Development a custom SEO tool for Panaworld

Back then there were only a few SEO tools and they weren't very cheap. Google did not give insights about SEO besides Google Analytics. I built a spider to check the rankings for each of our popular targeted keywords. The spider saved data insights in a Database for further analysis. I also built a MVP and a bit ugly, control panel just to see the historical position for each keyword. Finally, I made an automated emailing reporting system which sent us some relevant and critical info about our SEO status.

The Spider

Because I knew PHP very well, I decided to use PHP in order to build a Spider. Using regular expresions and tricking Google a little bit with userAgent and by not flooding it was enough to not be flagged as a robot. The code had to sends requests too Google carefully, parse the html and save the data to a Database.

Control Panel and Statistics

I made a simple but effective intranet just to make queries to the database with all the keyword positions. Some HTML, jQuery, Ajax, a small library for drawing the charts and a small PHP script was enough. It was ugly but boss didn't asked for more.

Email Reporting

I just wrote an Email template reporting weekly which keywords went up, which one went down being careful with the highest traffic ones and the ones close to the top 5 SERP position. This was very helpful and it gave us some surprises (they always went up).

The code for this project don't exist anymore. After a couple years, more and more SEO tools appeared in the market and Google himself delivered a lot of SERP keyword Insights and tracking within Google Webmasters tools, so I the project was pruned.