This post was sponsored by Bright Data. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
You know the story, every SEO professional is learning and using the same methods for building their SEO strategy.
So, how do you uncover hidden gems that help propel your local brand to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs)?
How do you elevate yourself from just a professional to an SEO expert?
Where do you get actionable insights that help you claim a top SERP position?
Expert digital marketers know that in order to win a top position on the SERP, they must understand how the SERP works.
The solution: Actionable search insights can be discovered with SERP APIs.
Being able to see what makes or breaks a top spot in a search will help you create a winning strategy.
Expert digital marketers are using SERP APIs, or SERP scrapers, to create:
- Brand sentiment strategies.
- Online reputation management (ORM) strategies.
- Improved keyword ranking strategies to modify their positioning and increase their visibility in search engines.
Before you take your first steps toward a stronger local SEO strategy, let’s dive into what a SERP API is.
What Is A SERP API?
SERP APIs are automated tools that pull public web datasets from SERPs.
They focus on giving you web data from paid and organic search results of different keywords and queries typed into search engines.
SERP APIs can help you outrank your competition by:
1. Automatically targeting unique parameters, including:
- Location (city-level targeting).
- Language.
- Filters.
- Safe mode.
- Device.
2. Automatically analyzing different search engine features, such as:
- Maps.
- Shopping.
- Trends.
- Hotels.
- Flights.
- News.
- More.
These two automated public data sets help you:
- Monitor your competition.
- Uncover hidden trends.
- Improve paid advertising campaigns.
- Expose content gaps.
- Understand how your content performs from region to region.
Screenshot from SERP API, October 2022What Are SERP APIs Used For?
SERP APIs, especially automated ones like Bright Data’s SERP API tool, help you:
- Easily uncover harmful ratings and bad press so you can repair your reputation.
- Create an SEO keyword strategy that’s based on real-time web data, instead of historical.
- Build out a content strategy that helps search engines understand your business and rank you higher.
- Uncover the best backlinking opportunities.
- Automatically gain insights and save time during SEO research phases.
1. Uncover & Repair Bad Reviews & Press To Increase SERP Rankings
You can use SERP APIs to manage the online reputation of your organization.
Worried about bad PR? Get alerted so you can get ahead of it.
Wondering if bad reviews are making your products appear lower on SERPs? Find out in seconds.
SERP APIs can help you and your team with Online Reputation Management (ORM).
How? By quickly scraping all public web data from search engines and seeing, at a glance, what pages rank highest – for positive and negative reasons – when searching for branded keywords or product keywords.
Your automated SERP API tool will show you how your brand is positioned to the public, and how its position is influenced by these factors.
From here, you can develop a superior strategy that counteracts any negative content with positive content – leveraging the insights pulled from the SERP web data to optimize your brand’s reputation and reach.
For example, SEO teams can see how their reviews and ratings compare against their competitors’ and monitor for any negative press or comments about their brand.
Using an automated SERP API can quickly show the types of websites that appear first in searches and whether or not they place the brand in a favorable position.
2. Build Your Strategy With Real-Time Keyword Research & Web Data
Traditional SEO tools rely on historical data to give you insights, providing results or data from a week ago or longer.
Often, they don’t give users the option to search by city or other detailed parameters. This becomes an issue for local SEO specialists, as search engine results for a keyword in Miami will appear differently than they will in Orlando.
It’s time to get ahead of your competition by creating your strategy from real-time web data.
How? SERP APIs have the ability to scrape public web data from search engine results pages in real time from any country, city, or location, making it perfect for international SEO and local SEO.
You’ll be able to build local SEO strategies and ORM strategies that improve your brand’s ranking position across locations in real time.
By using an automated SERP scraper you can:
- Track the changes in local search engine results or rankings in relation to your competitors.
- Uncover specific keyword, description, and link trends.
- Optimize advertising campaigns.
- Locate untapped backlink opportunities.
- Duplicate data affecting search positioning.
3. Automatically See Search Trends & Discover Content Gaps
You can use SERP APIs to discover search engine trends and expose gaps in your content marketing strategy.
The web data collected from SERP APIs can identify new, trending content ideas – such as blogs, articles, or videos – that can help you create and manage high-quality content that generates organic traffic.
How? An automated SERP API can give you instant insights into what your 2023 content strategy should contain.
4. Get Instant Insights Into The Most Effective Title Tags, Meta Descriptions & Backlink Opportunities
SERP APIs retrieve titles, tags, and descriptions from SERPs.
This means you can see the content you need without surfing through hundreds of SERPs.
With this information, you can better optimize your pages so they appear higher up in searches than your competitors’ pages, products, or services.
How? By scraping competing results, public websites, and content, you can identify areas to improve your own title tags and meta descriptions.
You can also locate untapped backlink opportunities to further enhance their pages and ensure they appear first in trending search results.
The best part? You can do this automatically.
5. Automate Your SERP Scraping Tasks With SERP APIs
SERP APIs can automate the process of scraping SERPs.
If you’re a local business with many locations or an international SEO professional who uses local SEO strategy for international rankings, you know this too well: Many different elements can affect the results being displayed on a page, including location, search history, and device.
SEO agencies also have multiple clients, and it can take hours to perform a manual scrape for each one.
As a result, it’s not feasible to manually survey SERPs and return accurate, real-time results.
How? SERP scrapers allow you to automate and pull web data from countless sources at once, enabling your teams to gather large volumes of data at a faster pace and have greater visibility into their positioning in search results.
Many web data providers offer SERP APIs that require little to no experience to scrape web data from result pages.
These tools are specifically designed to target all major search engines.
Similar to data collection infrastructure, some tools even come with unblocking technology attached, and more importantly, the data provider will automatically update SERP APIs after search engines make changes to the results pages – ensuring accurate and uninterrupted real-time web data collection.
This is extremely important considering there are constant changes being made to the structure and algorithms of SERPs, and new features are being added to these pages more frequently.
Equip Your SEO Teams With Safe SEO Automation, Today
SERP APIs can provide you with the additional tools you need to optimize your strategies for ORM, localized SEO, content optimization, real-time rank tracking, and other SEO-related projects.
With the help of SERP APIs, gathering accurate, real-time SERP web data has become a significantly more manageable task and has provided SEO teams with a direct line to different audiences and SERPs across the globe.