Is it your job to keep an eye on your company’s search engine placement? Or your clients? Or are you building a tool to do just that? Manually Googling stuff isn’t going to scale particularly well there. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could hit an API and it would return you nicely formatted data with this information?
That’s what serpstack is. A “serp” being a “Search Engine Results Page.” You hit it with a search query and it hits you back with a JSON representation of those search results. Simple and handy.
Everything on the search results pages maps to JSON quite logically:
Here’s a basic idea. Say your startup occupies a wonderfully nice #1 position for a particular search result that is very important to your startup. You could set up a little service that hits this API once a day for that search term to verify that you’re still at that #1 spot — and if you’re not, trigger a notification so you find out right away, rather than a month later when you randomly check.
With 100 searches you get on the free plan, that’s enough to make this happen right away. If you need to check more terms or more often, you’ll need to bump up to a paid plan, none of which are particularly pricey for what might be a seriously butt-saving API.