Are you looking to scrape business directories to generate leads?
Here are a few tips for scraping business directories.
Web scraping is not rocket science. But there are good and bad and the worst ways of doing it.
Generating sales qualified leads is always a headache. The old school ways are to buy a list from sites like Data.com. But they are quite expensive.
Scraping business directories can help generate sales qualified leads. The following tips can help you scrape data from business directories efficiently.
1) Choose a good framework to write the web scrapers. This can help save a lot of time and trouble. Python Scrapy is our favourite, but there are other non-pythonic frameworks too.
2) The business directories might be having anti-scraping mechanisms. You have to use IP rotating services to do the scrape. Using IP rotating services, crawl with multiple changing IP addresses which can cover your tracks.
3) Some sites really don’t want you to scrape and they will block the bot. In these cases, you may need to disguise your web scraper as a human being. Browser automation tools like selenium can help you do this.
4) Web sites will update their data quite often. The scraper bot should be able to update the data according to the changes. This is a hard task and you need professional services to do that.
One of the easiest ways to generate leads is to scrape from business directories and use enrich them. We made Leadintel for lead research and enrichment.
Thanks for reading this blog post. Datahut offers affordable data extraction services (DaaS).
If you need help with your web scraping projects, let us know and we will be glad to help.