I've built a directory listing website and I'm using WP All Import plugin to pull in data from a spreadsheet (which consists of scraped business info from their Google Maps / GBP listings).
Being that it's a directory website, I'd like the listing info to have essentially what's on the average Google Business Profile (GBP):
- Business Name, Address and Phone Number
- Hours
- Website URL
- Social Media profiles
- Business Description (that plain text bio on GBP listings)
- Logo
- Gallery / Images
- Business Attributes
- FAQs
I've spent 10 hours straight, yesterday, trying out various tools, web apps, desktop apps, chrome extensions, pouring through YouTube vidz - keep getting stuck.
Chrome extensions are slick but they only pull in the very basics NAP type data.
1) Outscraper - it seems hit or miss. For the last test run, it exported data for a certain category + city (ie. plumbers Boston) into a spreadsheet that had a business description for ONE of the businesses. It was the correct description taken from their GBP listing but why only 1 business? I double checked the other businesses in the list, they all have descriptions on their GBP but black cells in the sheet under Description.
Outscraper just said that they can't get that data unless I manually do searches in their app via Place ID 1 business at a time. If there are 500 businesses, that would take me literally 40+ hours to do 1 by 1. Also, they don't pull in the images from the GBP listing into that spreadsheet or FAQs.
2) Octoparse - I paid for their Standard subscription and it still takes quite a while to scrape even a dozen business listings. I tell it to limit the scrape to 10 pages but 1000+ listings later, it's still going.
On their sales page, they say they extract business descriptions, social profiles, price range, images, logo etc but... my spreadsheets consisted of none of that.
3) Apify - This was the first I tried and can't remember the issues here. Google Maps Scraper said it would find FAQs, images and everything else but I know it was the worst of the 3 main apps in my experience so far. I think this also didn't work out because of the formatting of the spreadsheet when trying to import it through WP All Import. For example, WP All Import wants you to drag one field that contains all the business attributes (ie. transgender friendly, wheelchair accessible parking lot, etc) into their one spot for it in the plugin. But, the export of Apify contains many individual columns in the spreadsheet, such as:
additionalInfo/Accessibility/0/Wheelchair accessible entrance Any suggestions? I don't mind paying for a scraper that can do this but after yesterday's marathon, I'd like to test it out for free first.
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