By: Jenny Romanchuk
What is Programmatic SEO?
With programmatic SEO (or pSEO), you automatically create pages that target keywords.
Thanks to programmatic SEO, you can create hundreds to thousands of landing pages designed to target hundreds to thousands of keywords – but you don’t have to spend time manually creating those pages, saving a lot of time.
To do this, you will pull data and use pre-programmed rules. So where do humans come into play? Just to validate the data and fill the databases.
But there’s a caveat.
“Many people confuse product-driven programmatic SEO with programmatic SEO,” says Kevin Indig, author of Growth Memo. Indig is also a growth consultant and former SEO manager at Shopify. He says the confusion is understandable. These concepts overlap.
Indig states that product-driven SEO involves a company showcasing part of its inventory to increase organic traffic. A good example is Instacart, which allows Google to index all of its category and product pages.
“Programmatic SEO, on the other hand, is a set of pages created by a company that doesn’t have visible inventory,” says Indig.
He points to Workable as an example, which lists a job description on its site.
The job description is not part of the company’s product inventory. However, the content fits well with the product, so the team created pages with the same design and content style.
“To do pSEO, identify query patterns related to your product and create pages around them in the same style,” says Indig.
How to Do Programmatic SEO
Each pSEO case is somewhat unique in terms of development tools and approach. To discuss the entire process, I’ll share some insights from Juan Bello, founder of PorterMetrics, and Filippo Erdi, growth marketing manager at Unmuted.
Let’s start with examples of the pages you can design using programmatic SEO.
“At PorterMetrics, we started doing programmatic SEO to expand product pages and template gallery pages,” says Bello.
The technology you need to replicate Porter’s process: WordPress + Elementor. Airtable. Google Sheets. ChatGPT (through the GPT add-on for Sheets and Slides). Whalesync or WPSync. A content management system (CMS) like WordPress or HubSpot CMS. HubSpot’s category description generator (at your discretion).
Now, I’m going to take you through 5 essential steps to set up programmatic SEO. 1. Choose a strategy for your programmatic SEO.
When developing your pSEO strategy, Erdi suggests considering one of the following three strategies or mixing them for your efforts. The vertical approach
The vertical approach focuses on targeting a specific category.
For example, if you have a CRM designed for accountants, you can create content that ranks for keywords related to that profession. In this case, you will look for keywords that have a similar structure and might be used by accountants.
For example, if you search for “software for accountants” in Ahrefs, this is the first result that appears:
There is a very clear pattern here.
The phrases “review software for certified accountants” and “accounting software for the certified accountant” have good search volume and the same structure: {need of the accountant} + for certified accountant.
Given the search volume and keyword difficulty (KD), it is worth delving deeper into research. The search result for “for the certified accountant” has 273 other terms with the same structure.
You can use programmatic SEO to create a landing page to target each of these keywords. As you can see, using the vertical approach, you choose a category and try to cover every important topic for that specific community.
Tip:
Task: Do not overlook low-search-volume keywords. These can be hidden opportunities that provide unique chances to target specific niches.
The horizontal approach
On the other hand, the horizontal approach involves directing your content to gain traffic from different types of businesses.
For example, if you offer a booking software, you can target niches that need your service. In the case of booking tools, you can consider structured keywords like “booking tool for + {profession}.”
Using the same method, you can search in Ahrefs for something in the range of “booking software for.”
Here, the pattern is easier to uncover. All 499 keywords follow the same structure: “booking software” + {type of business}.
Important tip: This is a great strategy if your product is adaptable and can be used across various industries.
The ABM approach
Account-based marketing tactics include creating a list of partners or developing custom landing pages for potential accounts and highlighting the benefits of potential collaboration.
Suppose you have a marketplace that connects manufacturers and contractors. You can create landing pages for all your production partners to leverage their reputation and increase traffic to your platform.
Important tip: Create a comprehensive strategy and break it down into smaller pieces. Implement one piece at a time; if you receive positive signals (such as an increase in organic traffic or pipeline engagement), proceed to implement the next piece.
Create a table (database) for your content items to extract data
Now, envision potential topic clusters. According to Juan Bello, tables are an excellent way to do this.
“To do programmative SEO, you should think of your marketing content as a table or spreadsheet, not as pieces of content,” says Bello. Then he recommends the following layout:
- Rows containing use cases or topics you will cover.
- Columns containing “parameters” or your content elements (like H1, title, text, images, etc.).
