The Best Available SERP APIs for Competitor Analysis

68% of online user experiences start with a search engine, yet, only 0.63% click for results on the second page. Besides, the #1 Google search result gets 27.6% clicks, meaning you’re invisible to users if your site isn’t ranking. 

SERP APIs can be your automated gateway for tracking keywords, getting competitor insights, and conducting SERP feature analysis. These SEO tools handle thousands of search results in seconds, offering you data-driven accuracy to outrank your rivals. This way, you don’t leave your SEO strategy to chance.

In this article, we walk you through how to use SERP APIs and the selection of the best SERP APIs in the market.

What Are SERP APIs?

SERP (Search engine results page) APIs are tools that scrape search engine data, providing valuable real-time insights into site rankings, competitor analysis, and search trends. They work programmatically by sending queries to a search engine and returning the results in a structured format like JSON or CSV.

Here are the key features of SERP API:

• Real-time data: Gives you access to fresh search engine data with timely SEO, and gains insights into market analysis.
• Keyword tracking: You can track your keyword performance across search engines and geographically, helping you align your SEO strategies.
• Rank tracking: Data from SERP APIs lets you observe your website ranking trend, examine your SEO efforts, and spot areas for improvement.
• SERP snapshot analysis: You can capture extensive SERP results like organic listings or rich snippets, giving you a broad view of the SERP outlook.

Why should you use SERP APIs?

Manually monitoring search engine results can be arduous and prone to inconsistencies and errors. Thankfully, SERP APIs complement your SEO strategy by automating data retrieval and providing accurate SEO insights at scale. 

Here’s why you should use them:

• Scalability: SERP APIs can process data on a large scale, allowing you to track broad keyword volumes simultaneously.
• Accuracy: Data retrieval is automated, minimizing human error by up to 80% and boosting data accuracy by 20%. This ensures you make logical SEO-informed decisions and preserve the integrity of your SEO data.
• Automation: SERP APIs refine your data-gathering process and save you time and resources by eradicating the tedious manual data-collection process. 

In fact, 78% of business leaders believe task automations save up to 3 hours a day, allowing you to focus on strategy instead of manual data collection.

A graph showing the percentage of tasks in the average workday that should be automated.

Source

Why Does Competitor Analysis Matter in SEO? 

By examining your competitors’ strategies and SEO performance, you can spot profitable opportunities, identify content gaps, and benchmark your SEO efforts. With this information, you can set realistic goals and modify your SEO strategy accordingly.

Importance of competitor analysis

Here are more granular reasons you should conduct a competitor analysis:

• Keyword rankings: You can examine the keywords they rank for and spot opportunities for your content planning.
• Backlink profiles: Lets you assess the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to your competitor’s pages to identify possible link-building opportunities.
• Content strategies: You can scrutinize your rival’s content quality, type, and frequency to inspire your content planning.
• On-page SEO components: Competitor analysis lets you evaluate their use of title headers, meta descriptions, and more to guide your pages’ optimization.
• SERP features: You can inspect how your rivals improve their visibility using SERP features, like PPC ads and featured snippets, and review how you can explore them.

Challenges of Manual Competitor Analysis

While competitor analysis is an indispensable SEO effort, doing it manually can be time-consuming and susceptible to human error. Though you may get some valuable insights, they fall short of the effectiveness and scalability you need to modernize your SEO approaches.

Here are the downsides of manual competitor analysis:

• Time-consuming: Manually analyzing multiple competitors for various SEO metrics can take hours or even days.
• Data accuracy: Manual data handling is prone to human error, reducing reliability.
• Lacks real-time insights: Search engine rankings vary frequently, and manual analysis may not capture this, reducing SEO effectiveness.
• Challenge tracking many competitors: It is nearly an impossible feat to analyze multiple competitors across niches or regions manually.

How Can I Use SERP APIs For Competitor Analysis?

SERP APIs supply you with the correct data to understand your competitors’ strategies and optimize your site without relying on guesswork. You can decode search trends, identify opportunities, and enrich your strategy through automation.

Here’s how SERP APIs help you to analyze your competitors:

• Real-time data collection: Retrieve the latest search results for your competitors’ rankings, featured snippets, and ads.
• Keyword gap analysis: Spot the keywords your competitors outrank you for and optimize your content to seize missing opportunities.
• Rank tracking: Track your competitors’ ranking trends and modify your SEO strategy accordingly.
• Content analysis: Assess your competitors’ high-performing content and identify high-engaging topics to boost your content strategy.
• SERP feature insights: Monitor your competitors’ performance in knowledge panels, featured snippets, and video carousels to optimize your SERP features and improve visibility.
• Backlink monitoring: Identify quality backlinks pointing to your competitors and develop a stronger link-building plan to bridge the gap.

Best SERP APIs for Competitor Analysis

1. Ahrefs API for backlink analysis

Ahrefs offers the fastest backlink crawler, with an index of over 14 trillion live backlinks and access to over 7 years of historical data. You can see the websites that link to your competitors’ sites and assess the quality of their backlinks.

Key Features:

• Identify your competitors’ ranking keywords and the pages with the most traffic.
• Study their backlink profile, including referring domains, anchors, internal links, broken links, and best-by links.
• Examine if your competitors use paid search ads and where they funnel their paid traffic.
• Learn about their website structure, including the number of pages, organization, and outline of the internal links.

Ahrefs is best for: backlink analysis.

