Programmatic SEO: What it is and How it Works

Intro

Consider how cars are manufactured in an assembly line. Each car follows the same basic production process and structure, but you can customize the features (like color, engine type, or interior materials) based on the model or customer preferences.

The similar happens in programmatic SEO, each web page is like a car on an assembly line, following a standard process but with customized features (keywords, specific content) to cater to different search intents.

In this blog post, I will be covering the following Programmatic SEO related topics in detail:

1. What is programmatic SEO?
2. Advantages and disadvantages of programmatic SEO
3. Successful programmatic SEO examples
4. How to implement programmatic SEO
5. Challenges associated with programmatic SEO

So without further ado, let’s get to it...

What is programmatic SEO?

Programmatic SEO or pSEO is a publishing method that lets you publish large volumes of web pages that follow a consistent or similar layout, specifically optimized for search engines. The published pages target important long-tail keywords that are more specific and often less competitive.

The main goal of pSEO is to make a website more visible in the SERPs by covering a wide range of specific topics that people are interested in. This method is efficient because it allows for the production of bulk content that is optimized for search engines, helping to attract more targeted visitors to the website.

Advantages and disadvantages of programmatic SEO

Nowadays, more and more companies and individuals are experimenting with programmatic SEO, as there are several advantages to using the technique. Some of them are:

• It’s a highly scalable strategy where you can create 100s and even 1000s of landing pages within no time.
• Your website starts ranking for more keywords in the search results, you get more visitors, and ultimately more customers for your business.
• Requires significantly less time and effort to publish multiple pages as compared to manual one-by-one publishing.

However, just like any strategy, there are some drawbacks to programmatic SEO as well. Some of them are:

• It’s extremely difficult to get all the generated pages indexed, especially for newer websites.
• If not set up correctly, the technique can also cause duplicate or thin content issues on the site.

Despite these challenges, the benefits of programmatic SEO, such as its scalability and efficiency, often outweigh the drawbacks, making it a valuable strategy for expanding your online presence.

Successful programmatic SEO examples

To understand the concept better, let’s take a look at some successful programmatic SEO examples that are getting tons of valuable traffic by using this strategy.

1. EnhanCV

EnhanCV.com provides tons of useful resume and cover letter templates to help professionals with their job hunt process. The website gets over 800k monthly organic traffic, which is all highly relevant for their business.

The site has programmatically created 100s of pages targeting keywords like “{job role} resume examples” and “{job role} interview questions and answers” as you can see in the above screenshot.

2. CarLogos

CarLogos.org attracts over 600k monthly organic traffic by programmatically creating separate pages for renowned car brands and their logos.

The site has over 1,000 indexed pages, and they target keywords like “{car brand} logo” and “{type of car} car brands”, as you can see in the above screenshot.

3. EatThisMuch

EatThisMuch.com grabs over 800k monthly organic traffic from programmatically generated pages targeting keywords like “{food} nutrition” and “{food} recipe and nutrition”, as you can see in the below screenshot.

This is a huge pSEO site with over 180,000 pages indexed in Google and generates revenue by showing display ads and also by affiliate promotion.

How to implement programmatic SEO

Implementing a solid programmatic SEO strategy does sound like an extremely complicated thing to do, but it’s fairly easy whether you’re using no-code or even code to implement. In this post, I will not be going into the specifics, but explain the overall process in detail.

The entire pSEO process can be divided into the following 5 steps:

1. Finding keywords
2. Preparing the data
3. Creating the page template
4. Publishing pages through automation
5. Measuring the progress

Now, let’s go through each step, one by one…

1. Finding keywords

When finding suitable and profitable keywords for programmatic SEO, you just have to search for patterns in keywords – some part of the full keyword should be modifiable. To have a better understanding, you can divide the keyword into two parts: one, head terms, and two, modifier.

For example, if the head term is “cost of living” and some modifiers are “London”, “New York”, “New Delhi”, etc. then the final keywords would be:

• Cost of living in London
• Cost of living in New York
• Cost of living in New Delhi

While researching, you just have to keep an open mind for any kinds of patterns in the keywords you’re looking through. There can be more than one modifier in a keyword as well; for example, “can {fish 1} live with {fish 2}”.

