8 Steps You Check Before Scraping a Website

You can get the most accurate data on the internet with Web scraping, which helps you collect the raw data on the internet and parse it, review it in a table. You can improve your e-commerce potential and have greater profits with web scraping, which you can also use to avoid misinformation on the internet, which is the largest source of information in the world.

In this text we have prepared for you, you will be able to learn:

• What web scraping is.
• How web scraping works.
• Uses of web scraping.
• The future of web scraping.
• The steps you should follow before you do web scraping.
• Why you should choose Scrape.do for web scraping.

In the light of this information, we will teach you, you will be able to get detailed information about what web scraping is. If you wish, you can do unlimited research from all internet sites on the internet by using our scraper and proxy services that we offer you as Scrape.do and you can benefit from our customer support team that can help you. What are you waiting for to take advantage of Scrape.do?

What is Web Scraping?

With web scraping, which means extracting data from websites as HTML codes, you can easily access data on a website. There is some software you need to have to scrape a website and some software techniques you need to learn before you can print it. There is a web scraper where you can even get to static or dynamic data, i.e. data that is constantly changing. Web scrapers legally obtain all unedited and raw data and structure this data to make it easy to interpret. Unstructured data appears as HTML, with its long name HyperText Markup Language, while structured data appears in CSV, Excel, and JSON formats. While interpreting HTML data is easy for a computer, it is not easy for a human, so the data in HTML format needs to be converted to another format and made interpretable.

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Working Principle of Web Scraping

Working as a human reading different pages of different websites and copying all the content on those pages into a file in another format, web scraping can actually categorize the information you want into a table. When you run web scrapers used for web scraping, they first send a request to the server where the website is located, and data is obtained in response to this request. The web scrapers that obtain this data will get the data you want and create a table of contents by deleting the other data if you have edited it. If you have not made any edits, you will have to edit the data you have obtained yourself.

In Which Fields Is Web Scraping Used?

If you have decided to sell your services and products online, or if you have decided to work in a company based on e-commerce, you are aware that you need to follow some strategies to grow that company or your website. We tell you that with web scraping you can grow your business or the website of your company. So how are you going to do this? To learn how web scraping can benefit your business, simply read this topic we have prepared for you. If you’re ready, let’s start!

You Can Track and Track Competitor Companies with Web Scraping

Selling products over the internet has become the biggest event of the last ten years, with all data entering the internet environment and internet sites becoming popular day by day. Although it has taken a serious leap, internet sales activities will grow even more with the further development of the internet. It is quite easy for the eyes to enter this market, which has a huge potential. It is quite easy to transform your website into an e-commerce site that sells products on the internet, but since there are many e-commerce websites, newly opened websites do not have much luck in the market. If you are an e-commerce entrepreneur who has just entered the market, you should not forget that you must monitor and follow your competitors. Using the web scraping method, you can easily find the following information about your competitors:

• If you have found out who the competitor websites are, you can get information about new products by scraping the product information on these websites or you can learn the marketing strategies used by those websites.
• You can scrape the product ads and service ads given by the competitors, and you can find out how much the budgets of these websites are with this scraping.
• By scraping the social media accounts of rival companies, you can find out what kind of audience they have, and you can gain customers by contacting people who can be your customers from their customers.

You Can Scrape Other Companies’ Prices to Follow an Accurate Pricing Strategy for Your Products

Many newly opened e-commerce site owners have no idea how much they will sell their products for. The prices on your website should be at a level where you won’t lose your customers and that you can get the highest profit you can consistently get. Although people who shop online generally prefer cheaper products, it is a well-known fact that they pay more for higher quality products. If you think your products are of good quality and still cannot sell enough, you can start by scraping the prices of competitors. If you are nervous about the price of your products, let us tell you that web scraping can be used for this purpose too! Here is how web scraping works for price scraping and what it does:

• By scraping the information of your customers and the customers of the competitor company, you can learn the interests of your potential customers and follow a marketing strategy according to the interests of your customers.
• Once you know your customers’ interests and the amount they spend on their interests, you need to make a good assessment. If your customers are not afraid to spend a lot of money on a product, you can make small price increases. However, if your customers are the types who do not like to spend money, you can encourage them to shop by organizing campaigns.
• After analyzing your customers and your competitors’ customers, get information about the prices of competing companies, you can make changes in your pricing in line with the information you get to maximize your earnings. In this way, you will not lag behind the market and increase your profits.

You Can Learn About Your Potential Customers and Gain New Potential Customers

When you need to get more potential customers, you may want to learn name lists and contact them as a first step, but this system is not a quality system. If you try to communicate by e-mail or by phone, this system may not work well, and the fees you spend for phone calls will be quite high. You will not be able to provide trust for people, because we know that frauds made over the phone are numerous. Moreover, even if the customers you get will shop from you for the moment, if you will not have quality customers in the long run, they will all shop for once and then forget about you. If you want to avoid this situation and get better quality customers, try these web scraping methods to get your potential customers’ information:

• First, do a search and scrape by targeting the education, companies, job titles of the customers you want to attract.
• Then find websites that are directly related to your business and scrape through those websites.
• As a result of the scrapings you have obtained, you will have a certain list of customers, you can send mass campaign and newsletter e-mails to the people on this list, but make sure that you do not send spam. You don’t want your brand reputation to deteriorate, do you?

