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Scraping Google reviews gives you essential data and other significant information on your competitors and similar businesses.
This helps you compare your business with others and understand what you’re doing wrong or right so you can improve.
What Is Google Maps Data Scraping?
Businesses scrape google reviews mostly from affiliated google applications like google maps.
Scraping Google Reviews is an automated process of drawing out data through search results and business listings.
This method of Google Maps data scraping can pull out data from over 200 countries.
Through Google Maps, a large quantity of data is extractable. Hence, you can scrape reviews any time you want.
Take into consideration that there are a number of other popular platforms, and combining them might get better results.
For example, scraping Yelp reviews and extracting reviews from Facebook pages might also be a good idea.
To dive deeper into the scraping process and successfully use a couple of features, a developer needs some external information.
For example, to get reviews using an API, the developer needs to have a Google Places API and key credentials.
As well as search terms for the entity to find proper businesses.
Once you locate the company, there will be an informative section underneath the tab that will have insights into the business, including reviews left by people.
Scraping reviews are constructive when you gather them via different sites.
However, using Google Places API might be pricy for some businesses.
That’s why it is important to review other options as well.
There are multiple approaches to scraping google Maps directly instead of using an API.
How To Scrape Google Reviews?
Scraping Google Reviews is not a complex process.
However, it may be tricky for starters.
Although Google has its own restraints, there are ways to scrape reviews off Google.
- If you want to stay undetected, then you need to scrape at a rate lower than 8. Which is 15 keyword requests per hour. 10 keywords per hour and a scraping rate of 20 will have you blocked on unauthorized sites.
- One way to increase the scraping rate is by using many IP addresses at once. So, for example, if you use 100 IP addresses, you can scrape at a level of 1000 requests per hour which is a rate of 24k in a day.
- There are also other ways to make it difficult for Google to detect you. You can do this by randomizing the scraping rate and adding delays between requests.
One way or another, depending on the scale and how detectable you want to be, there are always measures that companies can take.
The Benefits Of Google Maps Scraping?
Scraping Reviews And Ratings Of Businesses
Google maps scraping can help you obtain reviews and ratings of businesses.
Google reviews analysis summarizes what customers expect from the company, what products and services are successful, and which ones aren’t.
When you store all this information as data in an excel sheet, it can help you compare and analyze your company’s position better.
Find a Target Audience
Scraping can also help lower promotional and advertising costs.
Suppose your business’ target audience is other local businesses.
Then there is no point in promoting your product or services through social media.
Instead, you can scrape out owner leads from Google reviews and promote your services directly by contacting them.
B2B Leads Extraction
By scraping Google reviews, you can get data from businesses located anywhere in the world, belonging to any industry.
This gives you information regarding their consumers and their target audience.
Which could help a business attract more customers all around the world.
In addition, it will also help a company in running successful marketing campaigns with this amount of comparable and competent data.
SMS and Telemarketing
People usually don’t use Google reviews for business-to-business venture leads, and others may not know how to use them.
You can use this advantage for yourself and scrape out their business details like contact numbers and emails etc. and then send them texts and follow-ups via emails for promotion.
Helps To Make Decisions
The most important factor of scraping data from Google is that this information helps businesses analyze and judge their own results and those of their competitors.
By using the data scraped through Google reviews, a business owner can make informed critical decisions that would decide the prospects of the company in the future.
On the other hand, it can also help consumers and customers decide between businesses and make well-thought investments.
Google Maps scraping makes it possible to gather valuable data that you can use to improve a business’s position.
You can get data in any form, shape, or size that you want it in.
All you need is the right software and some time on your hands.
Additionally, company reviews scraping can assist you in better understanding your competitor’s customers and getting information about their buying preferences.
But at first, you’ll need to identify your competitors, that’s where scraping YellowPages can come in handy.
Is Scraping Data From Google Legal Or Not?
The legality of data scraping can be the topic of much debate.
In general, the act of scraping data from a website is not illegal.
Scraping is legal on the grounds that you scrape out public information from Google.
The only time when scraping can be something illegal is when you are infringing on copyrighted material or stealing confidential information.
There are two ways to look at the legality of data scraping:
1) When you scrape data that is readily available to the public, it is legal.
2) When you scrape data that is not available to the public, it might be considered illegal.
The bottom line is that if you are scraping data that is publicly available, then you are within your legal rights to do so.
Conclusion
Overall, scraping is a very good way to retrieve information and data in bulk from all over the internet.
Scrapping also structures the data and can help businesses get information regarding their customers, competitors, reviews, products, likes and dislikes, and more.
All together so that they can use this information to make their business experience better.
In addition, this targeted information can help increase sales overall.
Therefore, regardless of the technicalities of the task, scraping data from Google does come with a lot of benefits, especially for businesses.
