About Maklai

Maklai is an IT company founded and headquartered in Kyiv, Ukraine. The company has well over 15 years of experience under the belt, developing several successful products, mainly in the e-commerce and travel industries, including Booked.net, 1Map, and Tophotels.

Objectives

➤ Develop a custom SEO analytics solution for large-scale search performance tracking.
➤ Have a reliable and flexible source of SERP data at a reasonable price.
➤ Find opportunities for optimization and grow organic traffic to the company’s websites.

Featured Products

SERP API: your one-stop data source of structured SERP data

➤ All major search engines, all possible locations
➤ Advanced SERP features
➤ Real-time results
➤ Flexible pricing

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

Roman Kernytskyi, Product Owner at Maklai, attributes the company’s success to the professionalism of its team:

“Our team is the biggest advantage – it’s the people who aren’t afraid of challenging tasks. The pipeline from the inception of the idea to development and testing can be as short as just a couple of days. The speed and agility of development are the areas where we stand out among other companies.“

Roman goes on to reaffirm Maklai’s commitment to valuing its team members and fostering their talents:

“We value the personality of each team member, their worldview, and aspirations for something new. The strive to challenge the status quo and break through the existing barriers – that’s what ultimately made us into the close-knit team we are today.”

Like DataForSEO, Maklai is a Ukrainian company. The full-scale Russian invasion understandably affected its operations. Despite all the difficulties, the company remained resilient and kept developing new products.

“When the invasion started, we felt it’d be very difficult to keep up with the level of progress we developed before,” says Roman. “In the first few months, the company shifted the priority from developing projects to supporting the war effort and helping each other to adapt to the new reality. However, by the end of 2022, we had completely regained the pace and had sustained the progress to this day.”

The similarities between DataForSEO and Maklai don’t end there. The Ukrainian IT industry jumped into the war effort in 2022 and supports our Armed Forces by any means necessary. You can learn more about DataForSEO’s contribution here. As for Maklai, Roman also proudly shares:

“The dynamics of our volunteering projects keep growing. Since February 24th, 2022, our company has donated over 4 million dollars to the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Part of our team, beyond their work on product development, takes part in transporting the essential items. All that paints a perfect picture of our people: no one is indifferent, everyone does their part. We all bleed together.”

Business Challenge

Success often comes with its own challenges. For Maklai, one of the challenges is measuring the performance of SEO campaigns and monitoring SERPs on a gigantic scale.

Maklai’s travel and booking products include thousands of hotel listings worldwide, so tracking search rankings and determining points of optimization is crucial. What’s more, R&D and testing new projects can also require certain – and usually quite big – volumes of search engine insights.

In cases like this, companies can decide between two options. Search for a suitable, ready-made solution for SEO analytics and put up with trade-offs — or go full-in on developing a custom solution that satisfies every requirement. Both options have their pros and cons, but it looks like Maklai made the right choice:

“We are using commercially available platforms for SEO analytics, but their capabilities can’t meet our scale; they are insufficient for our goals.” confirms Roman, “This is the reason why we’ve been developing our own solutions for years now — they are much more agile and wired to meet our needs.”

Developing custom SEO software doesn’t come without hardships. The main problem, albeit unsurprisingly, is parsing search engine results, processing, aggregating, and structuring data — as well as the limitations that come with it.

Now, Maklai is a well-established software company with many competent developers. However, they had to start looking for specialized data providers at some point.

“We were collecting data on our own, but as we were scaling up, more and more limitations started to appear,” Roman claims, “So we started to look for platforms that specialize in SERP data.”

That’s when Roman found DataForSEO, and the compatriotship factor played its part:

“I simply found the solution on Google. When looking up various providers, I noticed that DataForSEO is from Ukraine. We decided to try it out and could test it for free, which was very useful. Overall, the most important criterion for us is the reliability and accuracy of data. Needless to say, we were very much satisfied with the results we got.”

Solution

Among DataForSEO’s wide range of data solutions, SERP API is probably the most popular. That’s the solution Maklai was looking for and ultimately leveraged to build up its SEO analytics capabilities.

“The main use case for DataForSEO is monitoring the performance of our projects and competitors in Google’s search results,” concludes Roman.

Roman kindly shared a screenshot of the interface to give you a glimpse of the solution Maklai’s team has built with DataForSEO SERP API.

Here, we see a rank-tracking dashboard that allows for precise measurement of website search performance over time. What’s particularly interesting is the filtering modules that can be used to adjust the results by keyword search volume, position, and other parameters.

As for the benefits that this custom platform provides to Maklai, we don’t have exact figures – but Roman has a very strong argument on why such solutions are extremely effective:

“Search performance is the main metric that we improved thanks to DataForSEO. We are looking to scale up even more. In fact, since we started our cooperation, our scope has increased three times. The data is high-quality and accurate and we are looking forward to obtaining more of it.”

“Thanks to the DataForSEO API, we no longer have to worry about collecting SERP data on our own. DataForSEO greatly expanded the scale of our capabilities, so we can finally develop ambitious projects that were put off due to previous constraints.”

In our humble opinion, such a solution is a must-have for every large software company. We also asked Roman if he would recommend us to professionals facing the same challenges as him, and his response is absolutely positive:

“Definitely! Reliability, accuracy and speed of data delivery, as well as a very high level of service and a customer-first mindset. I’m proud of the Ukrainian people!”

“It’s a pleasure doing business with your company,” concludes Roman. “All the issues and requests we had were resolved very quickly. Kudos to Kate Shevchenko, DataForSEO’s COO, whom I could contact directly and who showed me what a real customer-oriented approach should look like. We are also grateful for Ukrainian solidarity.”

Maklai’s story shows that reliable data solutions can be truly impactful in helping companies scale their SEO projects. For Maklai, combining high-quality SERP data and a passionate team of professionals is the key driver of the company’s progress.