“We found DataForSEO in the early days of the development of our platform. We needed a solid partner in terms of data acquisition, and we started contacting and testing the best players on the market. It turned out that DFS was the best data vendor we could work with, as the data provided was way much more stable and accurate than that of any other company. Over time, we have formed a broad technology partnership with DFS, which is now a very important part of our company.”

Matteo Barletta, the founder of GMB Crush

About GMB Crush

GMB Crush is a local SEO tool launched in the middle of 2022. The tool allows users to compare their Google My Business listings with those of the top 3 competitors for target keywords, locations, and device types. It provides actionable strategies they can implement to optimize their listings more effectively and thus increase their chances of appearing in local 3-pack search results.

GMB Crush aims at individuals and businesses operating in the local SEO industry. Its primary customers are freelance SEOs, SEO agencies, and other companies that manage several GMB listings across multiple locations.

The GMB Crush tool is provided on a monthly subscription basis. Depending on the amount of data a user needs to work with, they can opt for one of the three available plans, with the price ranging from $34.99 to $119.99 per month.

Objectives

• Turn a Chrome extension into a full-fledged tool
• Build an audit function for analyzing Google My Business listings and websites connected to them
• Track all the crucial behavioral signals and provide a breakdown of custom data
• Develop a pitch deck generator that would allow SEOs to leverage the audit data and close more sales
• Find a reliable data vendor to power planned features

Featured Products

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• Detailed information on each local establishment
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Google SERP API: accurate and comprehensive data from Google SERPs

• All extra SERP features supported
• All locations and languages

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• More than 3 trillion backlinks in the index
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About DataForSEO

DataForSEO is the leading provider of SEO data for the marketing technology industry. With an API-led approach to data delivery, DataForSEO is enabling hundreds of software businesses to enhance their products with reliable, accurate, and fresh data.

Background

The idea to develop an instrument for local SEO didn’t come to the GMB Crush CEO, Matteo Barletta, out of the blue. Having a huge interest in search engine optimization, Matteo has come a long way from being an SEO freelancer to launching his own agency, SEO Heroes. At some point, he and his team noticed that it was quite challenging to work with local SEO projects, especially those related to Google My Business listings. There were simply no tools that could streamline their work and provide the functionality the agency needed.

“We started to develop the idea of ​​our tool capable of doing Google Business SEO audits, tracking stats, and generating business proposals at the same time, because there was no such thing on the market,” says Matteo.

And so started the journey of GMB Crush.

Together with his partner, Mickey Diorio, Matteo launched the GMB Crush Google Chrome extension. The extension allowed finding and analyzing Google My Business listings ranking for a specific keyword and location. As he put it, it offered a snapshot of the categories used by a business, revealed place topics, and displayed the publication frequency of the business posts.

However, a Chrome extension lacked functionality and stability and was far from the advanced local SEO instrument the team wanted it to be. Besides, the local SEO tool industry was growing rapidly, and to keep up with it, a more complete solution was needed. That’s why Matteo and Mickey eventually decided to turn their Chrome extension into a full-fledged tool.

Business Challenge

The first thing you should consider when entering a competitive market is how to make your offering stand out from the competition. Developing a generic tool wasn’t an option for the entrepreneur duo, as such a tool would most certainly get lost among similar solutions. They had to introduce something new, something that would give them a competitive edge.

With this in mind, Matteo and Mickey thoroughly analyzed competitors, trying to find functionality gaps they could later capitalize on.

Here’s what Matteo has to say about it:

“The tools present on the market compete on the same primary features, namely geo-grid, tracking of citations, and automation of GMB posts. We think there is much more to say. This is the reason why we focused on creating something new, which solves even more practical problems of business performance tracking, lead generation, and technical analysis of GMB / GBP profiles along with the sites connected to them.”

So their goal at this point was to create a tool with expanded functionality, improving the existing features and developing new ones that weren’t present in the Chrome extension.

