Daniel - December 14, 2021
How To Scrape Data From Manta
In this article, I’ll be showing you how to scrape data from Manta.
Manta Overview
Manta is a popular online business directory for small businesses in the United States. The platform offer services like website building, SEO, and most importantly, they allow small businesses to list their businesses and gain exposure. They offer both free and premium listing services.
About 45 million people visit Manta annually and the platform is rated by Google hence it’s a great opportunity for small businesses.
When you list your business on Manta, you make it easier for customers in your locality to find you. You can post contact and direction details and also your company logo, photos, and short information.
With Premium Listing, you can enjoy advanced features like the Manta verified badge, target search placement, analytics, company page reporting, and your business will be published on more than 100 websites. This premium option costs $49 per month.
Currently, there are more than a million local businesses listed on Manta with over 60 million company profiles.
How To Scrape Data From Manta
As a small business, you can list your business profile on Manta free of charge and there are millions of profiles already listed. What this means is that Manta contains millions of business leads. You can get names, addresses, phone numbers, and websites of any business you want to work with.
You can also use the data to stay updated with competitors in your industry. There are customer reviews and ratings that give you an idea of what people are saying about a business.
However, you can’t copy all of this data manually. Manta has over 60 million company profiles and even if you’re interested in just 100,000, it would take you days to manually copy them from the website.
That’s why we employ web scraping. Web scraping is simply an automatic means of extracting a large amount of data from any web platform. This process is far easier, convenient, efficient, and faster than manually extracting data from Manta.
Tools For Scraping Manta
To scrape Manta, you will need a web scraper and a proxy. A web scraper is simply a bot that crawls the target website, identifies the data you need, and extracts it to your computer.
There are many reliable web scrapers available; the only thing you have to do is specify what data you want to extract. However, there’s a risk of your web scraping bot getting banned. Websites like Manta only appreciate human traffic while blocking bot traffic.
One of the reasons why is because bots are common for malicious activities like hacking and other cyber-attacks. Also, since they can send many automatic requests, they can overwhelm a website’s server.
A good scraping bot is optimized to operate safely so it doesn’t harm the target website. However, the website can’t tell which bot is safe and which isn’t so they block all. A proxy can solve this problem which is why it’s one of the important tools.
Best Proxies For Scraping Manta
A proxy acts as an intermediary between your computer and the internet. The traffic you send from your device gets to the proxy first and the proxy forwards to the target website. The same thing happens when the website sends back traffic.
This means the target website doesn’t interact with your device, or in this case, your scraping bot. Hence, the proxy masks your scraping bot and makes your connection appear genuine by replacing your IP.
You can use both residential and data center proxies although residential proxies are the most recommended.
As you scrape, you can also set the proxy to rotate IPs so no single IP will send too many requests to avoid IP ban. If any IP gets banned, you can easily switch to another as proxies do feature thousands and millions of IPs.
The best proxies for scraping Manta are available on ProxyRack. Not only are they reliable, but they are also very affordable as you can see from the prices below:
Unmetered Residential Proxies: Starting from $80
Premium GEO Residential Proxies: Starting from $14.95
Private Residential Proxies: Starting from $99.95
USA Rotating Datacenter Proxies: Starting at $120
Mixed Rotating Datacenter Proxies: Starting at $120
Shared Datacenter Proxies: Starting at $49
Canada Rotating Proxies: Starting at $65
Bottom Line
If you intend to scrape data from Manta, you need to utilize a scraping bot and proxies. With these tools, you can extract as much data as you need from the business listing website.
