Data is everywhere, and companies are virtually climbing over each other to give it away. If you’re a data-driven content marketer, data is opportunity, but accessing that data can take some technical know-how. This is a guide to APIs, one of the key methods for accessing 3rd-party data, and also a mini-directory of some of the most useful APIs currently available to marketers.
What Is an API?
Let’s start with the official definition – API stands for “Application Programming Interface”. Sorry, I’m not the one who lets engineers name things. Put simply, an API is a way to let you talk to a 3rd-party application, usually either to retrieve data or update that application. We’re going to focus primarily on the first use (retrieving data), and it looks something like this:
The API itself isn’t really a box floating in space, so much as a chunk of code that acts as a gatekeeper. That code helps translate the third party’s data into something you can read, and it makes sure that only authorized users can access the data (a process called “authentication”).
Why Should I Care?
There are hundreds of applications on the market that collect useful data, and many of them are making that data available for free or very cheaply. You can use that data to do original research, create unique content or even build your own applications. If you’d rather stick to beet farming, well then that’s cool, too.
Where Do I Start?
Here’s the bad news – APIs are far from standardized, and you’re going to have to understand data structures and write some code. This is not a how-to manual so much as an overview of what’s out there that can help you decide if the world of APIs is right for you. There are some bright spots on the horizon – tools and sites that make programming APIs easier – and I’ll cover some of those at the end.
Following is a list of hand-selected APIs (I’ll do my best not to play favorites, and our competitors are on the list), broken down into a few industry categories, and alphabetical within each category. For each API, I’ll provide a main link, a documentation link (documentation can be way too hard to find), a brief description of what’s available in that API, and whether or not there’s a free version. APIs are split into five sections:
The last section covers sites and tools that can help you if you're new to APIs, new to programming, or just are hunting for something that's not on this list.
(1) APIs for SEO
This section contains APIs for organic SEO data, including keyword research and link profiling.
Bing Search (Docs)
The Bing search API allows you to integrate Bing search results and search data directly into your applications, including web search, images, news, videos, related search, and spelling suggestions.
Free Version? YES, but rate-limited.
Majestic SEO (Docs)
The Majestic API includes a wide range of link metrics, including full back-link lists, discovery dates for links, anchor text, redirection information, and ACRank. Some features are limited to the paid version.
Free Version? YES, but limited functionality.
Raven Tools (Docs)
The Raven Tools API lets customers access and update account and campaign information. It can also be used to access link data from your Raven campaigns.
Free Version? NO, paid accounts only.
SEOmoz Mozscape (Docs)
SEOmoz's API has access to proprietary metrics, including MozRank, Domain Authority, and Page Authority, as well as link metrics such as linking root domains and anchor text data.
Free Version? YES, but rate-limited.
WordStream Keyword Tool (Docs)
WordStream's Keyword Tool API lets you access WordStream's keyword volume metrics, along with related keywords and structured keyword suggestions.
Free Version? YES, but rate-limited.
(2) APIs for PPC
The following APIs provide access to major ad platforms, including Google, Bing, and Facebook.
Bing Ads API (Docs)
While primarily a campaign management platform, the Bing Ads API does have access to useful data, including keword volume and keyword suggestions/opportunities.
Free Version? YES, but authorization required.
Facebook Ads API (Docs)
The Facebook Ads API provides access to managing Facebook campaigns, as well as statistics about Facebook keyword searches and audience segments.
Free Version? YES, but authorization required.
Google AdWords API (Docs)
Like Bing, the Google AdWords API is mainly for campaign management and building AdWords apps, but it also the only portal to Google keyword volume data. Getting authorized can be a long process.
Free Version? YES, but authorization required.
SEMRush API (Docs)
The SEMRush API has a number of tools for both organic and paid search campaigns, but where it really shines is in competitive analysis, especially for paid search.
Free Version? NO, starts at $15/month.
(3) APIs for Social
These APIs can access a wealth of information from major social networks and social aggregators.
Facebook Graph (Docs)
Facebook's "Graph" API is the primariy interface to building Facebook-based apps, updating Facebook accounts, and accessing Facebook social graph data. There are other, secondary Facebook APIs.
Free Version? YES, but rate-limited.
FollowerWonk (Docs)
FollowerWonk's Social Authority API scores Twitter users on a 1-100 scale, for simple influence scoring and comparisons (Note: FollowerWonk is a part of SEOmoz).
Free Version? YES, but rate-limited.
Gnip (Docs)
Gnip provides an enterprise-level API with "firehose" and filtered streams for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, and more. Pricing is custom and is aimed at large-scale applications.
Free Version? YES, but trial only.
Google+ (Docs)
The official Google+ API allows you to manage accounts, build apps, and access to data from user profiles, posts, and comments. It includes some limited search capability.
Free Version? YES, but rate-limited.
