Daniel - March 16, 2022
From simple copy and paste to major web bot usage, scraping of data has become a common trend online. In this article, we will show you how to scrape data from Google My Business.
Google My Business is a tool used to optimize and manage business profiles (Google business listings) on Google. It is an online directory that allows users to provide insights about their business which will be useful to customers and enable them (the customers) to connect with business owners on Google.
With this tool, you can turn searchers into customers. It allows you to respond to reviews, see followers, message customers, and get notifications in real-time.
You also get to edit your Business profile, upload pictures, and create enticing offers when you want and see the changes in real-time.
Web scraping is the process of gathering information from web pages and saving them on a computer for a specific purpose. The information gathered is called web data and they are transformed into structured data to make it usable.
Web scraping is done by individuals, business owners, and enterprises to extract important business profiles (name, physical address, email address, phone number, etc) from Google My Business. The information obtained can be used to assemble a database of business profile information which can be used for cold-calling.
The most common and most effective method of web scraping is the use of web bots. These bots are told the type of information to extract and they obtain the information more accurately and faster than humans could.
Premium web scraping applications like ScrapeBox are used to achieve this as Google My Business doesn’t support scraping.
To scrape data from Google My Business, web scrapers (web bots) are used. These bots are programmed to extract only specific data. However, web bots and their activities are not permitted by Google My Business.
When scraping, these bots send several requests to the Google My Business server which will make the server suspect the activity and block the IP address. This means that just premium web scrapers are not enough to safely scrape data from Google My Business.
To prevent your web bot activity from being detected and having your IP address blocked, proxies are the safest answers. They are used with the web bots to send requests from different IP addresses by rotating the IPs to reduce traffic.
Being that proxies come with several IP addresses, you get to rotate them and forget about ever getting blocked when scraping data from Google My Business.
The best proxies for scraping data from Google My Business are Datacenter and Residential proxies. They allow you to scrape data of any size and also ensure your anonymity when added to a scraping application like ScrapeBox.
Datacenter Proxies
These proxies are really fast and they are obtained from data servers. Their IP addresses are addresses of data centers and they are mostly shared and public,
Residential Proxies
These proxies are hard to detect and they are obtained from ISPs (Internet Service Providers). Their IP addresses are either shared or dedicated and they are addresses of real residents.
Residential and datacenter proxies are made available by both free and premium proxy providers all over the internet. However, only premium proxy providers can provide you with proxies that you can trust.
This is why we will recommend that you take out using free proxies from your list and get your proxies from ProxyRack, a trustworthy proxy provider.
ProxyRack’s datacenter proxies provide users with over 20 thousand IP addresses while its residential proxies provide over 5 million IP addresses. They support SOCKS protocols which work for scraping data from Google My Business. Currently, there are over 140 countries on ProxyRack’s proxy network.
ProxyRack Datacenter Proxies and Pricing:
USA Rotating Datacenter Proxies: $65 monthly
Global Rotating Datacenter Proxies: $65 monthly
Static USA Datacenter Proxies: $50 monthly.
Canada Rotating Datacenter Proxies: $65 monthly
ProxyRack Residential Proxies and Pricing:
Private Unmetered Residential Proxies: $65.95 monthly
Premium Residential Proxies: $49.95 monthly
Unmetered Residential Proxies: $199 monthly
To safely scrape data from Google My Business, it is necessary that you make use of a premium scraping application and either datacenter or residential proxies from ProxyRack to avoid getting detected and having your IP address blocked.