How to use Serpstat for aggregator website?
Ekaterina Hordiienko
Customer Support & Education Specialist at Serpstat
In continuation of the section on use cases, we will consider another way to use Serpstat for business. How many tools does an SEO agency use? They often number in the dozens. But are all of them used to their maximum? Probably not. And this is a missed opportunity to increase the efficiency of work and ... of course spent money., our users test the platform's reports for various tasks and come up with creative non-standard methods of data usage. Take a closer look at another application of Serpstat, in the creation and development of various aggregators.
An aggregator website is a resource that collects and aggregates data on a specific topic. The main task of such a site is to provide maximum information at the request of the user. Sites affiliated with the following resources include shopping aggregators, comparison sites, service aggregators, social network and review providers, marketplaces, news, and video aggregators, and finally various catalogs.
Aggregators receive more traffic from organic search, which creates intense competition for medium-sized businesses, but they also help small businesses grow. This use case discusses how such websites can be promoted and what opportunities Serpstat offers them.
An aggregator website is a resource that collects and aggregates data on a specific topic. The main task of such a site is to provide maximum information at the request of the user. Sites affiliated with the following resources include shopping aggregators, comparison sites, service aggregators, social network and review providers, marketplaces, news, and video aggregators, and finally various catalogs.
Aggregators receive more traffic from organic search, which creates intense competition for medium-sized businesses, but they also help small businesses grow. This use case discusses how such websites can be promoted and what opportunities Serpstat offers them.
Contents
Types and features of aggregator sites
What are the ways in which aggregators interact with businesses and search engines?
What are the steps in the formation of an e-commerce aggregator?
What are the ways in which aggregators interact with businesses and search engines?
What are the steps in the formation of an e-commerce aggregator?
- What is the best way to fill an aggregator using Serpstat?
- How to use SERP crawling service?
- Additional features and possibilities
Types and features of aggregator sites
Depending on the topic, there are dozens of different types of aggregators. It is possible to identify individual categories of these sites and analyze their characteristics.
News aggregators, such as Feedly, display data about events related to a particular topic, depending on the user's interests. Websites like these gather information from social media, news feeds, or specialized services, and are usually monetized by advertising traffic.
Marketplaces, working on E-commerce, display data on a wide range of goods, and sometimes - specialize in certain niches. Such websites allow the visitor to select several products on one site without comparing the offers of different online stores, and provide fast delivery and payment solutions. Advertisements and sales from internal online stores are the sources of income for such sites.
Additionally, there is a difference between the marketplace model and the standard aggregator model. In the first case, each vendor sells products under their own brand name (like on Amazon). Under the typical aggregator model, all services are provided by partners and providers under one common brand name (Uber).
News aggregators, such as Feedly, display data about events related to a particular topic, depending on the user's interests. Websites like these gather information from social media, news feeds, or specialized services, and are usually monetized by advertising traffic.
Marketplaces, working on E-commerce, display data on a wide range of goods, and sometimes - specialize in certain niches. Such websites allow the visitor to select several products on one site without comparing the offers of different online stores, and provide fast delivery and payment solutions. Advertisements and sales from internal online stores are the sources of income for such sites.
Additionally, there is a difference between the marketplace model and the standard aggregator model. In the first case, each vendor sells products under their own brand name (like on Amazon). Under the typical aggregator model, all services are provided by partners and providers under one common brand name (Uber).
Owners of companies that provide specific services can receive a significant share of traffic from specialized aggregators that distribute discount coupons. Businesses can use such sites for effective advertising. Partnerships like these are beneficial even with promotional prices.
In addition to providing a convenient sales channel, partner aggregators act as a guarantee for both parties. By housing in Kiwi, the airline company can sell more tickets and minimize cancellations and returns. To protect themselves from significant losses, hotel owners work with Booking and small hostels with Airbnb.
The site-aggregators, consisting of C2C content, like review providers or social network platforms, usually use UGC (user-generated content). Since this is the bulk of the semantics of such aggregators, parsing and processing posts from there should take extra care.
The same UGC content in the form of reviews helps to grow and develop certain types of aggregators — sites that specialize in reviews, such as Trustpilot or Tripadvisor.
It is also relevant to mention aggregator sites for private services, such as car sales, real estate, freelance, and tutoring (Preply).
