R for SEO

Using R, RStudio and APIs to Automate SEO Workflows

Coding and automation for SEO has seen an incredible surge in interest lately. It’s understandable: for the right problems, R for SEO can offer incredible time savings.

While I do have some limited resources on Python for SEO, I’ve concentrated on R to-date because of its approachable nature, specific packages, and ease of getting started immediately. Here I share some automations using R for SEO that have worked really well for me.

I’m not an expert coder or programmer by any means, so these workflows are mechanical – not-complete handsfree. I hope to share updates on those soon.

Bulk submit sitemap URLs to Google Search Console

I started with one of the simplest, but oddly time-consuming tasks at scale: submitting and re-submitting sitemaps in Google Search Console. Start now.

Export & download all your Google Search Console performance data

It’s surprising how many people only ever take the first 1,000 rows of data from the GSC interface, especially in enterprise settings. GSC is a veritable goldmine of customer data. Here you can get TONs of organic search query data you’ve been missing. Bulk export all your GSC search analytics data now.

UPDATE – I’ve tested this head-to-head with some out-of-the-box solutions and found some interesting results. Say with a Data Refinery-type product, once you add dimensions (such as URL) the completeness of the data will decrease, due to data loss GSC developer documentation notes as unavoidable. However, out-of-the-box API connector products may see 30% or more of data loss, where this script may only experience 15-20%. Note this is a limited sample and shouldn’t be considered an authoritative view. (Data loss is determined when summed or pivoted KPIs such as clicks don’t match from the export vs. the summary scorecard figures in the UI.)

Voice Search Strategy & Optimization for SEO

The Google Search Console experience has always been…throttled, as we don’t pay for the data. Even though the introduction of regex filters has been a recent helpful addition for complex and custom filtering, the SearchConsoleR package can help filter for various keywords in bulk for enterprise settings. Read about it applied to voice search strategy & optimization for SEO.