RankTracker’s Keyword Finder tool is great for discovering these keyword ideas and then validating them if they are worth going after or not.

2. Preparing the data

The data required for programmatic SEO can be in the numerical format or may even be in the long paragraph format, depending on the type of project. And whether you’re scraping the data from multiple sources or manually collecting them, you need to thoroughly prepare the dataset for pSEO.

Below are some tips that you can follow during the data preparation process:

• Create alternate versions of topics or headings. For example, if the main title is “can I feed bread to my dog” then create one more column with an alternative title as “can dogs eat bread”.
• Have your database prepared for internally linking the generated programmatic pages with each other.
• Create slugs, lowercase, and even plural versions of the topics as well, so that they can be used inside the page template without any grammatical errors.
• Check everything to make sure there are no duplicate entries.
• Leverage the power of AI (if required) to generate some descriptions or some sections of the programmatic page to be generated.

Basically, the idea here is to have all the required data points in the database and to make sure that there are no duplicates or inaccuracies.

And once the data is ready, it’s time to move to the next step.

3. Creating the page template

In programmatic SEO, a page template is the main layout of what the generated pages will look like. In the template, variables are used as placeholders, which are replaced with the actual data when the automation runs. And depending on the type of project, it can be a landing page style or a simple blog post style page template.

Here are some tips that you should follow when creating the page template for your pSEO project:

• Make sure that the page template is user-friendly and also optimized for search engines.
• Since the generated pages would have a lot of different data to show, use images and other visual elements to make them look good.
• Aim to create the template so good that it’s not even detectable if it’s been programmatically or manually created.
• From the SEO perspective, you should also add internal links, optimize the page for the target keyword, add schema markups, make them load faster, etc.

And once the page template is ready, it’s time to start publishing pages programmatically.

4. Publishing pages through automation

Publishing is the most technical part of the entire programmatic SEO process, but it’s not rocket science after all. Depending on the tech-stack of your website, you will have to choose an automation setup that connects the data to your page template and generates all the pages.

If you’re on WordPress, then you have a few no-code options like:

• WP All Import, and
• Multi-pages Generator

But if your website is built using a custom tech-stack, either you build the entire setup to connect the database with the page template or use a programmatic SEO tool like:

• The.com – works with all tech-stack, and
• Whalesync – works with Webflow and more

Your goal here is to connect your database (be it in Google Sheets, Airtable, or MySQL database) to the optimized page template by using any suitable programmatic SEO tool. And then publish all the pages on your website.

You’re now done. Voilà!

5. Measuring the progress

Now that all your pages are published, it’s time to start measuring the progress towards when the pages start appearing in the SERP. Below are some important KPIs that you can track:

• Page Indexation Rate: The number of pages indexed by search engines out of the total created. For Google, you can check the indexing progress inside the Google Search Console.
• Keyword Rankings: The position of your website's pages in search engine results pages (SERPs) for targeted keywords.
• Organic Traffic: The volume of visitors coming to your site through search engines. An increase in organic traffic is a strong indicator of successful SEO.
• Conversion Rate: The percentage of website visitors who take a desired action through the provided CTA. If the rate is up, it suggests that the traffic attracted through programmatic SEO is valuable.

You can use the Rank Tracker tool to check the visibility of your keywords, average position, and even SERP positions, as shown in the above screenshot.

Dealing with challenges associated with programmatic SEO

Programmatic SEO is a highly technical process and there are several points of failure that you can come across. Let’s take a look at some associated challenges and how you can deal with them…

• Slow Indexing: To deal with slow indexing, you should properly interlink pages with each other, create more backlinks, submit the sitemap to the Google Search Console, and properly configure your robots.txt file.
• Duplicate or Thin Content: Always review every row manually to avoid duplicate entries in the database, and have enough data on each page to avoid thin or low-quality content issues.

Conclusion

Programmatic SEO offers a powerful avenue for scaling your website's content and improving its visibility in search engine results. By targeting a wide array of long-tail keywords and efficiently creating optimized pages, businesses can significantly increase their organic traffic, attract more qualified leads, and ultimately drive conversions.

By carefully monitoring key performance indicators, you can refine your approach, overcome the drawbacks, and harness the full potential of programmatic SEO to propel your online presence to new heights.