Starting Pricing: $129/month

2. Bishopi API for SERP data extraction

Bishopi competitor analysis API gives you insights on when your rival takes a position on SERPs or when you lose rankings. You can extract your competitors’ data to understand their SEO strategy and link profile, your position on SERPs, fix declined traffic sources, and modify your content to align with emerging trends.

Key Features:

• Analyze competitors’ sources of organic traffic.
• Track your position on SERPs and how to outrank your competitors.
• Identify your competitor’s SEO approach and link profile.
• Study your competitors’ content gaps and adjust yours to bridge the gap.

Bishopi is best for: Extracting competitor SERP data.

Starting Pricing: $39/month with a 7-day free trial. 

We also have the Professional plan for $99/month and the Advanced plan for $349/month.

Pro Tip: Our pay-as-you-go approach allows you to generate API, purchase credits, and use the API.

Here’s what you get:

• Flexible payment — you only pay for what you use
• No recurring subscription required
• Simple credit-based system (each successful call is 1 credit)
• Credits don't expire at the end of the month and roll over indefinitely

What’s more, our SERP Analyzer API lets you analyze patterns across high-performing pages. It ensures you use data-driven insights to optimize your content and stay ahead of the competition.

3. Moz API for DA and PA analysis

Moz is a domain overview tool that tracks your DA and brand authority and evaluates your performance against your rivals. Its link explorer lets you compare extensive link aspects, like root domain, followed link counts, and spam score. 

Key Features:

• Evaluate your competitors’ DA and PA scoring.
• Monitor competitor rankings for a specific keyword with continuous rank tracking in MOZ Pro Campaigns.
• Analyze their ranking content to inform your content strategy.

Moz is best for: Analyzing domain and brand authority.

Starting Pricing: $49/ month with a 30-day free trial.

4. DataForSEO API for keyword Analysis

DataForSEO offers a 7-second turnaround time for live mode keyword analysis. The request cost for 1,000 keywords starts at $0.05. You can compare keyword popularity across competitors and geographical areas and identify the one with the highest interest.

Key Features: 

• Allows bulk keyword data analysis.
• Offers comprehensive geographical-based search insights.
• You can compare your website against your competitors’ SERP features like maps, ads, and featured snippets.

DataForSEO is best for: Large-scale keyword analysis.

Starting Pricing: Operates on a pay-as-you-go model, with a minimum amount of $50.

5. AccuRanker API for real-time rank tracking

AccuRanker is one of the fastest competitor research API with volume rank tracking capabilities. It processes data using its 24B keyword research database, AI control and search intent model, and dynamic tagging and segmentation. So, you can analyze your competitors’ performance and spot opportunities to outrank them.

Key Features:

• You can create advanced filters to tag your keyword data dynamically.
• Lets you identify your competitors and which pages they outrank you for.
• Offers aggregated SERP analysis, including available SERP features and those you already rank for.

Accuranker is best for: Instantaneous rank tracking.

Starting Pricing: You only pay for the keyword you want to track. Starts at 1,000 keywords for $129/month, with a 14-day free trial.

6. Custom Search JSON API — a programmable search engine

The API lets you programmatically retrieve and display Google search results from programmable search engines. You can use RESTful requests to retrieve image or web search volume results in JSON format. It uses filters to choose metrics, retrieve time-series data, and segment monitored resources into groups.

Key Features:

• You can locate the most relevant ranking pages using a set of predefined competitors or another data subset.
• Allows you to use the API data for a keyword in any of your applications.
• Offers 100 free API requests per day.
• You can search the entire database without restricted custom search. 

But, keep in mind that the search results are only a proxy of what you’d get from an actual Google search. It is not 100% representation even with exact location and language settings. Even so, the output is sound in informing your SEO decision-making, though not extensive.

Starting Pricing: Custom Search JSON API gives you 100 free daily search requests. You’ll pay $5 per 1000 queries and up to 10k daily.

Custom Search JSON API is best for: Retrieving direct Google search data.

Make Use of the Full Potential of SERP APIs

With AI shaping the direction of search engines, APIs now offer broader insights into emerging keywords, user behavior, and SERP volatility. For example, using machine learning in SERP competitive analysis, where SERP APIs can locate search variation patterns, can help you avoid abrupt keyword ranking drops. 

What's more, as search engines integrate extra zero-click results and AI overviews, utilizing the SERPS API ensures a solid and adaptable SEO strategy.

So, if you’re looking to scale your SEO efforts, Bishopi APIs offer a suite customized to your needs. Whether you need competitor analysis, keyword monitoring, domain and SERP analysis, or backlink tracking, Bishopi API is the solution. Sign up today and start your 7-day free trial.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is SERP Analysis

SERP analysis involves assessing SERPs to understand ranking metrics, competitor approaches, and keyword opportunities. It helps you identify well-ranked content, displayed SERP features, and ways to optimize your site for improved visibility.

What are SERP Features, and why should you care?

These are improved search results components like image carousels, featured snippets, knowledge panels, or local packs. They improve site visibility, influence user behavior, and direct clicks. Optimizing for them helps you seize more organic traffic beyond the traditional blue hyperlinks.

How do you track competitor analysis?

The process involves tracking keyword rankings, content strategies, SERP performance, and backlink profiles to spot opportunities. You can automate the process using SERP APIs, collect competitors’ ranking data, and modify your SEO approach accordingly.

Are SERP APIs safe?

Yes, if they are sourced from trusted providers and align with Google API Services User Data Policy. Always do your due diligence through reviews, case studies, or forums to ensure you pick the SEO APIs whose use is ethical and legal.