Boost your Local Business with Data Analysis and Web Scraping

Author(s): Lazar Gugleta

Originally published on Towards AI.

This member-only story is on us. Upgrade to access all of Medium.

Improving your business is a daily and tedious task, but using competition data can provide interesting underlying insights.

Data analysis lets you know how you stack against the competition and how to improve your assets, such as a website, opening hours, extra equipment, etc.

Today, we will explore how to collect, process, and analyze Google Maps data to your advantage and eventually improve your local business. We will use the Octoparse Web Scraping tool to obtain the data and Python to analyze it quickly.

Let’s jump right into it!

The tool we are building today has two components. First, we need to define the topic of our research. Let’s say we want to analyze tapas bars in Madrid and all the features that data collection offers us. After preparing the Excel file, we analyzed it in Python to see how to improve it.

Disclaimer: This article is only for educational purposes. We do not encourage anyone to scrape websites, especially those web properties that may have terms and conditions against such actions.

We are using the Octoparse Web Scraping app for this part called Google Maps Listing and Details Page… Read the full blog for free on Medium.

Join thousands of data leaders on the AI newsletter. Join over 80,000 subscribers and keep up to date with the latest developments in AI. From research to projects and ideas. If you are building an AI startup, an AI-related product, or a service, we invite you to consider becoming a sponsor.

Published via Towards AI