Build your own SEO Tools for Free – Part 1
As SEOs we make use of dozens of different tools, pulling in data from hundreds or thousands of sources to spreadsheets from data pools so massive it’s not even worth calculating. It used to be that the only way to access that data was through expensive SEO tools but now there is a whole wealth of data out there for you to gather, analyze and make use of if you want.
Build your own SEO Tools – Our ‘Big Data’ store.
The thing is that lots of the data that premium SEO tools collect and organize is actually publicly available data – readily available for you to gather and make use of yourself if you know how.
The rest of the data they use requires API access to certain services but luckily for us most of those APIs give out free API keys – albeit with usage limits or certain restrictions. You’ll be signing up for a bunch of those API keys throughout the building of these tools but the keys will allow us to gather as much data from as many different sources as we need.
Getting the Data is no longer a Problem. Organizing it all is.
The real magic to all of this is when you combine public data with the freely available data from APIs to create tools that show you in depth information and provide insights into things you wouldn’t normally notice if the information wasn’t combined and sorted.
In just a few seconds you can gather serious amounts of information about practically anything you want. It’s no longer a problem accessing that data: the problem arises when you need to make sense of what you collect.
This is where our SEO Tools come into play, we need to scrape everything and make sense of it.
SEO Toolset Features
- Rankings Tracker – with Google Analytics integration so you can check the rankings of keywords you see in your reports and keep a note over time.
- Social Share Count – You obviously want to be keeping track of how your pages are performing socially to help get an overview of how people are engaging with your content.
- Possibly even make this take note of mentions and what they say and keep a note of #hashtags used in tweets for future reference and content generation.
- Keyword Research – Using various different services including the Google Adwords Keywords API and Ubersuggest.
- Content Brainstorming – This one will search various different sites for you keyword with different advance search operators to help you find topics to create content about.
- Outreach/Currently in Industry – This one will make use of social networks to find out things people in your industry are talking about now and see if you can jump in on them
Next Time – We Start Building
Those are just a few of the core features I’d like my SEO Tools to have and eventually I’d like to have them all completely integrated into the one big tool with both a Google Docs version and an online version for me to build into my WordPress installs to help with smart content creation.
A Google rank and social share counter will be the first things we’ll build. So I’ll go into the importXML() function and XPath which is the basis of how we gather all our data.
