A Beginners Guide to SEO APIs
Search Engine Optimization Application Programming Interfaces are the trending topic in 2021 and they’ve become one of the biggest considerations for digital marketers today.
This article takes a look at what SEO APIs are and how they benefit companies when web scraping using Python.
Contents
What are APIs?
Application Programming Interface (API) can be likened to a middleman in software. It refers to technology that facilitates communication between two different applications, which otherwise may not be able to work together.
An API is essentially the technology that takes a request or incoming message from one device/software and submits it to the recipient device/software. Once the destination device/software responds, the API returns a solution/response to the sending device/software. The action of sending an API request is called the ‘API call’ and the action of receiving an answer is called the ‘API response.’
What is SEO APIs?
APIs are – at their core – tools for data aggregation and collation. Consider this example: a customer wants to book a bus ticket to travel to a nearby city, they log into their computer and type in “bus tickets to XYZ”. They set the parameters for a date, time, price, and seating. After a few seconds, the search engine provides them with a list of bus service providers who are operating a service to the destination and meet the customer’s specifications.
In this example, it is the API that is transferring the request for bus tickets to XYZ and making the “call” to the websites of various bus service providers. Once these websites send a “response,” the API shares these results with the customer.
For businesses, this point of contact is extremely crucial. This encounter with the API can help to either ensure the business’s listing is made visible to the customer, or suppress it. However, there’s a catch. The API will only be able to share a response that meets the exact characteristics of the call. So, if a product/service listing does not meet the search query, the API will be unable to collect that information and display it to the customer.
This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) APIs come in. They are APIs that are used by companies to help bring together the search query with the company’s listing, on-page content, page errors, etc. This is just one of the functions of an SEO API, we delve into more below.
Other key functions of SEO APIs Understanding website performance
SEO APIs can be used to audit the core features and performance of a website. Companies can easily check how quickly the site is loading, the presence of any broken links, or 404 errors and 301 redirects. APIs can also help in identifying poor metadata and scraping premium-quality meta too. Businesses can also use SEO APIs to scrape and analyze XML sitemaps and robots.txt files to improve how the site is built and increase its efficiency.
Improve site visibility and reach
APIs can be used by businesses to improve website visibility and increase a website’s ranking. These days, APIs are built keeping Natural Language Generation in mind and they’re able to track and respond to all types of keyword inputs made by people when they search the web. This ensures a company’s website is made more visible to a greater number of people.
Get information about competitor’s SEO performance
Some SEO APIs (for example, the Serpstat API) can help companies collect website and SEO performance metrics from various companies. In fact, some SEO APIs also go a step further and support the generation of PDF analytics reports.
Identifying plagiarised content
Plagiarised content can threaten a company’s website and flag it for poor/illegal practices. If this happens, the website may drop significantly in the SERP rankings. With SEO API, companies can monitor whether their content has been plagiarized. The API will provide responses indicating similar-sounding content, allowing the company to take the right action.
Acquire advertising campaign analytics
SEO APIs also benefit advertising campaigns. Take Google Ads API, for example. It can help collect audience engagement data and create landing pages, ad texts, and AD keywords. These ad APIs also help developers build tools that are specifically helpful to the company’s advertising and marketing strategy.
Translate content into different languages
Companies with multilingual websites, or who want to create multilingual websites, can use APIs to translate content. While the results may not be completely authentic and natural, API-translated content can help businesses better target their overseas customers with ease.
Understand site configuration
SEO APIs can be used to scrape and analyse robots.txt. This can provide developers with a better understanding of the way the site or platform has been constructed, identify any vulnerabilities in the development, and give the required information developers need to fix these problems.
SEO APIs and web python scraping
Web scraping using the language Python is the process of using Python to collect large amounts of data from various sources on the web. Python web scraping and SEO APIs can provide enriched data and reports when combined.
Typically, people who use python web scraping and APIs in conjunction for website improvement, use the flask API. This is a Python API – one of the best, and easiest, SEO APIs to work with. Additionally, some developers use flask API to develop web-based applications based on the information they get.
Conclusion
SEO APIs, like the flask API, are exceptionally powerful tools that companies can use to supercharge the way their websites perform. By combining APIs with Python web scraping, businesses will be able to generate greater value when they use SEO APIs.
Bio:
Christoph Leitner is a code-loving father of two beautiful children. He is a full-stack developer and a committed team member at Zenscrape.com – a subsidiary of saas.industries.
When he isn’t building software, Christoph can be found spending time with his family or training for his next marathon.