Klout (Docs)
The Klout API provides access to Klout's aggregate social metrics, including Klout score, influencers, influence graphs, and topics of influence.
Free Version? YES, but rate-limited.
PeerIndex (Docs)
PeerIndex is another social aggregator, and their API provides data on multiple influence metrics, including activity, authority, and audience scores.
Free Version? YES, but rate-limited.
SharedCount (Docs)
The SharedCount API lets you access sharing stats on a number of platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Reddit, LinkedIn, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Pinterest.
Free Version? YES, but rate-limited.
Topsy (Docs)
The Topsy Otter API is an alternative source for Twitter data, including a number of useful search functions - search by keyword, by links mentioned, by popluar stories on a domain, etc.
Free Version? YES, but rate-limited.
Twitter (Docs)
The official Twitter RESTful API includes many tools for account management and data gathering, including individual tweet and user data, follower stats, and a variety of search options.
Free Version? YES, but rate-limited.
(4) Miscellaneous APIs
Here are some other useful APIs, including Google products, analytics, and text processing.
AlchemyAPI (Docs)
AlchemyAPI provides a Natural Language Processing engine to perform tasks such as sentiment analysis, named entity extraction, author extraction, and topic categorization.
Free Version? YES, but rate-limited.
Google Analytics API (Docs)
The Google Analytics API is a full-featured system to manage GA accounts and profiles, customize tracking codes, and to access and export analytics data.
Free Version? YES, but authorization required.
Google Places API (Docs)
The Google Places API allows you to access the entire family of Google local data, including Google Maps, Google+ Local, and Google Places search.
Free Version? YES, but authorization required.
PageSpeed Insights (Docs)
PageSpeed Insights is a Google Developer tool for website performance analysis. The PageSpeed API allows access to PageSpeed scores and recommendations.
Free Version? YES, but authorization required.
Repustate (Docs)
The Repustate API provides access to a number of advanced algorithms, including sentiment analysis, social media monitioring, and predictive analytics.
Free Version? YES, but rate-limited.
(5) API Support Tools
If you're new to APIs, this section can help get you started or find APIs outside the scope of this post.
CodeAcademy API Track
CodeAcademy is a resource for learning programming concepts and languages. The API track has specific online courses designed to help you learn API coding.
Free Version? YES.
Mashape (Docs)
Mashape is an API marketplace that allows you to access over 2,000 APIs from a single account. Mashape also lets you distribute and monetize your own APIs.
Free Version? YES, depending on the API.
ProgrammableWeb
ProgrammableWeb is a directory of over 9,000 APIs on a wide variety of topics. ProgrammableWeb has its own API, that allows you to access their search database.
Free Version? YES.
SEER Interactive SEO Toolbox (Docs)
SEER's all-in-one interactive toolbox lets you access multple APIs via Excel, including Google Analytics, SEOmoz, Majestic, Raven, Twitter, and Klout.
Free Version? YES, but rate-limited.
SEOGadget Excel API Extensions (Docs)
The SEOGadget API extension for Excel allows you to easily call link data from Excel spreadsheets, including SEOmoz, Majestic, and additional SEOGadget data.
Free Version? YES, but rate-limited.
What Are Your Favorites?
While I don't intend this to be an exhaustive list of APIs, I'll try to keep the post up to date with the most useful APIs for marketers (assuming that people are interested). So, feel free to share your favorite data-collection APIs in the comments.
Thanks Pete :) For SEO, I'd like to add the SEMRush API. The new SearchMetrics API looks really powerful too.
Great List Dr Pete. Those are great suggestions Matt.
Thanks... I ended up putting in SEMRush as "PPC", but they definitely have tools for both worlds. I've been trying to figure out what the SearchMetrics API currently accesses, but I'll try to dig deeper on that one.
Thanks a lot for the list, Pete. Do you know if there are any plans for a GetListed API?
* Another API for the list: Google Webmaster Tools API gives you access to crawl errors, keywords, sitemap edits, etc.
I'll be honest, I had no idea that Google Webmaster Tools had an API. Do you have experience pulling from it? Any luck with it?
Also to Dr. Pete, any thoughts on an "Easy API Usage for Non-Coders" post? While I'm brushing up on my PHP knowledge with Udemy, I'm sure for every PHP knowledgeable SEO there are three that aren't. I believe one of the Critchlow's did a post that was on that vein with using Google Docs to pull API data... I'll update when I find the link.
I do really like that you mentioned the APIs that can be pulled with Excel. One extra thought, SEO for Excel. That one plug-in is astounding for the data it can pull directly into Excel. There are a number of GA for Excel plug-ins out there too. Between the two, a damn good audit can be created... just sayin' :-)
Great list Pete. Will probably be using this at a later date. Definitely bookmarking.
Great List of APIs for Marketers Pete. Some more important APIs for the marketers include Google Webmaster Tools API, Ahrefs API, Mail Chimp API, etc.