You Can Make Your Investments More Accurately Using Web Scraping

Web scraping is directly linked to the investment world, as the largest medium in which data is researched for investment is the internet. With this method, which is used by people who do not want to take unnecessary risks while investing, to extract alternative data for hedging purposes, the risk to be taken is minimized and it becomes possible to reveal the risks and potential investments that are invisible to the person.

There are investment strategies that range from constructing a hypothetical thesis to experimenting, doing research, and monitoring and analyzing the results, and these strategies need extensive research. If you have decided to make an investment and you want to decide whether the investment method you will apply is the right one, you need to know what kind of data that investment has in the past. You should learn the reasons for the failures and successes that investment has had in the past, learn about the pitfalls you can fall into, and have a clear understanding of the return on investment you plan to achieve. In order to do this, you can apply the data scraping method to the investment you will make, and you can make more accurate decisions by having a wider perspective on the data you obtain.

What Will the Future of Data Scraping Be Like?

Although it is up to you to decide whether to use data scraping for a study or not, it is possible to say that data scraping will be of incredible importance in the next few years. It is very important that you learn data scraping soon, which will be of great importance, and train yourself to be able to scrape data, otherwise, you will fall far behind in the market. Even now, there is artificial intelligence software on the market that has the ability of people to interpret images and can translate visually entered information into written form. These softwares interpret the data they obtain and use it for machine learning purposes.

Although we all know the advances in data scraping in writing, systems that can only scrape data from images and videos will be developed in the future. As we develop in the field of image scraping, even if we are not looking at the images, we will be able to learn about images and apply many strategies more accurately, thanks to the data we obtain.

What Steps Should You Follow Before Scraping a Website?

We all know that after scraping a website, we have to examine the data make comments about our website, and even create marketing strategies to improve our e-commerce site. But do you know what to do before you do data scraping? Let’s take a look at what you need to do before scraping data.

Step One: Think Like a Machine, Not a Human

Websites, which basically consist of a mixture of HTML codes, can be formed both statically and dynamically, and each website of each website has specific HTML codes for that page. It always makes more sense to use a web scraper to scrape a website, as web scrapers are tools that can convert raw data written in HTML into formats such as JSON and CSV. You also need to press a single button in your web scraping app to run the web scraper.

Although web scrapers are customized for web scraping, you should keep in mind that dynamic websites can change at any time and your web scraper will not be able to access the correct data every time you run it. This may be because your web scraper has software that cannot tell what changes have taken place on the website. As a human you can get the data on the website and rearrange the data, it would make the most sense to use a web scraper that can handle this issue as these changes can take several hours.

Step Two: Set Up Your Web Scraper

This step is actually a pretty easy one, basically. If you have chosen the web scraper you want to use and this web scraper has a good service team, you can easily set up your web scraper with the help of the service team. However, you will install a web scraper that you download from the internet, and you will need to get detailed information on how to install that web scraper.

Step Three: Submit URL Request to Website You Want to Scrape

If you are sure that you have successfully set up your web scraper correctly, you are entitled to the step of sending a URL request to the website you want to scrape. Note that if a URL request is not sent, your data will not be downloaded and saved. Also, be sure to delete your cookies, internet search history, and cached data before sending any URL request.

Step Four: Don’t Repeat Your URL Requests

If you want to scrape data from a website, don’t send multiple requests or send too many requests to the same website address to get the data you want. If you are logging into a website that can access your IP address, your requests will appear and your IP address will be blocked.

Step Five: Make Web Scraping As Slow as Possible

We can easily say that the faster you do web scraping, the worse results you will get. If you want to scrape a website, you should select a few pages as possible and scan these web pages. After scanning, you need to add libraries and then re-request a small number of web pages.

Step Six: Download All the Data You Want to Get

If you have scraped the data, it means you can start downloading all the data of the previously scraped URL addresses. Your web scraper will automatically download all data from websites and create a structured dataset from unstructured data.

Step Seven: Divide All the Data You Have into Smaller Pieces

If you organize the data you have in small groups, you can draw a new and easy way for yourself. In other words, by dividing a website into two stages, you can collect the URL links of the websites in the first stage, and download the data on the websites in the second stage.

Step Eight: Create a URL List in case your Scraping Fails During the Process

Keeping the URL lists that you will create for your scraper to scrape permanently will be useful in case you encounter a problem during the process. If your scraping was technically unsuccessful, you can restart the process using those URL addresses to download the rest.

As Scrape.do, we are with you throughout your entire web scraping process, helping you to get the best data both during, before, and after the process. By using our web scraper that we have created for you, you can overcome the obstacles on all websites and create the right strategy to make your e-commerce store bigger than ever before. To learn more, contact us in the contact section of our website!