Parsing Yandex Maps to Obtain Local Business Data and Generate Leads
Launched over 10 years ago, Yandex Maps has undergone significant changes and found many uses beyond just getting from point A to point B. The most common offerings include satellite imagery, aerial photos, real-time traffic maps, and route planning for cars, bicycles, public transport, and walking.
However, they are also actively used for finding local businesses and obtaining additional information about them. Parsing Yandex Maps helps clients collect data about local businesses.
Suppose you move to a new place and need to find a good barbershop nearby. The most common solution is to type the keyword "barbershop" into Yandex Maps and find those that fit your budget and have the best reviews.
Maps also allow people to find when a store or service is open, and even allow editing information in case of changes. All this data, along with valuable customer reviews, can be very useful if properly matched and saved in an easy-to-use format.
Yandex Maps contains many terabytes of data, and a significant portion of it is thousands of small businesses in various cities. Since nearly 13% of all Yandex search queries are related to maps, such a large (and constantly growing) dataset is not surprising.
This massive dataset and user base together helped the company capture nearly 67% of the navigation app market (as of 2023). Parsing Yandex Maps helps extract data sources from Yandex.
Data Points That Can Be Extracted When Parsing Yandex Maps
If you are going to try parsing Yandex Maps, the main attraction will be the data points that can be extracted. For almost any establishment, Yandex Maps provides a set of information. If you are looking for a service, such as a laundromat, or a store that sells cakes, you typically have all this data:
- a) Business name
- b) Rating
- c) Number of reviews
- d) Price range
- e) Type of establishment
- f) "About" section
- g) Full address
- h) Business hours
- i) Phone number
- j) Website if available
- k) Popular times (during the day)
- l) Photos
- m) Reviews
There may be other data points if the business added them or if individuals updated them. Many of the above data points may be missing if no one has updated them yet. Yandex Maps uses its "Local Guides" program to encourage users to upload photos and update information about places they frequently visit. Thus, the dataset is constantly updated in real time.
Not only are new data points added to existing establishments, but new businesses often get listed in Yandex Maps. Parsing Yandex Maps helps quickly extract business listings and other data.
Certain information is also updated from time to time due to reasons such as seasonal changes or natural disasters. One such example is the lockdown, which forced many businesses to change their opening hours or introduce other rules. Many businesses updated their information during COVID, and this greatly helped people.
How to Benefit from Local Business Data from Yandex Maps
Local business data can be very valuable if used correctly. They can answer questions that can only be solved with data:
1) Market Research
Local business data can help companies find solutions to many problems through market research. For example, a fast food company can use local business data to find out which areas of the city have more fast food outlets.
This information indicates that these areas are popular among food lovers. On the other hand, you can use local business data to find out which areas have fewer fast food outlets and open your new restaurant there.
Various data points can be used by businesses to determine things like the type of people in a given location, their price sensitivity, their likes and dislikes, and the gap between supply and demand.
Data obtained from local businesses can also be used indirectly. For example, if you want to open a travel company but don't know which places in the city are most popular, you can use local business data to find out where the most popular attractions are and set them as common routes.
2) Data Aggregation
Aggregating any form of data can provide a broader picture when viewed as a whole. The same applies to business data. Collecting and aggregating data on specific types of businesses can help identify main issues, missed opportunities, the scale of a new business, and much more.
Aggregated data on various businesses on Yandex Maps can open doors that information from a single business cannot.
For example, you want to start a hyperlocal delivery service and want to partner with the most popular shops and service providers nearby. You can use Yandex Maps data to sort all businesses by ratings and reviews, and then start picking from the top of the list.
3) Sentiment Analysis and Brand Image Management
Today, public opinion about a business is as important as the products it sells. You can monitor the brand image of any business by tracking its latest reviews on various platforms.
Local business data on Yandex Maps contains thousands of reviews for millions of businesses. This data not only provides a large dataset for sentiment analysis, but can also help businesses analyze what they are doing right and where they are missing the mark. Parsing Yandex Maps will help extract the necessary data.
Specific customer reviews can be analyzed individually, but for those who want to analyze thousands of reviews, sort them based on whether they are positive, negative, or neutral, and extract useful insights from them, data parsing from Yandex Maps is the best option.
4) Competitor Analysis
Knowing your competitors is no less important than having your own house in order. For this reason, companies may want to collect data about businesses similar to their own. Such data can be easily obtained through Yandex Maps.
This data can be used to gain insights into pricing strategy, opening and closing times, additional services, customer perception, and much more. This information can in turn be used to identify opportunities for improvement and make data-driven business decisions.
How You Can Obtain Data
There are several ways to obtain local business information from Yandex Maps, including parsing allowed by Yandex itself:
Yandex Maps API - Yandex provides various APIs that can be used to extract information about places on its maps. The APIs can be used for free if the user follows certain rules.
Otherwise, you will have to pay a certain amount for every 1,000 requests to each API. Although the costs may seem small, they can add up if you try to get more information for more places or update information frequently.
Writing Code - writing code to scrape a site like Yandex Maps can be quite challenging. This is because the user interface is frequently updated, and different types of businesses have their listings in different formats, often with different data points and features.
There is also the risk of getting blacklisted if you access multiple map pages from the same IP address in a very short period of time. Creating a data parsing solution that reads local business information in different locations and updates it in real time is not only complex and expensive, but also involves additional overhead for building and maintaining infrastructure.
Paid/Free Software Solutions - most such solutions are used by companies where the business team (which usually does not have strong coding knowledge) takes care of data parsing requirements. Although they can be used with some training, you will encounter obstacles due to lack of various features. Moreover, retraining new employees, as well as dealing with infrastructure and configuration changes from time to time, will eat into the core focus of the business team.
Why ESK Solutions?
Our fully managed enterprise-grade comprehensive solution will help you obtain all necessary data from businesses anywhere in the world. Any custom requirements, such as filters for specific types of businesses, can be implemented as needed.
We provide a low-latency solution that updates data in real time. Our fully managed data collection services also take care of infrastructure creation and maintenance.