Beginners Guide To Google Search API

The google search console is an extremely useful tool that helps website owners, marketers, and other SEO professionals. It is used to monitor the performance of the site, look at the traffic generated, crawl data, get technical updates, and more. Though it is a resourceful tool it has many limitations when it comes to querying the data. One of the ways to overcome these limitations is to use the google console API. Before getting to know how to use this, here are a few things to know about Application Programming Interface, API.

What is API?

Application Programming Interface is a piece of software that allows two or more applications to talk to each other and get information.

A: The application takes the requests and then accesses the relevant information from an intermediary service and returns the results.

P: The programming language used is completely hidden from the user and is internal to the API. It is used to translate the request calls to an understandable format to the intermediary service and returns the response. The bottom line is that irrespective of the programming language used by the client and the server, the API can communicate with them and get the information.

I: The interface is anything that is used to complete the request. If you are using the Google search console’s search bar then it is the interface and the results are also displayed on the same screen. Another example of an interface is the ATM, the screen and the touchpad are the interfaces.

The advantages of using APIs are:

• It allows different applications to connect
• They are universal
• It can help you build other APIs using the same design
• APIs can help pull data from anywhere.

What is Google Search API?

The google search console, GSC can be thought of as a smartphone with default factory settings whereas the GSC API is your smartphone with all the apps and customizations that you want. The API helps in customizing the input and get the desired outputs.

Setting the API

• Access the API using the API explorer and if you already have a GSC account set up login into it.
• Set up the request by providing the start date, end date, and the dimensions like the query, page, device, and country.
• Filters can be added which is an optional one. If you are setting it then it has to have a dimension, operation, and expression.
• Finally, set the row limit. The API can be used to get requests up to 5,000.
• The requests can be set as a filtered one or an unfiltered one.

Run the Request

After making sure that the requests that you have are what you want then it is time to run it. The API console has an ‘Execute’ button, click on that to run the request. If the request is syntactically correct then the API will return the data you asked for. If there is an error then it has to be corrected and rerun.

Convert the Google Search API JSON to CSV

Since the excel is the best tool to work with data, the received output which is a JSON has to be converted to CSV. Use a converter that is available online to export the output as a CSV file.

By adding google search within a website you are not only making it more useful to the user but also getting more data points to work on your marketing strategy.