Matteo and Mickey are convinced that Google considers plenty of factors when ranking GMB listings. Besides the listing itself, the search engine takes into account the website connected to it. Thus, they needed the tool to audit not only GMB listings but also websites linked to them.

They also wanted to track all the crucial behavioral signals in a meticulous way with a breakdown of custom data. And lastly, they needed the tool to generate persuasive pitch decks that SEOs could contact their prospects with to propose their services.

To power all of these advanced features, Matteo and Mickey had to find a reliable data vendor that could provide accurate location-specific data regularly and without fail.

Solution

The GMB Crush tool has been relying on DataForSEO APIs from the very beginning. Instead of investing in developing an in-house data scraping system, the company decided to outsource all the complexities of data collection and system support to third-party vendors.

That’s when our APIs came in handy.

“We found DataForSEO in the early days of the development of our platform. We needed a solid partner in terms of data acquisition, and we started contacting and testing the best players on the market. It turned out that DFS was the best data vendor we could work with, as the data provided was way much more stable and accurate than that of any other company. Over time, we have formed a broad technology partnership with DFS, which is now a very important part of our company,” says Matteo.

When asked what business tasks DataForSEO APIs helped solve, Matteo replied:

“Scalability. The way DFS structures its products fits our business needs perfectly. Other companies with a similar proposal haven’t been able
to satisfy us.”

We are happy to know that GMB Crush has found DataForSEO APIs useful and now integrates them into many sections of the tool. The GMB Miner section is powered by DataForSEO Google Maps API. It helps the tool to find the top 100 businesses ranking for a specific keyword and location. Users can then select their Google My Business listing from the list and add up to 3 competitors of their choice.

The same API is used in the GMB Wizard section, providing the top 10 competitors’ zip codes for comparison.

The My Business Info endpoint of DataForSEO Business Data API is used to receive various GMB insights that are then delivered to Wizard reports:

• Whether a particular listing is verified;
• Primary and additional categories of the listing;
• Its business attributes and place topics;
• The business’ description, and so on.

Speaking of the GMB Wizard, most of its features are built on DataForSEO solutions.

The Google Reviews endpoint helps the tool provide review data for analyzed GMB listings. The section displays each listing’s rating and the current number of reviews, giving users an idea of how many reviews and rating stars they need to keep up with the competition.

Using the endpoint, Matteo also developed his own Review Velocity metric that shows the number of days it takes a GMB listing to accumulate 20 reviews.

The My Business Updates endpoint helps in collecting Google My Business post information. The tool shows the post frequency rates and displays the exact dates when businesses post any updates.

Finally, the company uses as many as three DataForSEO APIs to analyze websites connected to Google My Business listings.

DataForSEO SERP API (Google Organic Regular endpoint) helps the tool show the number of indexed pages of any site.

The Instant Pages endpoint of DataForSEO OnPage API provides page loading speed and OnPage score of analyzed domains (this data is then used in calculating the company’s proprietary metric, Brand Rating).

Also, the data from the Summary endpoint of Backlinks API (the number of referring domains and backlinks as well as domain rank) helps in calculating the Domain Authority of linked websites.

As you can see, GMB Crush has lots of handy features that require different sources of data. The company currently uses five DataForSEO APIs to keep its tool functioning. Considering this, we couldn’t help but inquire whether the API integration process went well for them.

Luckily. It did.

“Compared to other services the integration was quite easy and flawless. It didn’t require a lot of time and effort to integrate endpoints into our own ideas. Another good point is that the service from DFS is constantly improving so that gives us a huge advantage,” says Matteo.

We also asked about the company’s goals for the future.

“We have a well defined and structured roadmap. Our goals for the future are to solidify the current features and expand the tool with many
other features, always with the aim of solving problems and adding value to the provided data.”

We wish the GMB Crush team all the best in achieving their goals. For our part, we promise to continue delivering the data needed for the tool to function without delay. We are grateful to GMB Crush for choosing DataForSEO, and hope sincerely to continue beneficial collaboration for each side!