1. Using APIs to automate marketing Rob Kerry @Ayima

2. Rob & Ayima
Worked in SEO for over 15 years, both agency and client side
Known as “evilgreenmonkey” when SEO first became a thing
Co-founded the global online marketing agency, Ayima, in 2007
Ayima now has a team of over 100 people across 6 offices in Europe, North America and Asia (Sydney office coming soon)
Cut my SEO teeth in the online poker industry, as an in-house marketer for the world’s largest online gaming company

3. What is an API?
API = Application Programming Interface
In other words – it helps software to talk to other software
Most marketing software offers API access (often for free)
Latest evolution of the web is API First, with user interfaces built on top of APIs

4. Example – AngularJS

5. APIs have strict rules…
Most APIs are very strict
Some information is required, otherwise the request will fail
APIs are not human friendly, your code must handle the errors and fail gracefully with a fluffy message
Data is usually returned in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), a long string that can be changed into data names and values

6. Example – Grepwords.com API

7. Postman – No coding needed
getpostman.com
Free tool for Mac & Google Chrome

8. Why bother with APIs?
Software/Service providers can only guess at what data you need, when you need it and in which format
Some web interfaces are slow, long-winded and restrict the amount of data returned
With APIs, you choose what data you need
Automate reporting and data research tasks

9. Data is better with friends
Software/Service providers don’t often like to integrate or play with others
Aren’t you tired of exporting to CSV/Excel and then resorting to VLOOKUPs and bloated spreadsheet merges?
Using multiple data sources to create new insights can give you the cutting edge over your competitors

10. Share of Voice

11. Share of Voice - Overview
You want to know how your website is performing for a set of keywords, compared to your competitors
Who are your online competitors in SEO and PPC?
Which areas are they strong and weak in?
Which keywords offer the best opportunities?

12. Share of Voice - Data Needed
Search Volume
SEO/PPC Keyword Rankings
Average CTR (Click Through Rate) data

13. Share of Voice – Search Volume
Google AdWords API – Limited to big agencies and software providers and heavily restricted
Grepwords.com – Scraped Google Keyword Tool data, costing from $15 a month
SEMRush.com – Also offers scraped Google Keyword Tool data starting from $15 a month

14. Share of Voice – SEO/PPC Keyword Rankings
AuthorityLabs.com API – First 10 pages of Organic search results and PPC results for ~$0.66 per 1,000
SERPMetrics.com - $0.62 per 1,000 requests but only offers Organic results
Build/Bring Your Own – You may already collect this data and can use an existing feed

15. Share of Voice – Average CTR Data
Advanced Web Rankings – Get average CTR data for Organic rankings from thousands of websites, download the report for Paid Search CTR data
Build/Bring Your Own – Organic CTR data can be found in Google Search Console and Paid CTR in AdWords

16. Share of Voice – Average CTR Data

17. Share of Voice – Create a Report
For each keyword in your list, give each ranking Domain a score
Keyword Score = (Monthly Search Volume * Ranking CTR)
Add the Keyword Scores up for each featured website and sort by the Total Keyword Score for each Domain
You now have an estimated Share of Voice ranking and Monthly Traffic Volume for you and your competitors

18. Share of Voice – Example
UK Payment Gateways – 500 Keywords

19. SEO Budgets – Cost to Compete

20. Cost to Compete - Overview
Have you ever been asked how much it would cost to rank for X keyword in Organic Search?
Sometimes the Paid Search CPC (Cost Per Click) is prohibitively expensive or legally restricted
Google and Bing’s ranking algorithms have evolved, but still center mostly around links

21. Cost to Compete - Data Needed
We just need link data from one of the 3 main sources:
Majestic.com –API access requires a platinum level subscription at $400 a month
Ahrefs.com – API access starts from $500 a month
Moz.com – Free API access or $500 a month

22. Cost to Compete – Pull the data
Get the Domain Authority score for each of the websites currently ranking in the Top 10 for the keyword
Next, pull data on all of the links to the ranking pages and the Page Authority of their linking pages
Do the same for your own website and keyword landing page

23. Cost to Compete – Create a Report
For each ranking page, add together the Page Authority for every linking page
You can filter the data by unique “Class C / Subnet” links in order to get more accurate results
Do the same for your own keyword land page

24. Cost to Compete – Estimates
To estimate your required links, subtract the number of links into the your keyword landing page from the number pointing into your competitor’s.
Do the same with the total Page Authority score, then divide this number by the number of links required (above)
This gives you an estimate of how many links you need and the average Page Authority those links should have

25. Cost to Compete – Estimates (2)
To calculate the cost of ranking in each Top 10 position, multiply the number of required links by the average cost of acquiring a link via your preferred method
Some websites rank in Google purely based on their Domain Authority (e.g. Wikipedia) which skews our results
You can use the website’s Domain Authority to detect these instances and either exclude them from your data set or use a similar method to estimate what it’ll take to match their authority

26. Cost to Compete – ROI Estimates
Create an SEO ROI estimate, using data from our Share of Voice report
Take the estimate monthly traffic (Search Volume / CTR) for our keyword and desired ranking position
Use your average SEO conversion rate and AOV (Average Order Value) to estimate the additional monthly revenue
We now know our break-even point and revenue growth

27. Other Cool Data Reports

28. PPC/SEO Opportunities

29. Recovering (not provided) data
Google Search Console API gives you 5x more data than the web interface
Get all your keyword data back, by requesting keyword data for each individual SEO landing page
Estimate SEO revenue to a keyword level once more, by dividing the revenue generated from an SEO landing page by the percentage of SEO traffic sent by a keyword

30. Link Cleanup
Don’t buy fancy link auditing services – create your own reports by pulling the data from APIs
Add extra link data such as the linking page’s topic and estimated traffic from the Alexa.com API
Get clever at spam detection, using 3rd party security APIs such as Google’s Safe Browing API and Web of Trust
Identify link relevance based on the images on the linking page, using Google’s new Vision API

31. Identify PPC Trademark Infringement
Identify people bidding on your brand terms by pulling PPC data from the AuthorityLabs API
Request SERP data for every major city, to find affiliates breaking your terms by bidding in certain cities/states
Can also identify holes in a competitor’s PPC strategy, where they may not be bidding at certain times or in some locations

32. rob@ayima.com Twitter: @ayima
Thank you!