What is the best Craigslist search tool, either free or paid?

How can I automate listing the 1st page natural and sponsored results for a given search query (given a list of search queries) and save to a spreadsheet?

• Online or Mac-compatible. The homework I did led me to the following results so far: http://nielsbosma.se/projects/seotools/ (not for Mac) http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/google-scraper-in-google-docs-update (looks good, will still require manually going through the list of keywords) The current tool is an Excel spreadsheet (on Mac) where further analysis is done. The question is how to automatically obtain the top 10 URLs for each search query, and the same for paid results. Ideally, the tool would automatically run this analysis at a given frequency (e.g. once a week) and report with changes (e.g. "competitorX .com is 2 results higher this week: was #5, now is #3").

• Answer:

  You're best bet is Advanced Web Ranking (no affiliation): http://www.advancedwebranking.com/ - That costs a bit though and is more for on-going agency style work. The Google Spreadsheets based scraper doc is also a good idea for a free equivalent (here's a great place to start: https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/04/12/search-rankings-with-google-spreadsheets/). You can set a script up to trigger and cache the results every week with a little extra work. A bit of conditional formatting would then highlight changes each week. More info: https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/how-to-build-agile-seo-tools-using-google-docs/