Daniel - July 8, 2021
In business, data intelligence is pivotal. One of the best ways to get valuable data is by scraping. In this article, I’ll show you how to scrape data from Yell.
Yell is a top online business directory in the UK. On the platform, you can find companies and service providers in any niche, you can access a variety of information about them including reviews, opening hours, and photos amongst others. You can trust the information on Yell as the website has been around for a very long time – since 1965.
Hence, for customers, Yell can help you find the right business for any service you need. However, Yell is more advantageous to businesses than customers. As a business, you can list your services for free on the Yell platform. When you list your business in Yell, it’ll appear in Google search results amongst other search engines.
Currently, there are more than 2.9 million businesses listed on Yell. Furthermore, there are about 3,000 business categories. You can also build a website (yellow page), run Google and Facebook Ads. As a result, Yell will help make local digital marketing for your company a lot easier. There are about 36,000 live websites on Yelp with 100,000 live digital customers.
The platform features several cutting-edge digital solutions. This is as a result of its relationship with top tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
If you’re a company or marketer in the UK, Yell features valuable market data that you can use. For instance, you can find leads from business profiles including email addresses and phone numbers. The data can also help you discover the top performers in different niches and who your competitors are.
To scrape data from Yell, the first thing you need is a Yelp scraping bot. You can’t scrape data from Yell with manual copy and paste as it’ll waste your time. A scraping bot is an automated program designed to extract specific data from Yell. You just need to specify what data to extract.
There are many such bots available; some are free while some are paid. It’s difficult to scrape data successfully with just a scraping bot because you can get blocked. Websites like Yell only welcome human traffic, they block bot traffic which is what your scraping bot gives.
To prevent blocking, you can use a proxy. A proxy acts as an intermediary between your browsing device and the websites you visit. When you use a proxy, your real IP address is hidden from the public eye. Instead, websites anyone who cares to check will see the IP address of the proxy.
Proxies don’t feature one or two IPs but thousands and millions. You can rotate these IPs while scraping data from Yell to prevent any from getting blocked. It’s very simple; before Yell’s servers will detect that you’re using a bot, you’ll have switched to a different IP, and so on.
Without further ado, ProxyRack proxies are the best proxies to use if you want to scrape data from Yell. You can purchase both residential and data center proxies and any would work with Yell.
Residential proxies are, however, more reliable as they get their IPs from internet service providers. Datacenter proxies, on the other hand, feature what you can call artificial IPs. Nevertheless, they are very fast.
Below are the available proxies on ProxyRack and their prices:
Residential Proxies
Unmetered Residential Proxies: Starting from $80
Premium GEO Residential Proxies: Starting from $14.95
Private Residential Proxies: Starting from $99.95
Datacenter Proxies
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
A web scraping bot and a reliable proxy are the two things you need to scrape data from Yell.