What is and how to do Web Scraping on the Internet in a 100% legal way?

Do you need to extract information from websites or social networks? Let me tell you what is Web Scraping (or Web Crawling, there are many synonyms for the same term), a technique that is simply based on extracting information from websites.

Maybe you are wondering, is this useful for me? I don’t know your case but I’m 100% sure it does.

It is estimated that on the internet there is about a Zettabyte (1e+9TB, a lot) in data storage, but well, what am I going to explain to you about the internet that you don’t already know? Everything is on the internet.

Answering the previous question. Yes, just imagine having the power to get the data you need, such as emails, phone numbers, addresses…

What is Web Scraping?

As mentioned above, web scraping or data scraping involves creating or using a computer program to extract data from entire websites or a few web pages.

In addition, when web scraping, you can download the entire web page or key aspects such as the <title> tag or the content of the body of the article for further analysis 😉.

Here I summarize in 2 lines what web scraping is used for.

• It is a technique that allows the extraction or scraping of online data in an automated way using robots, tools or scripts programmed using Python, Ruby on Rails, …, greatly facilitating the task.
• Web crawling or Web Scraping is also used to find emails in public domains, especially for the sales and SEO sector.

How does web scraping work?

The different modes of operation of web scraping are based on data extraction methods, but generally differ from manual scraping to automatic scraping:

• Manual scraping is the copy-and-paste of a lifetime. For example, someone copying articles from a blog and storing them only has the ability to search a given data set. It is extremely laborious and rarely applicable when processing large volumes.
• Automatic scraping uses software and programming to extract data systematically and with little or no time investment. This is the one we are interested in.

Is web scraping, crawling or web scraping legal?

Yes, of course! of course it’s legal. So you, you don’t have to worry about that…

Web Scraping is completely legal as a computer technique. Millions of companies are doing web scraping and crawling right now all over the world while you are reading these lines.

There is talk that up to 45% of all online traffic is driven by robots and not by people.

That’s almost half of all traffic!

So… why do these techniques get such bad press?

Well – like everything else in life – tools can be used to do both good and bad things.

And of course… you may have heard that hackers or cybercriminals have used this technique to carry out illegal actions. There are some, that can not be avoided (well yes, that’s what law enforcement officers are for).

Several questions that will put us in context are: why do you want these data? are you and only you the one who carries your conscience…? Are they public data?

Example in the case of our emails:

Is it illegal if you send spam? Of course it is. And … does that make email illegal? Of course it does not. Well, with data mining something similar happens.

Without further ado, we want to help you prospect, sell and grow. We want you to grow too.

Read on to find out what you can achieve, at the end I’ll tell you the best web scraping tools!

What are the advantages of web scraping for companies?

There are many advantages of web scraping and here are some of the most obvious and clear ones:

1. Automation

Web scraping allows you to automatically extract data from websites, allowing you or your sales teams to save time that would otherwise have been spent on mundane data collection tasks.

The TOP thing is that it also means you can collect data in greater volume than any one person could ever achieve!

It is also possible to create sophisticated web bots to automate online activities, either with web scraping software or using a programming language such as javascript, python, go or php.

2. Business intelligence and information

Web scraping of Internet data allows you to look up your competitors’ prices, monitor their sales and marketing activity, and conduct quick market research of your industry online.

⭐ Tip: By downloading, cleaning and analyzing data in significant volumes, you will be able to get a better idea of your market and your competitors’ activity, which in turn will allow you to make better business decisions.

3. Unique and rich data sets

The Internet offers a wealth of text, image, video and numerical data and currently contains at least 6.05 billion pages.

Depending on what your goal is, you can find relevant websites, set up website crawlers, and then create your own customized dataset for analysis.

4. Create applications for tools that do not have a public API for developers.

By web scraping data, you will never have to rely on the website releasing a public application programming interface (API) to access the data they display on your web pages. Web scraping has several advantages over accessing a public API:

• You can access and collect any data that is available on your website.
• You are not limited to a specific number of queries.
• You don’t have to register for an API key or comply with its rules.

5. Efficient data management

Instead of copying and pasting data from the Internet, you can choose what data you want to collect from a number of websites and then collect it precisely by web scraping.

In the case of more advanced web scraping / crawling techniques, your data will be stored in a cloud database and is likely to be run on a daily basis 📈.

⭐ Tip: Storing data with automated software and programs means that your company, your operations or your employees can spend less time copying and pasting information and more time on creative work 😉.

How can I use Web Scraping to make money?

There are many reasons to take advantage of the power of web scraping to improve your sales or apply it to your business. I’ll explain 🙋🏽‍♀️!

1. Lead generation

How can you not? Using web scraping to collect email addresses and LinkedIn contacts through prospecting is one of the most used techniques, especially by B2B companies targeting sales.

To execute this strategy, you usually use a software that allows you to find these contacts by assigning some parameters, usually about your target market.

2. Optimization of the pricing strategy

By monitoring the prices of all your competitors, you can optimize your current prices and offers to beat your current offer.

⭐ Tip: To create a competitive pricing plan, it will be necessary to collect price data for several million products through web scraping and dynamically change product prices to meet fluctuating market demand.

3. Trademark supervision

Every brand wants to have a clean and positive online sentiment to improve the chances that customers will choose to buy your solution over your competitors’.

