Web scraping is all about accessing data on the web automatically without having to manually copy it. This can be used both if you want to scrape your own data or if you want to scrape data from other websites.
Obviously, there are different ways in which this can be achieved but that is not what we are going to talk about today. We are simply going to focus on getting some useful information out of another website and nothing else.
Doing competitor analysis and research should be part of every business's monthly routine. You should see what your competitors are doing for:
- Marketing plan
- What keywords they're targeting
- price monitoring
- who they hiring
- Their brand reputation
- what they're working on
In fact, you should be doing competitor analysis before anything else!
We're going to show you 4 ways you can use web scraping to do competitor research:
- Find what keywords they're targeting
- Find who they're trying to hire
- Price Monitoring
- Identify what kind of brand reputation they have
Find what keywords they're targeting.
SEO (search engine optimization) is an important marketing tactic that every business will need to succeed. You should find what keywords your competitors are targeting for their products and blog. You can use these keywords as part of your own SEO strategy. You can also use them to find out what your competitors are doing well, and what you should avoid.
If you want to learn how to scrape your competitor's keywords, you can follow this guide to help you: How to scrape a blog
Find out who they're trying to hire
Every business needs talented people to keep the company going strong. Sometimes, businesses will leave job postings on their site, or on other services like LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and indeed. This information could give someone an inside track of what kind of role they're trying to hire and how they plan to improve their business and operations.
Learn how to Scrape job postings and job data
Price monitoring
Keeping an eye on what your competitors are doing is important. It's even more important to find out how they're changing their prices and how your products stack up. You can use web scraping to keep an eye on how your competitor's services and products stack up against yours. Are your prices competitive? Are you undercutting your competitors? Are you charging more? Are they lower?
you can learn how to automatically monitor your competitor's prices here
Identify what kind of brand reputation they have
You should look at your competitor's brand reputation. You can do this by scraping their social media mention, articles they're mentioned in and online reviews. This will give you an idea of what the public thinks of your competitor's brand.
It's important to identify if there are any negative reviews or comments and see how they're handling them. Are they offering support? Fixing problems? Or ignoring it? All this information could help you out in some way.
Closing thoughts
There are many ways that web scraping can be used to help your business grow. Web scraping is a great way for businesses to do competitor research by finding out what sites they’re ranking on, how well their own site ranks in comparison and the strategies other companies use.
Web scraping also makes it easy for marketers or sales teams to see which keywords customers search before buying their products; this information could be invaluable when deciding where you should focus your marketing efforts next.
Web scraping for competitor research is important. It's important that you take advantage of all the tools available on the web to stay ahead of the game and improve your business.
If you haven't already taken advantage of our free web scraping tool yet, click here to download it today!
