SERPMaster Review

SERPMaster Pricing

One of the cheapest SERP APIs in the market. 

Let’s begin with SERPMaster’s main draw point: price. True to its slogan, this tool really is one of the cheaper SERP APIs on the market – at least for small-time scraping. 

Like any other such API, SERPMaster charges only for successful requests. The plans are all monthly and provide a fixed allowance, with no option to pay as you go. 

The smallest plan, Micro, starts from just $20 per month and gives you 5,000 requests ($4/1,000 results). The price per result is pretty high, but entry plans are never efficient. If you’re willing to shell out $92 per month, the price drops to $2.30 per 1,000 results. Now we’re talking! The biggest plan on display offers 100,000 results for $200 ($2/1,000 results). 

If you only want to try the service out, there’s a free trial that grants 250 results. It offers all the same features, save for JavaScript rendering or customer support. In fact, there’s not much upselling here in general: the only aspect that notably improves is customer service.

SERPMaster’s pricing plans.

If you run out of results, you can top up your plan once by contacting customer support. Not the most convenient solution, but at least it’s there.  

To put things into context, here’s a comparison between SERPMaster and some of its competitors:

As you can see, SERPMaster cleans house at nearly every price level. And while it targets clients with limited needs, there is a mention that you can get a custom quote for more volume. It can potentially reach into millions of requests, depending on your requirements. 

SERPMaster Features

Neat parser, all data types, and many locations to choose from. No .CSV or scheduling capabilities, though. 

Alright, I’ve mentioned that SERPMaster is pretty rich in features. But what are those features, exactly? 

All Data Types

SERPMaster lets you retrieve pretty much any kind of data from Google, both desktop and mobile search results. Its documentation provides a comprehensive list. To save needless work, I’ll simply screenshot it below:

Global Locations

SERPMaster allows targeting any country in the world. You can choose to receive country, state, or city-level results. For hyper-localized queries, you can specify coordinates and radius.   

SERPMaster also allows choosing the result language using a different parameter. So, you can extract search queries from the US but, say, in Spanish. 

Three Integration Methods

You can integrate the tool three ways. 

1. The first one is called Browser, where you send requests by forming long and complex URLs straight in your web browser’s address bar. It seems like it’s aimed at beginner’s or when you don’t really need much data.
2. The second one is called Real-Time. Here, you send POST requests to SERPMaster over an open connection and receive data in… well, real time. 
3. The third method is called Callback. Once again, you send a POST request. But instead of retrieving results immediately, SERPMaster lets you fetch them whenever you wish. Usually, it’s done via webhooks. This method works best when you constantly need large amounts of data. However, you can’t schedule searches, which is something SERPMaster’s competitors offer. 

Pagination

You can select which Search results page to extract and how many entries it should include (up to 100). 

Several Output Formats

SERPMaster returns data either in raw .HTML or parsed .JSON. You can choose the format. Exporting to .CSV isn’t available, which might be a roadblock for some. 

Competent Parser

The .JSON parser can handle most data types. Its output is neat and well structured, so you likely won’t need to clean up the data much. Here’s an example from SERPMaster’s documentation:

An example of a parsed organic search result.

User Experience

Detailed documentation, no dashboard or API playground. 

Let’s go through what it’s like to use SERPMaster.

Registration

You can buy a plan straight from SERPMaster’s website. You’ll be asked to enter your email, location and postal address (for compliance purposes), and then to pay. Once you do, SERPMaster’s customer support will send you credentials for using the API. 

To get the free plan, you’ll have to fill in the form and talk with customer support. The process is very similar, except there’s no payment involved.

Sending Requests

Just like with most SERP APIs, you send a request to an endpoint, in this case, https://rt.serpmaster.com. It accepts various parameters that allow specifying a keyword, location, device, and more. 

SERPMaster uses several scrapers (APIs) for different Google data, each with their own parameters: Autocomplete API, Image API, News API, and so on. But it’s easy to switch between them, as the underlying principle remains the same. 

