Page Structure Added to the SERPs API

October 27, 2021

As Google continues to update its algorithm, we work to ensure you have data to keep up with the changes, and so have added a new feature to our SERPs API. If you’re unfamiliar with our SERPs API, you can learn more about the insights it shares here.

To help you make even more informed decisions about your content strategy, our API now can tell you the Page Structure of the top 10 ranking pages on the SERPs.

Getting started

Using the SERPs API you can request Page Structure data for your search queries. To do this you need to add an extra parameter to your request which will give you Page Structure data.

The API will then scrape the top 10 pages on the SERPs and have a look at the content on these pages to work out what kind of page it is. It will take around 10 minutes to get this extra data.

Once the API has finished, our algorithm will determine a page type for each ranking URL and provide a breakdown of the content including:

• Number of words
• Number of images
• Number of paragraphs
• The H1 – 6 titles
• Response codes
• Meta Title
• Comments

The page types are broken down into these 6 categories:

• Articles – a long-form piece of written content that would appear on a blog, newspaper, publisher’s website or similar
• Generic – a web page that does not fit into the other categories, e.g. Home page, contact us page.
• Image – a page where the main content is an image(s).
• Listing – pages listing multiple products or items (e.g. eCommerce PLPs) or articles where the content is broken out into itemised lists
• Product – a typical eCommerce page showing a product to buy
• Video – a page where the main content is a video(s).
• Wiki – such as Wikipedia, an informational wiki or encyclopedia page.

This detail will be available to SERPs API users once we’ve exposed that particular endpoint (this is ‘Work in Progress’). In the meantime, the page types and a summary of the SERPs will then be merged back into the SERPs API response.

What can you do with this data?

Understanding the ranking page types will give you an edge against your competitors, as you can format your content in the predominant ranking type and understand what users are looking for from their search queries. This data will support your content marketing efforts, especially when used alongside User Intent data.

This will also give you an understanding of why your content might not be ranking as well as your competitors. Are the top ranking pages product listings and is yours an article, for example?

Following the ‘Smell of the SERP’ can help you understand if you have the right type of content across your site and explain why certain pages are performing well or badly for important search terms.

Next Steps

We are now working towards building this into a separate API call so that you can access the detailed Page Structure data shown above.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the API and how it can be a part of your SEO strategy, get in touch with our team.