⭐ Tip: You can use web scraping to monitor forums, reviews on e-commerce websites and social media channels for mentions of your brand name to better understand the current voice of your cliente🙎🏼‍♂️.

This gives you the opp

4. To measure your search engine optimization (SEO) activities.

You can easily monitor your SEO efforts by crawling the Google search engine results pages to monitor important keywords.

In addition, you can track competitors that rank for a number of keywords. Tools like ahrefs and Semrush will be your allies.

Finally, by web scraping the top 10 results, you can analyze HTML pages to understand what are the main factors driving the optimization of your content to appear on the first page of Google (word length, number of titles, etc.).

5. Web Scraping of products and prices to compare web sites

By web scraping multiple websites, you can easily aggregate product prices from a large number of websites which can then be grouped into a price comparison service.

⭐ Tip: By combining product data from various sources, you can help customers find the cheapest place for your product or service and it is possible to monetize this type of service with affiliate marketing.

For example

• Flight Comparison Service – SkyScanner
• Home rental comparison service – AirBnb

6. Collect and analyze public opinion

Downloading large amounts of comments from websites such as Reddit or popular blogs can help you understand popular opinion on a large scale and depth.

⭐ Tip: With the help of natural language processing tools, you can easily perform sentiment analysis on topics or extract the most frequent words.

7. Build a machine learning dataset

Web scraping data from eBay, YouTube, Reddit or another website allows you to create an actionable machine learning dataset that would otherwise have been completely inaccessible via a public API.

8. Investigation of the competition

Web scraping is a great tool for competitor research.

💡 Examples include scraping the reviews of all products on a competitor’s website and then analyzing the sentiment of each product.

This can help your company find products where customers express positive sentiment towards the product (a good rating, positive text).

You can also enhance your content research efforts by setting up custom RSS feed web scraping to alert you every time a competitor uploads new content to their website 🔥.

One tool that comes in handy is SimilarWeb for example.

9. Automated content creation

You can do scraping of news websites and apply an analysis or customer curation technique with the aim, often, to offer better targeted news or content to your audience.

In this case we have tools that use Open.AI technology for example.

10. Hiring

Mining data from the web provides you with valuable information about the labor and salary markets, allowing you to better recruit the most talented candidates for your company compared to your competitors.

⭐ Tip: In addition, web scraping gives you insight into the current skills market and therefore you can hire sales professionals and developers who are actively acquiring “future-proof” skills.

11. Easily identify market demand – Demand Analysis

Sensing current and future demand in your market is a vital component of creating a successful product and increasing sales.

By mining large amounts of data, you can quickly identify consumer trends, needs and market trends.

⭐ Tip: In this use case, web scraping allows you to adapt any product to the ongoing needs of your end consumer.

Best Scraping tools for Lead Generation

1. Scrab.in

You are going to see that this Chrome extension is a very very powerful tool. The RE-VO-LU-ION.

What can it do for you?

• Automatically extract the emails and names of your LinkedIn contacts.
• Automate the prospecting of new contacts on LinkedIn, sending automated invitations to connect to new profiles according to your search filters.
• Automate the sending of messages to your network of contacts.
• Export your leads to use them in your email campaigns.
• It will help you automate all your activities in social networks, you will be able to interact with the profiles you visit as if they were visited by you.

How will it do it?

Well, the tool will visit the profiles (that you have segmented) and convert them into friends (i.e. first-degree contacts).

So what does that mean? It means that you will be able to send personalized messages to all those contacts.

By that I mean that if you have a company that sells products or services you can ask them directly for permission to call them, visit them or whatever….

Imagine sending 500 messages!

How much work, time and money would that mean for you?

It would be a real blast.

Don’t you think it wouldn’t cost you anything to try it?

Main features

1. Automate your social media activities.
2. Automatic visit, automatic endorsements and direct message profiles you visit.
3. Use with Linkedin Sales Navigator for targeted searches
4. Export all the leads generated in CSV

2. FindThatLead

Do you know how to do Web Scraping with FindThatLead?

If you know us great, but if you don’t know us, we’ll tell you a little about our tool:

What can FindThatLead do for you?

• Find any email
• Verify emails
• Get the emails, name and domains of your potential customers, you only have to specify the sector you work in.

You will see that our little tool will give you emails from many different sites (it is 100% legal).

The best of all is that you will have at a click of a button ALL the emails you need to grow your company, here we show you how to make an email campaign to convert your leads into customers.

Have you thought about where you would like your company to be in a few months?

Thanks to this tool you will have the contacts of the people you can help with your products or services, segmented and you will be able to target the position you need to talk to in order to get your message to them.

And yes, you can also use it to automate your prospects and build lists of potential customers.

You will see that thanks to our tool this translates into drastic savings in both money and time.

Do you want to know what most of our clients do with our tool?

Look, they use it for cold email and to create Facebook and Google Custom Audiences.

In addition to the browser panel, you can donwload FindThatLead’s Chrome Extension and receive emails directly from Twitter, LinkedIn or any domain while surfing the web.

Características principales

• Prospector: use it to create highly targeted lead lists in seconds
• Receive emails from domains
• Receive emails from Twitter profiles
• Receive emails from LinkedIn profiles
• Receive emails from Whois databases
• Validates bulk mailing lists
• Receive bulk emails from domains and social profiles

You know what Web Scraping is! Everyone is looking for innovative ways to use new technologies. Web Scraping allows you to collect all kinds of information and even generate qualified leads!