How To Be A Successful Web Crawling And Data Mining Agency?

Having worked on over a hundred Web scrawling jobs of all sorts of scale and complexity and having built technologies that can scale web crawling projects to millions of URLs per day, our knowledge of customers and web crawling agencies, here are some things that could help you boost your success rate.

1. Have a presence on UpWork

a. It is by far the best way to prove your track record. Customers don’t readily believe people when they have tall claims about the kind of projects they have done in the past. It’s best if you have a neutral third party like UpWork keeping a track record of your work, money earned, and also the ratings and reputation.

A complete profile as below:

b. Plus UpWork is excellent for SEO as Google ranks it very high and you will get a steady trickle of clients from here.

2. Re-assure people that Web crawling is one of your primary jobs. Many agencies have it a tag on Upwork along with a million other tags, so it is difficult to get a sense that they do web crawling as well as let’s say website building or mobile app development or that they even care about getting a project like that.

3. Ideally, have a landing page for web crawling where you only talk about that part of your skillset, list your team, list your projects, reviews, links to Upwork profile, etc.

4. Capture visitors using the email address, request for quotes and web-based chat like Drift or Intercom.

5. Talk about the frameworks you use and are familiar with to give a sense of authority and confidence to your end customers. Even if the end customers don’t know anything about Scrapy or Puppeteer, talking about them gives them a sense of the depth of your knowledge.

6. Openly talk about how you overcome risks like rate limitings, code changes on the target websites, IP blocks. Talk about how you monitor and debug your spiders etc.

7. Blog about some of the key concepts from a layman’s perspective makes YouTube videos to build confidence and also SEO juice to your website.

8. Answer questions on forums like quora by being generally helpful and build goodwill which will inevitably turn to visitors and clients in the long run.

9. Partner with software companies like us to get deal flow. We are Proxies API, a Rotating Proxies API Service that serves hundreds of clients, and we get regular requests for recommendations of agencies that can handle entire web scraping projects all the time. Reach out to us.

The author is the founder of Proxies API, a proxy rotation API service.