How to use the Content & Page Structure API

There are a number of common SEO uses cases that the Content & Page Structure API solves. The main one of course it to analyse a set of pages to understand key metrics about them and then compare them to the page you are trying to rank.

You can utilise this as a standalone API and just feed it URLs to analyse, or you can utilise it in conjunction with the Authoritas platform and/or the Authoritas SERPs API to compare the content and structure of your pages with the top ranking pages in Google. It will help you analyse whether you have the right type of content, e.g. If Google is showing 10 articles in its 1st page organic listings for a set of keywords, then your article is not going to rank well for that page! It will also provide detailed data about each page (unless the website blocks our crawler).

How does this Content API help SEOs?

There are a number of common use cases that this helps SEOs solve:

Assess the types of pages performing well on Page 1 of Google for that query (e.g. Do articles dominate or product pages)?
Determine if there is a good or poor match between the ranking keywords for your pages and what Google wants to show users.
If some keywords are poor matches for Google's intent, then it helps you identify which keywords to split off into new pages, or which pages need further content added to meet Google's expectations
Analyse the detailed characteristics of the top performing pages vs your page, so you can identify what is missing from your page and where you can improve your content

This helps clients see that they have the wrong content type or format for some pages when Google is favouring other types of content. e.g. For eCommerce sites, they may have a product page ranking well for some keywords and badly for others; when you analyse the top competing pages for the poor performing keywords you could see that Google wants to show articles.

This is illustrated in the example spreadsheet below:

The API returns the following data for each URL analysed:

Date [dd/mm/yy]

URL

Page Type (e.g. Article, Product, Category Listing, Document, Wiki, Video, Image, etc, etc)

meta title

meta description

meta type

meta hreflang

schema

http response code

keywords (the main keywords used in the content with a count of occurrence)

text block count

word count

paragraph count

paragraph word count

image count

video count

internal link count

external link count

main content text block count

main content word count

main content paragraph count

main content paragraph word count

main content image count

main content video count

main content internal link count

main content external link count

main content h1

main content h2

main content h3

main content h4

main content h5

main content h6

For a complete list of current features, please refer to the product page on the Authoritas site: https://www.authoritas.com/content-page-structure-api.

The rest of this article provides information for your sofware developers to implement the API.

API Pre-Requisites

Option 1 – Existing and new SERPs API Users

You need to be a SERPs API user and have a valid key.

When we return the JSON results for a search query, we will also include ~10 unique job ids for the top 10 organic ranking URLs.

Then, all you need to do is make an additional request to a new API endpoint once you have successfully processed the SERPs API JSON we have delivered for each of these unique job ids.

Option 2 – Content/Page Structure API Only

This API stores details of all the unique pages we have visited, crawled and analysed. If you are not a SERPs API user, then you can make direct requests to the Page Structure API endpoint. This allows you to send thousands of URLs and have us analyse the page type and content for you.

Technical Implementation Steps

1. Send SERPs API request with an additional “parameters” object that contains “page_structure_analysis” field equal “true” like below:

2. Wait for SERPs API to process the request and get the JSON with results.

3. Page Structure Analysis will be triggered for up to 10 URLs (results) in the “universal” results (mainly organic). Such results will contain a “page_structure_jid” field like below:

4. In order to get Page Structure analysis for a given universal result, use the URL below and replace {page_structure_jid} with the value from “page_structure_jid” field:

https://ps.api.authoritas.com/request/{page_structure_jid}

The Page Structure analysis response JSON has 3 possible status values:

New – the request is in progress, check again after some time
Done – the request finished successfully
Error – the request failed (there are many reasons like temporary website issues, websites blocking our crawler or network issues)

The successful analysis contains a Page Type estimation based on our algorithm (currently we support the following page types: generic_page, article, image, video, listing, product, wiki, document, social_media page type).

Want this SEO data but don’t want to use an API?

There is an alternative approach to using our APIs. Sign-up for the platform and we will synchronise this page structure and content data for the top 10 organic ranking URLs for each of your monitored keywords for any platform account that has Big Query enabled. You will then be easily able to analyse this data in Looker Data Studio.