Aggregators cover a wide range of topics. New ideas and trends contribute to the growth of the field in proportion to how well they solve problems and meet the needs of users.
In addition to providing a convenient sales channel, partner aggregators act as a guarantee for both parties. By housing in Kiwi, the airline company can sell more tickets and minimize cancellations and returns. To protect themselves from significant losses, hotel owners work with Booking and small hostels with Airbnb.
The site-aggregators, consisting of C2C content, like review providers or social network platforms, usually use UGC (user-generated content). Since this is the bulk of the semantics of such aggregators, parsing and processing posts from there should take extra care.
The same UGC content in the form of reviews helps to grow and develop certain types of aggregators — sites that specialize in reviews, such as Trustpilot or Tripadvisor.
It is also relevant to mention aggregator sites for private services, such as car sales, real estate, freelance, and tutoring (Preply).
Aggregators cover a wide range of topics. New ideas and trends contribute to the growth of the field in proportion to how well they solve problems and meet the needs of users.
What are the ways in which aggregators interact with businesses and search engines?
The secret to the successful promotion of aggregators lies in presenting a wide range of semantics by topics and providing a comprehensive website structure. Generally speaking, aggregators are large and, as a result, it is quite likely that a page can be optimized for any query, even a low-volume one. An aggregator's position becomes better if the user finds the necessary information. The search content and product offered on the site coincide in this way, and the number of queries on which the site is ranked increases as a result.
An additional advantage in the ranking of such sites is the time spent on the aggragators' pages. The search engine presumes that the aggregator solves the user's problem and helps them spend their time in the most beneficial way. Due to a large amount of useful content (quality product description, reviews, additional materials), the visitor can find everything they need to make a final decision.
However, such success is heavily dependent on technical indicators and on-page SEO. Technical requirements for aggregators:
An additional advantage in the ranking of such sites is the time spent on the aggragators' pages. The search engine presumes that the aggregator solves the user's problem and helps them spend their time in the most beneficial way. Due to a large amount of useful content (quality product description, reviews, additional materials), the visitor can find everything they need to make a final decision.
However, such success is heavily dependent on technical indicators and on-page SEO. Technical requirements for aggregators:
- suitable navigation;
- fast loading;
- completeness of data;
- obvious structure;
- multilingual content;
- markup and microdata;
- mobile version;
- absence of broken links.
What are the steps in the formation of an e-commerce aggregator?
Products and their characteristics are often uploaded in the form of XML file that contains basic data and is updated as your site changes according to a specified schedule. With this method, you can change prices or inform the aggregator of the actual availability of goods. Information on the aggregators is also updated thanks to RSS, a family of XML formats used to transmit data about changes to the site.
Aggregators parse XML documents containing price lists of e-commerce sites periodically. There are some resources that only support CSV or XLS (spreadsheet) formats, so you need to manually upload the price list to the site and update the data each time.
The interaction of online stores with Google Merchant Center is a separate methodology. Although this is not a trading platform, it displays data on goods on the Google result page. Google shopping is configured through Adwords campaigns. Payment is based on clicks.
Aggregators parse XML documents containing price lists of e-commerce sites periodically. There are some resources that only support CSV or XLS (spreadsheet) formats, so you need to manually upload the price list to the site and update the data each time.
The interaction of online stores with Google Merchant Center is a separate methodology. Although this is not a trading platform, it displays data on goods on the Google result page. Google shopping is configured through Adwords campaigns. Payment is based on clicks.
What is the best way to fill an aggregator using Serpstat?
In case you choose a niche and plan to build a product aggregator, Serpstat will assist you in keyword research and clustering. In addition to the standard options (off-page SEO metrics for link building, search queries to collect semantics, etc), Serpstat allows you to choose which stores to display on aggregator pages, followed by SERP crawling to obtain the necessary XML files soon.
SERP crawling service will be able to perform this task quickly and efficiently.
SERP crawling service will be able to perform this task quickly and efficiently.
How to use SERP crawling service
With this feature, you can parse the SERPs in a particular city, take into account the local pack and get the most up-to-date data at the right time. Parsing results can be processed in JSON and HTML formats, saved in BigQuery or SQL, and integrated for analytics in any BI system.
Usage areas:
Usage areas:
1
Local pack parsing will help the aggregator to find partners, products, services, reviews or other content in the desired region to place on the pages.
