With Google constantly changing SERPs, it’s a good idea to keep a historical record of those changes. One way that we do that as SEOs is by using rank tracking tools like GetStat, Ahrefs, or SERPapi. All of these tools give use a snapshot of the data within SERPs, but none of them show a visual representation of SERPs that you can store for long periods of time. GetStat is close, but they only save a visual respresentation of SERPs for 2 weeks.
So to solve this problem, I built a tool which captures an image of SERPs I want to keep an eye on. I used Puppeteer, which is a headless browser, to do this for me. I’m also using TrustedProxies as my proxy tool to make sure I don’t get blocked by Google.
You can checkout the script I built on Github here: https://github.com/baresluca/google-image-scraper-puppeteer/blob/master/image-scraper.js
Desktop View
Mobile View
I try to use timely examples wherever possible, and in this case the types of SERP features present are pretty interesting. If we tracked this SERP over time for the next 3 months we’d see some very interesting changes. But we don’t need to keep track of just one SERP we could use this to keep track of as many SERPs as we want.
The main benefit is being able to see changes over time, but this is also a great tool when explaining SERP changes to stakeholders. It’s not always easy to understand what SEO’s mean when they talk about specific changes in SERP features, but having a visual example instantly makes the conversation much clearer. And using this tool makes it possible to always have past examples of SERPs in the bank.
Anyways, this has just been sitting on my Github for a few months gathering virtual dust, while I’ve been running a similar version on my desktop. I’m hoping others will find this tool useful and can get some good mileage out of it.
Puppeteer is a fantastic tool for understanding SEO better. This is just one small project that anyone can try with Puppeteer, but the sky is the limit for how much you can learn about SEO using Puppeteer.