A nice touch is that you don’t have to enter URLs for Google queries by yourself. You can simply add a keyword as a parameter, and SERPMaster will form the URL by itself. This simplifies use for beginners. 

Here’s an example of a simple query in Python. It returns organic results for the query “kittens” in New York:

import requests
from pprint import pprint

// Specify content type and form the request body
headers = {'Content-Type': 'application/json'}
job_params = {
'q': 'kittens',
'geo': 'New York,New York,United States',
}

// Post job and get response
response = requests.post(
'https://rt.serpmaster.com',
headers=headers,
json=job_params,
auth=('user', 'pass1')
)

// Print the response body
pprint(response.json())

Documentation

SERPMaster provides a detailed documentation page. It explains the integration methods, response codes, and available parameters. The documentation is comprehensive enough to give you all the tools for using SERPMaster.

The documentation page.

However, it’s not quite perfect: there’s no node.JS, and I would’ve liked to see more examples, especially under individual APIs. SERPMaster’s competitors like ScaleSerp have playgrounds where you can build requests via a visual interface. Considering that the target audience here are small-time scrapers, something similar would really help. 

Alternatively, SERPMaster offers a walkthrough. It does a good job explaining the basics. But again: a playground would be better.

Dashboard

Yeaaahhh… about that – there’s actually no dashboard to speak of. Everything you do with SERPMaster, it’s either via customer support or API.

Want to see your usage statistics? Send a GET request. Want to buy a plan? Contact the customer service. And so on.

Not having a dashboard is an inconvenience (to quote Robin Williams, “Which year is it?”) but by no means a dealbreaker.

Performance Tests

Surprisingly robust. 

I tested SERPMaster for three hours, sending 10 requests per second to various Google URLs. It might not sound much, but 10 requests every second is a pretty sizable amount. For context, this used a little over 100,000 requests – the full allowance of SERPMaster’s biggest plan. 

The results exceeded my expectations (which, frankly, weren’t that high considering this is “the cheapest provider”). 

With a timeout of 30 seconds, 95.78% of the requests connected to SERPMaster’s API. Out of those requests, 100% successfully reached Google. This is a terrific result, showing that the actual web scraping logic here is impressive. 

The average response time was 7.4 seconds – not the fastest in the market, but still nippy. Our results actually beat SERPMaster’s own estimates in the help center (10 seconds). 

Overall, SERPMaster should be more than enough for its target audience. You will get data reliably and within a reasonable timeframe. If some requests fail, you can simply retry them, as the API only charges for success.

Customer Support

Email or phone support, depending on which plan you get.

SERPMaster’s customer support comes in two tiers. 

The first tier is available for the entry plan. It grants support by email. 

The second tier unlocks if you get one of the two more expensive plans. It unlocks what SERPMaster calls personal support. In other words, you can hop on a call with an account manager to discuss your issues or needs. 

SERPMaster’s support agents work 24/7. It’s strange that it isn’t mentioned anywhere on the website – I stumbled upon this tidbit in a Google ad…

With no live chat, you shouldn’t expect lightning-fast response times. But I found the email support to be decently responsive. You can really do worse.

Conclusion

Time to wrap up. 

When I started looking into SERPMaster, I didn’t have high expectations. It’s a cheap tool for occasional Google scraping, I thought, not exactly a premium service. 

For the most part, it pleasantly surprised me. The scraper works really well, and it’s highly customizable. The pricing is very competitive too, compared to any competitor. You might be able to find cheaper options, but few to none will get you the package you receive here – or, most likely, performance. 

The main missing features are .CSV output and request scheduling. The user experience could be improved, too, with a playground for generating code or some kind of dashboard. But I don’t think that many people will find these omissions deal breaking. 

All in all, SERPmaster does what it promises and does it well. If you need moderate amounts of data from Google and don’t want to build the web scraping infrastructure by yourself, consider SERPMaster. It probably won’t let you down.