SEO wasn’t supposed to be as difficult, time-consuming, and expensive as it has become. Learn how you can turn the tables using APIs and in-house SEO tooling, from George Svash, Director of Content Marketing at DataForSEO.
APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are the essential components that empower diverse platforms, apps, and diverse informational systems to “talk” with each other. You can think of APIs as a set of buildings blocks that enable different platforms and, in most cases, applications to share data and trigger the execution of certain tasks. At the same time, having APIs is also vital when it comes to building software solutions for analyzing large volumes of marketing data.
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Have you seen this year’s Marketing Technology Landscape supergraphic? If not, it’s definitely worth looking over. Today, there are over 7,040 software solutions that are aimed at automating every aspect of the marketing craft, including, not the least, advanced SEO analytics. With several dozen of SEO software vendors operating on the market that will help you solve common issues for a relatively small website. At the same time, if your work involves several websites and analyzing huge volumes of data, a seemingly smooth SEO workflow can quickly grow into a troublesome burden. Having too much data becomes a mountain that’s too difficult to climb unless you have adequate equipment – something that the majority of convenient SEO tools fail to provide. That’s what makes SEO agencies and in-house marketing teams look in the direction of third-party data sources and custom, even DIY, SEO software solutions. One thing, however, stops many businesses from developing their own SEO tools – the cost of it snowballs in the proportion of data volumes required.
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Nick Chernets, the Founder and CEO of DataForSEO, the BaaS company that provides SEO data to software businesses and SEO agencies through an API, explains where extra costs come from:
“Marketers used to pass SEO software projects to in-house development teams and make them build everything from the ground up. The problem is that extracting data from Google is difficult from the technological standpoint and hence, costly. Google wants to keep it that way to sustain this high technological threshold. At the same time, every SEO project has tons of data underneath. The cost of collecting and analyzing all that data in-house is ridiculously high.”
At the same time, Nick believes that building SEO tools in-house should be affordable to every marketing team:
“Now we see more and more development teams adopting the advanced tooling approach. They build quality tools on the top of data they get through our APIs. We ensure a stable flow of stable data to the system, so the only thing left to them is building the interface and integrating an API. This eliminates lots of tedious tasks and cuts off most of the development costs. Following this approach, you can get the tool up and running in a matter of weeks. And more than that – custom DIY solutions are often cheaper than enterprise-grade SEO tools. Not to mention that it’s more sustainable in the long run.”
As you see, while APIs won’t necessarily help you climb the Everest, they can supply you with the means to collect and analyze marketing data on a large scale. That data, in turn, represents the very core of any SEO tool. In this article, we’ll walk you through the world of APIs that can make your SEO analytics much less burdensome.
Conventional APIs for SEO Analytics: Google
Google offers a variety of APIs that empower many software solutions. It’s only natural that SEOs rely on Google to collect and analyze important data. From the SEO perspective, all Google APIs boil down to Google Analytics and Google Ads.
Let’s start from Google Analytics API. It’s absolutely must-have if you need to generate detailed traffic reports for website’s landing pages. Google can break the traffic down to seven different dimensions: including operating system, country, city, landing page, keyword, and device. Using Google API doesn’t require high-level technical expertise and is free for users. However, keep in mind that it works only with websites which Analytics account you’re authorized to access.
Yet another source of useful SEO data provided by Google is its Adwords API. Unless you’re totally new to digital marketing, there’s no need to explain the opportunities Google Ads can provide, but Adwords API goes beyond that by giving the possibility to integrate all the essential PPC data (e.g., Search Volume, CPC, Competition) along with keyword ideas into any system or application. Moreover, the SOAP interface has support for six programming languages, including PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, Perls, and .NET.
On the other hand, gaining a token to use AdWords API is complicated – the “token review team” rejects applications that fail to comply with Google’s Terms of Service (TOS) and the Required Minimum Functionality, what results in dismissing the majority of applications submitted by SEO agencies and software development companies. What’s more, Google can revoke the token that it has already granted if they notice that your service doesn’t comply with its TOS (such as parsing results pages for analyzing rankings), which has happened with several big names in the SEO software industry.
Here’s how Google Analytics and Adwords APIs can help you with everyday SEO tasks:
- Essential PPC data directly from Google.
- Data on your (or your client’s) traffic.
- Easly integration.
At the same time, there’re certain difficulties that will arise if you try using Google for getting data on a large scale:
- Strict usage limits.
- Can be difficult to obtain a developer token.
- The requirement to comply with Google TOS.
As you see, while it’s undeniable that Google APIs are valuable for SEO professionals, the limitations imposed by Google make it almost impossible to build a sustainable SEO software using Google services alone. Fortunately enough, Goole isn’t the only option here.
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Going beyond conventional: Third-party SEO APIs
If you tried researching third-party SEO data providers, you’d have found quite a few vendors willing to give it to you for a relatively low cost – often a handful of what enterprise-grade SEO tools are charging. In addition to that, such companies usually operate on a pay-as-you-go model, meaning that you pay for data that you use. The data is generally supplied through the REST API. Given the lower price and virtually no data limits, it’s only natural that some marketing teams choose this option over expensive and bulky SEO tools. Furthermore, third-party providers can give data that’s impossible to get from Google, such as search volume for Google (not provided) keywords, backlinks, competitors traffic, competitors rankings, and so on.
Some of SEO data vendors are essentially point-solutions that focus on several types of data, such as Bulk Search Volume, SERP pages, etc., while others provide a well-rounded solution for any SEO software projects. Some of the well-established providers of SEO data are SimilarWeb, Ahrefs, and DataForSEO. All these companies are not data brokers – they actually mine the data they sell.
- SimilarWeb. Provides clickstream data on the website’s traffic collected through its free plugin, which has over half a million downloads on Chrome Web Store.
- Ahrefs. The value of the Ahrefs API is identical to its platform – backlinks. The company claims its live backlink index is the largest in the world and its crawler is “second most active after Google.” It’s up to you whether to believe these claims, but Ahrefs API is definitely worth trying out if you’re interested in analyzing backlinks.
- DataForSEO. Having over five years of experience in the SEO data market, DataForSEO provides a wide variety of data types. Their offerings include SERP API for tracking rankings, Keyword Data API for getting search volume and different PPC metrics, Keyword Finder API for keyword research, and more.
APIs as the core of the data-driven SEO
The more tasks you have, the more time and effort it requires to execute them. On the other hand, SEO wasn’t supposed to be as difficult, time-consuming, and expensive as it has become. At the end of a day, why would you limit your business by SEO tools’ standard interfaces and unjustified prices if you can build your own tool and set your own terms?