5 SEO APIs That You Must Have For Better SEO Results

Despite its death being prophesized several times over the last decade, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) lived on to become a crucial component of digital marketing. Starting off as a fringe market marred by illegitimate practices, SEO is now a multi-billion dollar industry whose market value is expected to reach $103.24 billion by 2025. 

While the effects of the pandemic forced businesses to cut spending in multiple areas, SEO software market data tells us that the demand (and budgets) for specialized optimization software remained consistent.

By utilizing SEO tools, you will draw in substantially more organic traffic and gain insight into what kind of content your target audience is looking for. This type of software is extremely powerful and, if you’re serious about your optimization efforts, you shouldn’t think twice before investing in one.

However, spending time in SEO software’s dashboard and extracting data manually can be very time-consuming. SEO APIs automate and speed up this process, integrating directly into applications you use and providing you with raw, actionable info.

Here, we’ve gathered the best and most useful SEO APIs around that are bound to significantly improve your optimization endeavors. 

What’s An API?

Before we dig into SEO APIs, let’s take a look at what an API is in the first place. API stands for Application Programming Interface – a type of software interface that serves as a bridge between two applications. With an API, you can integrate one tool’s features and capabilities into another. 

APIs are crucial for integration specially when it comes to SOAP APIs, and we rely on them heavily in our everyday lives. For example, the weather widget you probably often use on your phone is an API. Easy Log in/Sign Up somewhere using your Facebook or Google account is possible thanks to the API. What about paying on an e-commerce site using PayPal? As you might have guessed, this is the API too.

Whenever you get access to one software or service’s features or pull data from their databases while using a separate application, you can be sure that APIs are involved. The future is now! API is an innovative way to streamline business functions and make life easier for users. It allows companies the ability integrate different types of data, payments or app functionality into one system with ease with the help of management tools and solutions.

What are SEO APIs and why are they important?

Now that we went over what APIs are, let’s get into SEO APIs specifically. Their main purpose is to extend the functionalities of dedicated SEO tools to applications you and your company use. 

Using your chosen SEO software’s native dashboard is perfectly fine as it can give you a breadth of useful in-depth data and metrics. However, this can also take up a considerable amount of time, especially during more intense optimization campaigns. Swapping between multiple different tools to get SEO data can be exhausting, and have a noticeable negative impact on your effectiveness.

SEO APIs are a great way to circumvent this problem, as they bring forth powerful features straight to the applications you use daily. These APIs can have a wide variety of functions. These include things like fetching SERP and keyword data, rank tracking, site health checkups or competitor analysis.

“In a world of ever-changing markets and technological developments, staying competitive equals staying innovative. As such, using tools like SEO APIs is paramount for taking optimization and digital marketing efforts to the next level” said Nick Chernets, CEO and founder of DataForSEO.

By utilizing an SEO API, you can have this type of data at the tip of your fingers whenever you need it without swapping away from the application you’re using.

Must-have SEO APIs

Now, let’s go over the most useful SEO APIs you can get your hands on. By using them, you’re sure to vastly improve your SEO efforts and as a result, garner more organic traffic and grow your site. Here, we’ve focused more on presenting them by functionality, as opposed to listing or ranking them by the provider behind the API.

1. Google PageSpeed Insights API

Google’s PageSpeed Insights API provides developers and site owners with insightful data on performance metrics for any particular web page. After scanning a page, which is a pretty quick process, the PageSpeed API provides you with information like First Contentful Pain times, time to interactive, first input delay, and overall speed performance. This API fetches data from the Chrome User Experience report and lab analysis information from Lighthouse. 

The value of the information provided cannot be overstated. Making sure your site runs as smoothly and as quickly as possible is integral to providing a great user experience to visitors. Slow, unresponsive, and glitchy pages will quickly turn away users.

Load times are especially important, as research shows that bounce rates rise rapidly with every additional second your page takes to load and negatively impact sales.

These metrics became even more important with Google’s Page Experience update, which made performance scores and Core Web Vitals ranking factors.

2. DataForSEO SERP API

One of the core aspects of performing proper SEO analysis is dissecting SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). SERPs reveal the current ranking situation for any given keyword or search query. You can see who holds the first spots in Google results, look at what your competitors are doing and make an effort to provide even better content or optimize your pages more effectively.

DataForSEO’s SERP API brings all this data right to you, without forcing you to manually fire up your SEO software and perform the SERP search. In addition, this API works with several search engines, not just Google, and can also fetch data from image and news searches. 

This is especially useful and time-saving when your SEO undertakings are targeted towards an audience in another country, with the US market being the most popular and lucrative. 

SERP checker APIs shouldn’t be hard to find as SERP checking is considered to be an extremely important part of SEO. Hence, most providers in this niche will offer this type of APIs.

3. SEO Content Analysis REST API

Besides SERP checks and technical SEO, on-page SEO is equally, if not more, important. Even if your site works like clockwork, on-page content is what ultimately determines how your page will rank.

While software or APIs can rarely replace dedicated and skilled SEO managers, they can make the work of optimizing content much easier and speedier. They are especially useful when you have a lot of pages/sites you need to audit.

By using the SEO Content Analysis API, you’ll be treated to a treasure trove of valuable information on how well the page’s contents are optimized. This includes data like title and meta tag analysis, content length, keyword density, URLs, interlinking, and so forth.

This API will present you with your site’s overall SEO score as well as provide you with advice on what you can do to increase it. The information gained through this API can tell you what needs improving, but you’ll still need to write quality content yourself to improve your rankings.  

4. SEMrush Keyword Research API

While search engine algorithms are constantly improving, keywords still form the backbone of how they rank pages. Consequently, proper keyword research and analysis are fundamental for proper SEO. 

SEMrush’s Keyword Research API pulls up relevant keyword data at your behest, including their volume, ranking difficulty, CPC and provides you with other related keywords. With SEMrush, you have a 12 million-strong keyword database at your disposal, with historical data going back to 2012. 

As an alternative, you can use DataForSEO’s keyword APIs also extract data from Google Trends, which is useful for finding great “at the moment” opportunities – writing about a currently hotly debated topic or marketing a product everyone is looking for right now.

Some APIs like KW Finder can also suggest low-difficulty keywords you could easily rank for. We definitely recommend you get yourself a keyword research API to help your SEO pushes.

5. SEO Booster API

An all-in-one & auto SEO app to help improve Google rankings and drive more traffic is also a must if you don’t want to spend tons of time doing technical SEO tasks manually, particularly on some e-commerce platforms like Shopify, and SEO Booster is a very great and effective option.

The app has all SEO functions you might need to optimize your website elements, both Basics ones namely Bulk Edit Meta Tags, Fix Broken Link, Add Image Alt-tags and Advanced ones such as Google Snippets, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Site Speed. The interface is easy-to-navigate and clear, suitable for SEO novices as well as professionals.

The customer support service is also a plus point of the app. Live support 24/7 is available, you will have both non-technical and technical supporters assist whenever you have any questions or issues happening.

This SEO Booster app is highly recommended to help you optimize your site, boost your Google ranks and reach more customers from organic search.

Conclusion

Here, we listed the type of SEO APIs we deemed to be crucial for optimization efforts. Of course, there are plenty of other API types with a multitude of different capabilities, but these should form the core of your SEO tools. You should also consider purchasing a license for full-fledged SEO software, not just the APIs.

Keep in mind that APIs are not a complete replacement for SEO experts and good content teams – they can point you in the right way, but you’ll have to reach the goal yourself.