If you’re not already scraping Yelp reviews, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to gain insights into your customers and your competition.
Yelp is one of the most popular review platforms.
It has 142 million users across the globe, with about 50 million-plus downloads from the Google Play store.
That’s a lot of potential data you could use to improve your business, and web scraping is the perfect way to get it.
In this article, we’ll see how you can go through the process of scraping Yelp reviews without diving into tech nitty gritty’s.
What Is Yelp?
If you don’t already know what is Yelp and what it does, it is a digital platform that primarily posts reviews about different brands and businesses.
They are not limited to one industry but cover many companies, including restaurants, clothing brands, and other products.
When you’re buying a product for the first time, you will surely be skeptical about whether the product is suitable for use or not.
Good or bad, people would want to know before they invest in a business’ product.
On the other hand, for businesses, a good customer review is a vital element in turning prospective customers into consumers.
This is precisely where Yelp comes in.
Yelp gathers reviews from consumers and showcases them in one place, so potential customers can view them before they make a purchase.
These reviews are also a valuable source of feedback for businesses.
They help businesses to understand what their target audience wants and what they don’t.
As a result, businesses can work on their weak points to make their products or services better.
Overall, it’s a platform that builds trust between companies and consumers.
It helps businesses grow their reach and promotes sales on a large scale.
The Pros of Using Yelp for The Businesses
Yelp assists all businesses, but primarily small scale and startups benefit the most from this platform because they always seek to create credibility.
As mentioned above, the reviews gathered at Yelp help potential customers determine whether or not they should invest in a product.
Bad reviews can really hurt the business’ integrity and decrease sales.
Customers always want to invest in things that people generally have good reviews of and are trusted.
It is quite a given that you wouldn’t want to purchase something if the product repeatedly gets one-star ratings.
Likewise, people refrain from investing their hard-earned money blindly to save themselves from getting poor quality products with lousy customer service because, let’s face it, no one wants that.
Yelp eliminates this gap by helping customers decide on what business they should invest in, along with introducing startups as well.
Hence, through Yelp, small businesses get more exposure, and the better the reviews, the more they attract customers.
The only deal is to treat customers as a priority and do business in a way that lists you in the consumer’s good books.
The Use Cases of Scraping Yelp Reviews
As a business owner, you might be wondering what the point of scraping Yelp reviews is.
After all, they are readily available on the website, and you can just read them manually.
Well, yes, that is true.
But just imagine the amount of time it would take for you to go through each and every review manually.
Not only is it time-consuming, but it is also quite tedious and incredibly boring.
That’s where scraping comes in handy.
It allows you to gather all the reviews automatically in a single go, and you can just sit back and relax while the scraper does its job.
Plus, it also filters out the reviews for you so that you can just read the relevant ones to your business.
The same goes for Google and Facebook reviews too.
For example, scraping Google reviews can give you some amazing insights about your customers and how they feel about your business.
Scraping Facebook reviews can give you a better idea of how people are talking about your brand on the largest social media platform.
Sound good so far? But now let’s focus on our main topic and see what insights we can get from reviews collected from Yelp.
What Insights Can You Get?
Yelp Reviews are a great source of insights for business owners, and if you are one of them, you can use this data to your advantage in a number of ways.
By analyzing the reviews, you can determine which areas of your business need improvement and work on them accordingly.
You can also get an idea of what your customers are saying about your business, which is valuable feedback you can use to make changes if necessary.
Suppose you own a restaurant.
In that case, you can use the insights gained from Yelp to help you improve your menu, find out what dishes are most popular among customers, get feedback on your service, etc.
This data can also help you determine the areas in which you need to make changes to attract more customers and grow your business.
Moreover, you can also use this data to keep an eye on your competition and see how they are faring.
This way, you can stay one step ahead of them and ensure that your business is always ahead of the game.
In short, Yelp reviews offer a wealth of information that can be highly beneficial for businesses, and this is why scraping them is such a good idea.
To get even more insights it’s also useful to combine the data from Yelp with other data sources.
For example, scraping data from YellowPages as well can give you a more comprehensive view of the market and always be on top of your game.
Now, let’s take a look at how you can actually start the automatic scraping of Yelp reviews.
How to Start Collecting Yelp Reviews Automatically?
As we can see, there are many advantages to collecting Yelp reviews automatically.
So, you might be wondering how you can get started.
If you are technical and have some experience with coding, you can try to write your own scraper.
However, if you are not comfortable with coding or don’t have the time to do it, you can always find a reliable web scraping services provider that can do all the work for you.
This way, you can focus on your business while the web scraping company takes care of scraping company reviews for you.
There are a number of companies that offers such services, and they can help you set up the scraper and get it running quickly and easily.
All you need to do is provide them with the specific requirements for your project, and they will take care of the rest.
So, if you are looking for a quick and easy way to start scraping Yelp reviews, this is definitely the way to go.
Wrapping Up
Reviews are an essential part of any business to grow.
They give you insights into various areas of your business and help you determine the areas you need to work on.
Yelp is a great platform that provides reviews for businesses, and these reviews can be extremely helpful for business owners.
Thus, scraping Yelp reviews has proved to be a good starting point for businesses to understand their customers better and work on areas of improvement.