As Google continues to update its algorithm, we work to ensure you have data to keep up with the changes, and so have added a new feature to our SERPs API. If you’re unfamiliar with our SERPs API, you can learn more about the insights it shares here.
To help you make even more informed decisions about your content strategy, our API now can tell you the Page Structure of the top 10 ranking pages on the SERPs.
Getting started
Using the SERPs API you can request Page Structure data for your search queries. To do this you need to add an extra parameter to your request which will give you Page Structure data.
The API will then scrape the top 10 pages on the SERPs and have a look at the content on these pages to work out what kind of page it is. It will take around 10 minutes to get this extra data.
Once the API has finished, our algorithm will determine a page type for each ranking URL and provide a breakdown of the content including:
- Number of words
- Number of images
- Number of paragraphs
- The H1 – 6 titles
- Response codes
- Meta Title
- Comments
The page types are broken down into these 6 categories:
- Articles – a long-form piece of written content that would appear on a blog, newspaper, publisher’s website or similar
- Generic – a web page that does not fit into the other categories, e.g. Home page, contact us page.
- Image – a page where the main content is an image(s).
- Listing – These are pages listing multiple products or items (e.g. Classified or eCommerce PLPs (Product Landing Pages)) or articles where the content is broken out into itemised lists
- Product – a typical eCommerce page showing a product to buy
- Video – A page where the main content is a video(s).
- Wiki – Such as Wikipedia, an informational wiki or encyclopaedia page.
The above detail will be available to SERPs API users once we’ve exposed that particular endpoint (this is ‘Work in Progress’, at the moment). In the meantime, the page types and a summary of the SERPs will then be merged back into the SERPs API response (hence why you should wait an extra ten minutes if you want this data – the normal SERPs API response will be returned whilst you’re waiting). We’ll update both the Organic and Universal sections of the SERPs API response with a new property for all results we see on Page 1 of the SERPs👇🏻
We’ll also provide a summary of this at the top of the response. It will look like this 👇🏻
What can you do with this data?
Understanding the ranking page types will give you an edge against your competitors, as you can format your content in the predominant ranking type and understand what users are looking for from their search queries. This data will support your content marketing efforts, especially when used alongside User Intent data.
This will also give you an understanding why your content might not be ranking as well as your competitors. Are the top ranking pages product listings and is yours an article, for example, or is everyone else’s URL a Product page and is yours a Listing page? The content type might be a factor as to why you are not ranking as well as your competitors. In the screenshot above you can see that 75% of the content types are product pages, and 25% are article pages. So you need to consider the format of your content in order to help improve your overall content strategy.
So you need to consider the format of your content in order to help improve your overall content strategy – is what you are producing the same type of content that Google is rewarding with top rankings?
If you have a look at the example below, we have put together information from our Market Share tool alongside data from the Page Structure API to give you an idea of how we might use this data to help determine what actions we should take.
This product page is ranking for 9 keywords. It is ranking on page 1 for 3 branded terms and you can see that Google is also ranking other product pages for these terms – so there is a good fit of page type to what Google thinks the user’s intent is.
But you can also see that the page is ranking less well (pages 2 and 3 of the SERP) for the other 6 keywords; and when you look at the makeup of the SERP you can see that Google is favouring articles for these terms. Some of these terms, like ‘yeast nutrition’ have huge search volumes – but to rank well for these terms a new page will need to be created, containing long-form content around the nutritional information of their products, to even stand a chance of competing.
Following, the ‘Smell of the SERP’ like this can help you understand if you have the right type of content across your site and explain why certain pages are performing well or badly for important search terms.
Next Steps
We are now working towards building this into a separate API call so that you can access the detailed Page Structure data shown above.
If you’re interested in finding out more about the API and how it can be a part of your SEO strategy, get in touch with our team.