2
By parsing the SERPs, you will be able to identify the queries on which you should focus resources.
3
This feature allows us to predict more accurately the expected traffic in a particular category, as well as see which products are listed on our site or on a competing aggregator.
4
The parsing of such data will help us identify niches in which regional competitors are ahead. We can then optimize particular pages to achieve such results.
SERP crawling works with POST requests, through endpoint https://serpstat.com/rt/api/v2, and as an additional parameter after the symbol "?", you need to specify your token.
Set the task for parsing and the parameters from the request as the first step. You can find the region's and its task ID in the document.
Set the task for parsing and the parameters from the request as the first step. You can find the region's and its task ID in the document.
1
Specify all necessary parameters.
2
Send a request to receive the result.
3
Copy the task number to the SERP parsing from the result by the method.
In the second stage — get the result on request, find the appropriate objects — a complete list of Google SERP features.
1
Copy the sample request for the result by method from the API documentation:
POST: api.serpstat.com/v2?token=<your token>
{
"id": "some_id" ,
"method": "tasks.getTaskResult",
"params": {
"taskId": <task id from the previous step>
}
}
2
Request for the result and find the required blocks from "TopShopBlock", "Local pack" or "Feature content block", depending on the task.
The result can be used in various ways:
1
Review platforms and e-commerce aggregators — to list goods and offers from stores with a price range, and allow users to leave reviews. In advance, coordinate with stores on possible collaborations.
2
A service-focused aggregator would collect data about companies in the niche, get a Local pack, form partnerships with companies, post links, inform visitors about promotions, and offer promo codes.
3
Analyze the SERP, monitor your competitors, and note SERP features you can display your website on.
4
Check the availability of the product in the Google Merchant Store, adjust advertising, or select keywords, which will not be visible or effective enough.
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Additional features and possibilities
In the Website Rank report, you can see that aggregators often outperform other sites in the organic distribution in the region. You can use it to find competing aggregators.
Whether you're running an aggregator that doesn't yet need to collect a lot of information or if you're just interested in evaluating niche-specific data, you can collect basic information in Search Analytics. These steps will also help you choose your SERP crawling requests more carefully as well.
Keyword research:
Keyword research:
1
First, enter a query in the search bar, select the search engine database and go to the Keyword selection report.
2
Choose filtering by the required SERP feature.
3
With this feature, you get a list of queries for which you can see the desired objects in the search results. Now you can run crawling by selected keywords and use the results according to our tasks.
4
Another example is for keywords in PPC and the "Right shopping block" element.
Domain analysis:
1
Choose a competitor domain in the niche using any suitable Serpstat report.
2
Enter the domain in the search bar, select the database and proceed to the analysis.
2
Set filtering for SERP feature, for example — "Top shopping block".
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Using Google Alerts, you can curate important insights on a specific topic based on the principles of news aggregators. Using Serpstat, it is possible to track Keyword trends in real-time.
Use-case:
Analyze trends by region, for example, for the United Kingdom.
Choose an interesting query that you can use for detailed analysis.
Check the query in Keyword research reports, and pay attention to the search volume, KD, and related keywords in organic search.
Check the SERP, find a lot of fresh news on the topic, and prepare content using the keywords selected in the Search analytics module.
In general, aggregators consist of thousands of pages. With such a large volume, it is quite easy to get out of control technical errors that can negatively affect ranking. In the appropriate Serpstat module, you can do an in-depth audit of the resource and analyze its optimization. Auditing your site at least twice a month will allow you to fix the errors generated by your CMS. When adding new pages, you can start Page audit.
To begin a Website audit, you need:
To begin a Website audit, you need:
1
Specify a domain, and activate a checkbox with subdomains if you plan to cover them as part of the audit.
2
By selecting crawl volume settings, you set the site scan type for the whole site, and the rest of the settings can be edited or left as they are.
3
If you need to check a specific category, specify a sitemap in the scan type.
4
The next step is to enter the path to this category. These settings will cause the crawler to scan all the pages in a certain category on your aggregator.
5
Set up an audit schedule or use the API to automate the process.
There are many more possibilities for aggregator sites than we've covered in this article. If you come up with new ideas after reading this article, please share them in the comments. Together, we can improve businesses and introduce new features.
Related use cases
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