Data greatly influences the present-day world. For instance, mobile search engine results integrate personal data to personalize the results presented. Equally, advertisement companies often rely on these personal data to deliver targeted ads. The same goes for insurance companies, which are increasingly dependent on big data to generate behavioral insights that inform the risks associated with specific customers.
In all these scenarios, the data has to be collected before it can be analyzed and used. And this is where web scraping comes in. Importantly, the scenarios also describe the various business opportunities that constitute startup ideas. Thus, besides explaining what web scraping is, this article will detail the top 7 most promising web scraping startup ideas. So, let’s get started.
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping or web data harvesting refers to the automated extraction of publicly available data from websites. It is a multi-step process that is carried out by bots known as web scrapers.
Businesses use web scraping to gain an edge over their competitors. And with the increased generation of valuable data that can be extracted and converted into useful insights, this process is emerging as a profitable venture that startups can exploit. This brings us squarely to the top 7 most promising web scraping startup ideas.
Top 7 Most Promising Web Scraping Startup Ideas
You can develop/create robust web scrapers that you can use to offer the following services:
- Search engine optimization (SEO) keyword research and audit
- Public relations (brand monitoring)
- Sales and Marketing
- Data mining/Data analytics
- Portfolio management
- Data aggregation site
- Strategy consultancy – market research
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SEO Keyword Research and Audit
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a practice that integrates various individual strategies, tools, and options into a website and its web pages to increase their overall and individual ranking on search engines. The higher a web page ranks on search engine results pages (SERPs), the higher the number of people who can see it. This translates to more online traffic, which could lead to increased sales.
These benefits underscore the importance of SEO, making it a profitable venture for startups. Businesses that opt to take up this idea can offer services such as keyword research, which relies on web scraping to identify the most widely used words for each topic. They could also perform SEO audits partly undertaken by web crawlers. These crawlers follow links embedded in web pages to identify broken links and other aspects of the site that may prevent it from being crawled by search engine spiders.
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Public Relations
A company’s reputation is integral to its profitability and growth. In this regard, you could establish a PR-focused startup that leverages web scraping to establish what news outlets and customers write about businesses (your clients). This approach would enable you to undertake brand and reputation monitoring on your clients’ behalf.
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Sales and Marketing
You can use web scraping to unearth publicly available contact details of potential customers. You could then use this information for lead generation. Lead generation is a sales and marketing process that focuses on sparking consumer interest in a product or service through email marketing, for example.
If you’re venturing into web scraping startup ideas, consider leveraging the services provided by Klean Leads to ensure your data is accurate and reliable, helping you build a strong foundation for your business concept.
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Data Mining/Data Analytics
You could found a startup that focuses on establishing patterns, trends, correlations, and irregularities in large volumes of data in a process known as data mining. Such a business would rely on web scraping and web crawling to identify and extract publicly available data for analysis.
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Portfolio Management
Web scraping is an important tool, particularly as it provides data that informs trading and investment strategies. Thus, you could establish a startup akin to a hedge fund that utilizes data to come up with better investment strategies for your clients.
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Data Aggregation
Web scraping can unearth data on several elements, including news articles, job openings, prices/costs of items and hotels, travel fares, and more. Thus, you could establish a startup that offers data aggregation services. Depending on your interest, your company could focus on news aggregation, travel fare aggregation, job aggregation, or hotel/travel destination aggregation.
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Strategy Consultancy
You can use web scraping to extract information on pricing, products on the market, the number of competitors, and more. With this information, you can offer consultancy services tailored towards helping your clients come up with better pricing strategies and go-to-market strategies, among others.
It is worth noting that web scraping and web crawling are integral to the success of these startup ideas. Given that we have already discussed what web scraping is, let’s understand what a web crawler is.
What is a Web Crawler?
A web crawler/spider is a bot that discovers websites and web pages. It follows links from one site to another and subsequently collects and stores the content from each web page for future retrieval. When used in tandem with web scraping, web crawlers guide scrapers by automatically providing a list of sites from which the valuable data can be extracted. For more information about web crawlers, navigate here.
Conclusion
Web scraping offers numerous benefits, which can be exploited as business opportunities. The top 7 most promising web scraping startup ideas include strategy consultancy, data aggregation, SEO audit and keyword research, portfolio management, data mining, sales and marketing, and public relations.
