Google and web scraping are two rather new technologies that are increasingly being used by large businesses. Put simply, a web scraping tool is a technology solution to extract data from web sites in a quick, efficient, and automated manner, offering data in a more structured and easy to use form. When Google is being scraped, the same process applies, except the data is being extracted from the search engine.
Businesses often use Google scrapers to automate data acquisition processes. Scraped data is used to enhance operations, inform executive decisions all the way down to individual customer service experiences. Google provides its own Application Programming Interface (API), it chooses which information is more important to users based on its own analysis. Yet, many businesses choose to build their Google scraper or use third-party services in order to gather data in a more efficient manner.
Google isn’t too keen on letting other tools acquire data from their search engine. Often they will employ anti-bot measures to prevent automated applications from acquiring data. Quite ironically, they have themselves used exactly the same process to build their search engine. Whether people like it or not, web and Google scraping is here to stay as businesses have already started using it for several reasons.
Piracy and Counterfeit Protection
Many large companies and well-known brands utilize Google scraping to monitor search engine results for any malicious entities attempting to illegally use their branding. For example, Adidas might use a search engine scraping tool to monitor for any illegitimate websites that attempt to profit off of their brand illegally.
Price Monitoring
Google scraping can be used to analyze the competitor pricing policy, evaluate prices and product policies of competitors which is a great deal of information for sales strategies. Data acquired in this manner can be used to create updated and advanced pricing strategies for brand and sales (for example, dynamic pricing utilizes scraping tools to implement their strategy). Implementing advanced pricing strategies requires having access to a reliable and consistent flow of premium data. Price monitoring using web scraped data gives companies the ability to have well-grounded information of the entire market, facilitating dynamic pricing, revenue optimization, and ensuring they’re always one step ahead of their competitor’s pricing strategies. Having detailed information related to competitor sales strategies helps businesses keep up with the competition and customer demand.
SEO Monitoring
Generating organic traffic on a website is mostly about ranking, location, and keyword combinations. Google scraping can show a company or a business the level at which its website page appears on the Google results page. It can also show the keywords the website uses on a given page and what exactly they rank for. SEO experts have to often use third party SEO tools like Ahrefs, Moz, or others to gain insight into rankings. Unfortunately, these tools update their databases once every few days which is often not enough for extremely volatile search engine result pages. Therefore, SEO experts might use Google scraping tools to acquire data that is otherwise unavailable to gain insight into ranking changes.
Keyword Monitoring and Research
SEO experts rely on several sources of data to create their optimization strategies. The first source is often Google blogs, the search engine liaison, and a few other official sources. Other sources are third-party providers that scrape the search engine in order to reverse engineer the algorithms. SEO experts use third-party providers and Google scrapers to monitor search engine result pages. By monitoring SERPs, insights can be gleaned from the data such as why certain pages rank higher than others. Finding out why certain pages rank better than others can help SEO experts develop strategies that can help companies beat out the competition.
SEM Surveillance
Nearly everyone nowadays is buying PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ads on search engines nowadays. Businesses even bet on the competitor keywords and brand names in order to attract visitors to their website. Keeping track of what the competition is doing is nearly impossible without utilizing Google scraping as all ads will not be shown to all users.
For SEM surveillance, businesses scrape Google or use a third-party provider in order to acquire ads from any location and device without using their own business IP address. This way Google will display ads as if it was any regular user doing a search query. As Google thinks the query has been sent by a regular internet user, it will often display many more ads without any restrictions. Businesses can then easily acquire significant amounts of data on their competitor ad campaigns.
Conclusion
Google scraping has proved purposeful, its advantages are so many, businesses have become successful with the use of Google scraping by gathering data and putting it to good use. A Google data extraction tool is an easy way for businesses to gain a competitive edge in nearly any market. With very little development effort, access to nearly infinite amounts of data appears within hands’ reach.
