In the rapidly changing world of SEO, tracking on-page data and changes is useful for improving discoverability and maintaining results. To achieve this, you can use Custom Element Extractions (CEE). This feature is part of ContentKing, one of the SEO tools we use extensively. With Custom Element Extractions, you can define and monitor elements.
This article was previously published in English on the ContentKing website.
Custom Element Extractions offer great flexibility, allowing SEO specialists to extract page elements and track changes to them. By using XPath, CSS selectors, or regular expressions, you can create rules to extract text, data, or numbers and display them in the ContentKing interface. With this page-level data, you can monitor critical on-page elements. You can then set up alerts to capitalize on revenue opportunities and mitigate potential risks.
Thanks to its flexibility, Custom Element Extractions is suitable for a variety of purposes. Whether it’s extracting breadcrumbs for category analysis, monitoring product prices, or extracting a product’s brand, CEE offers a solution. For e-commerce platforms, such as Shopify and Magento, CEE provides significant added value. It overcomes limitations in URL structures and enables you to perform analyses at the product or category level.
With Conductor Website Monitoring’s Custom Element Extractions, users can, among other things:
This versatility makes CEE a valuable solution for businesses of all sizes. In this article, written by Jarik Oosting and also shared via Conductor, we provide various examples and insights into how to use Custom Element Extractions.
Many e-commerce sites use Shopify as their CMS these days. Although Shopify offers a comprehensive solution, it also has its limitations. One major limitation is the flat URL structure, which means that e-commerce categories (called “collections” in Shopify) do not have a nested structure such as /collections/{main-category}/{subcategory}. Instead, all collection URLs are structured as /collections/{naam}.
For tasks such as category analysis or content pruning, it’s important to have a clear overview of the website structure. For example, it’s important to know which categories are related to one another. For an e-commerce project using Shopify as the CMS, it was necessary to gain insight into the relationship between products and collection pages. By setting up breadcrumbs that included the category name, we were able to use Custom Element Extraction to extract the entire breadcrumb trail from a product page.
By making smart use of a CSS selector in combination with CEE, we were able to save dozens of hours of manual work. The content pruning analysis then provided valuable insights into product performance by product group. Based on this, we were able to remove, optimize, or retain the right pages and page groups.
Another specific challenge our SEO team faced was identifying opportunities for product page optimizations for products with a minimum selling price. By extracting product prices and combining them with Google Search Console data, our team was able to implement 260 product page optimizations. This resulted in a 65% increase in revenue for these product pages.
During an analysis of the website for a multilingual project we’ve been working on since 2020, incorrect internal links were discovered. Some UK English pages contained internal links to pages intended for the U.S. and vice versa, which negatively impacted both SEO and UX. Users abandoned their visits to the website because they suddenly landed on a page with different prices and shipping information.
An extraction process was set up using XPath for the internal links, which filtered out all outgoing links. This data was then exported to Google Sheets, and formulas were applied to filter out the incorrect internal links. The client subsequently corrected these links, resulting in 300 corrected links and a large number of users who can now click through to the correct pages again.
In another project, we discovered that several internal links were still pointing to the staging environment. Unfortunately, it wasn’t possible to perform a database lookup, so Custom Element Extraction was the most efficient method. All outbound links were mapped using Custom Element Extraction and made visible via the filters in the Conductor Website Monitoring interface. The SEO team then corrected the links without having to create any exports.
Data analysis is an important part of an SEO process. For a Shopify environment, it was necessary to gain insight into all brand pages (which are the /collections/ pages) in order to take follow-up actions. Due to Shopify’s structure, it was not possible to base this on the URLs. Instead, we had to use an on-page element, allowing our team to use the breadcrumb to determine the page type.
Using a CSS selector and the “Replace” function, the team extracted the breadcrumb and replaced it with “Yes” whenever it was a brand page. Given the scope of the project, this saved us a significant number of hours and allowed us to use the data for optimizations such as meta titles. This resulted in a 6.5% increase in CTR.
Custom element extraction isn’t new in and of itself. Other crawling tools, such as Screaming Frog, also offer this feature. As loyal users of Conductor Website Monitoring, we know their tool better than anyone. Conductor’s strength lies in its use of custom element extraction in combination with setting up alerts via email or Slack.
Alerts can be set up based on changes to an element, and it is possible to expand them with additional criteria. For example, it is possible to trigger alerts only for specific segments of the website, such as pages with a minimum number of clicks.
Our team uses the alerts in various ways, including the three applications described below.
For an enterprise project involving a large website, it’s common for brand pages to change over time. When a new brand is added to the website, it’s beneficial for us to be notified immediately. This way, the page can be included right away in the on-page optimizations. However, our team and the internal SEO team are not always notified when new brands are added.
To address this, an alert has been set up in Conductor that sends an email notification whenever a brand page is added. This allows our team to proactively add new brand pages to the list for optimization.
In another specific case, we were asked to help address an issue involving the monitoring of price changes for products with a retail price of at least $200. Our team set up a segment for indexable product pages with that minimum price. The client’s marketing team, including their social media managers, was then added to this segment. Whenever a price change occurs for this product segment, everyone is now notified. As a result, departments are always on the same page, and marketing opportunities are better leveraged.
After testing the alert for several weeks, our team decided to further refine the alerts. Not all price changes were important enough to warrant a notification, so a new filter was added to certain categories based on the URL to make the notifications more specific.
For another project, it was valuable to know which products with at least 100 clicks from organic search were no longer in stock. Most e-commerce retailers have good tools for monitoring inventory, but sometimes the most important products run out of stock just as the marketing department is promoting or optimizing them.
To prevent the available time from being spent inefficiently, a segment has been created for product pages with at least 100 clicks. The segment uses a custom element, in which the stock status is extracted from the page via CEE. The sensitivity is set to “High” to ensure prompt notifications when products are out of stock. In the past, thousands of users would land on products that were out of stock, and the customer wouldn’t notice until a few weeks later (even with the right inventory management software).
You can combine multiple filters to create segments—for example, based on a minimum price or specific product types. This allows you to set up specific and valuable alerts that help you achieve your online goals.
Whether it’s through Conductor Website Monitoring, Screaming Frog, or another tool, custom element extraction is often underestimated. Our absolute favorite for custom element extraction is ContentKing, thanks to its real-time monitoring and the ability to set up alerts. The applications of custom element extraction are diverse, and it can be used for any website.
With a passion for SEO and an unmatched drive to achieve results, Jarik Oosting is the driving force behind SmartRanking. With more than 15 years of experience in the field, Jarik has built up a wealth of knowledge, ranging from technical SEO to complex migrations. As the founder of SmartRanking, he has assembled a team of like-minded SEO specialists who help companies achieve their online growth goals. He is also the author of the book *GEO – Being Visible in AI Answers*, which explores how companies can remain discoverable as AI search engines reshape the search landscape, and he is a frequent speaker.
His academic background in Information Science at the University of Groningen, with a specialization in Natural Language Processing, gives him a unique perspective on the world of SEO. For Jarik, it’s not just about search engine visibility, but about sharing knowledge and guiding companies toward sustainable online success.