Great post - bookmarked ... Personally loving the API for SEOmoz - but needed SEOgadget to get it working!
Haven't used it yet, but I have just discovered that linkdex have an API - if anyone has used it and has an awesome and shareable Excel doc - that would be awesome.
Also - I want to get the API from Googl WMT working, but thats another I am failing with!
Nice post, Dr. Pete. We've got more data than we know what to do with these days, so learning APIs is a great first step toward actionable insight.
For simple Google Docs reporting on traffic and other high-level metrics, Mikael Thuneberg's AutomateAnalytics script is an easy-to-understand Google Analytics API tool. If you can handle basic Excel functions and know Analytics and GDocs, this might be a great place to start. Jamie wrote a great post on how/why to use it here.
Hi Pete!Really interesting post, I'm currently promoting the 3 APIs of T Dispatch and that will be very useful for me. In order to promote the APIs, apart from Programmableweb, do you know any other API directory list?
Thanks!
Every day I learn more of these excellent articles, thank you for sharing relevant information on the subject, excellent article
Great API list for SEO. The SEOmoz Mozscape API SEO tool is definitely the best item on that list. Greetings from Munich (München) Germany,
The SEO München Team
Pete:
Any suggestions for Events information APIs?Thanks.-Sandip
Dr. Pete@
what makes us ahead from others - effective information. And i must say who has information is ahead, i am happy to get the list of some most useful API's for SEO. List is very practical and very very effective. Thank u Doctor.
Great List of APIs for Data-Driven Marketers Pete! Knowledge of APIs is a big 1st walk in the direction of practicable insight. Absolutely bookmarking
I would add https://www.blockspring.com/
I just started using and so far, I've been impressed. There are some really interesting tools for non-sophisticated SEOs to gather HTML and text from pages in buck.
What does Google think about using the API's for data? How do we distinguish between API data and duplicate data? If a company provides data, it is obviously on more than one location (their site being one of them). If I add the same data to one of my pages, doesn't it instantly become duplicate data? Are we sure that Google does not penalize the use of API's?
It really depends. If you just used an API to extract chunks of text and then displayed them on your site, and a bunch of other people did that, too, then yes, it would be duplicate content. In most cases, though, APIs use structured data, so you have to repackage it or make it into something useful. Once you do that, you usually end up with something unique. If the API is basically just a way to syndicate content, though, then you have to take the same precautions you would using any syndicated content that's available on multiple sites.
Thanks for the great list, Pete! Throwing our hat into the ring: MindMeld is a contextual search & content discovery API we just launched: https://developer.expectlabs.com
I'd like to add our collection of APIs which make the SimilarWeb data available as individual APIs. These can be used for SEO, competitive analysis, or market research. Take a look at what we have available at https://developer.similarweb.com.
Before reading this, I didn't have more idea about API. But Thanks to Pete for giving me very informative post. It would be very helpful for everyone.
This will be huge moving into 3rd Q - great stuff Doc.
your pal,
Chenzo
You...you are amazing...Thank you for this list Dr. Pete!A list for you in return, a list of User Agent Strings (when crawling/scraping) and it is also a massive list of crawlers: https://www.useragentstring.com/pages/useragentstring.phpI don't own/profit from that list, just thought it may be useful to those who are into data, which in the SEO world means scraping/crawling.
Copyscape API for checking duplicate content across a UGC website is good, only problem is if you do a large number of calls via this API it will cost you =)
Do you know of a good alternative to Copyscape? I end up using it constantly with my writer team to ensure unique copy. I used to do the poorman's tactic of searching keyword rich sections on Google to see if there is a return, however that only goes so far and is dependent on the odds that one selects the duplicate section.
No API that I know of, but I use https://smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker/ as one tool to check for duplicate content in our UGC submissions. You can paste in text (so the content doesn't need to be already live on the web) and will check the document by breaking it up into several word phrases and running Google queries on those phrases. It checks 50-80% of the text (haven't figured out the exact percentage).
Wow. Thank you so much for the time you have put into this list.
One request. Please keep it updated.
Thanks Dr. Pete for helpful info...It would be amazing if there is more detailed ranking or statistics for these APIs achievements! We use multiple and depend on types and purposes, hope to get better result with better tools..
would be great if there are links on how to use each of them :)
Hi Dr Pete,
Thanks. Hashtag Amazeballs.
Question: If there were 3 or 4 APIs that you couldn't live without -- that would make you cry if they disappeared tomorrow -- what would they be?
Great collection of API's. Now on to trying to figure out my specific need with a particular API, that is the hard part!
Awesome Post Pete!
We are currently developing our own in house tools, using the SEOMoz, Majestic, and Raven API's.
But this has opened my eyes to what else we can do to improve those tools further!
Completely amazing and so informative, my self is completely zero knowledgeable with this API thing. But now I am more curious to dive deep in to and going to attend you featured Codeacademy API for newbies.