- A table covering a specific angle or cluster.
“Use cases or topics are every piece of content you will create for a specific angle or category. These topics are determined based on your business model,” says Bello.
Example:
Porter Metrics
Marketing Reporting Software
Use cases
Report Template
Social Media Report Template
PPC Report Template
Agency Report Template
Porter Metrics
Marketing Reporting Software
Integrations
Social Media Dashboard Software
PPC Dashboard Software
Agency Dashboard Software
Booking
Hotel Listings
Cities
Top Hotels
Best Hotels in New York
Best Hotels in Boston
Best Hotels in Toronto
Yelp
Restaurant Listings
Cities & Neighborhoods
Best Restaurants
Best Restaurants in New York
Best Restaurants in Boston
Best Restaurants in Toronto
HubSpot
CRM Software
Use cases
Software / Tool
CRM Software
Sales Software
Service Software
Example of an eCommerce store
eCommerce
Color
Shoes
White Shoes
Black Shoes
Red Shoes
Mapping use case to identify topic clusters
To identify topics without the need for keyword research but with actual interest from potential customers, PorterMetrics follows these four steps.
- Use Google Search Console to get the keywords you rank for. Categorize or tag them in broad topics to build use case maps.
- Gather customer questions or topics from customer service conversations or calls or emails to find the most common and urgent cases people are trying to solve.
- Use ChatGPT to analyze and summarize these conversations.
- Examine competitors’ robots.txt and sitemaps.xml files to see how they organize their sites.
In Bello’s example, he learned how ClickUp organized their template pages by use case and then type of user, ending up with over 5,000 software pages.
Taking advantage of content filling
Following the example of Porter’s pSEO, create your table (or database) on Airtable.
Then, use WP Sync or Whalesync to sync Airtable data to WordPress. These plugins let you import this table into WordPress with one click.
All
Create a new WordPress page. Elementor allows you to add dynamic elements so you can pull Airtable columns as parameters into the page builder.
Click the live Airtable template to populate the content to replicate the structure.
To fill the table with content, use three methods: create formulas for titles like “{integration name} + reporting tool” (for example, Facebook Ads reporting tool).
ChatGTP: Create dynamic prompts (for example, “Create a description for the {integration name} reporting program…”). To achieve this, we used Data Fetcher or GPT for Sheets to connect ChatGPT to Airtable and Google Sheets respectively.
Manually: When the standard text for formulas is not usable, or ChatGPT couldn’t provide contextual answers, fill the pages manually.
Translation: We used ChatGPT to generate translations for each parameter and text into other languages (Spanish and Portuguese), making it relatively easy to make our content multilingual.
Exploring Examples and Results
Stick to this tutorial to create pages similar to Porter’s: Connector pages. Looker Studio connector pages. Google Sheets connector pages.
All are nested under the integrations category. Create destinations: [integration name] for Google Sheets, [integration name] for Looker Studio, [integration name] for data connectors.
Languages: English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Note: If you change the subfolder from /en/ to /es/, you will find the American Microsoft equivalent in Spanish. If you change the subfolder to /pt/ and /connectors/ to /conectores/, you will see the Portuguese version.
Example
English: https://portermetrics.com/en/connectors/facebook-ads/ (Facebook Ads data connector)
Spanish: https://portermetrics.com/es/connectors/facebook-ads/
Portuguese: https://portermetrics.com/pt/conectores/facebook-ads/
That’s it; you now know the steps required to help you create hundreds of pages.
Examples of Programmatic SEO
Now that you know how to do programmatic SEO, I will discuss some examples.
1. Userpilot produces tool comparison articles for low and zero search keyword terms.
“We produced 274 posts in nearly a year using programmatic SEO, which converted at a rate three times that of our regular posts. You can see all the posts produced this way under our tools category,” says Emilia Kurchinska, Head of Marketing at Userpilot.
These posts target the bottom funnel using keyword combinations such as:
- Best tools/software for {use case}.
- Alternatives to {tool1} and competitors.
- What is… {use case} + Question (for example, how to {do} {use case}).
- [N] Best {use case} tactics that actually work.
- Best services/agencies for {use case} for your business/{industry}.
- {tool1} vs {tool2} vs {tool3} for {use case}.
Kurchinska says, “The biggest benefit is that these posts convert at a much higher rate; it’s not a traffic game. They generate relatively little traffic (less than 1% of our traffic).”
Moreover, programmatic SEO contributed to significant savings.
Kurchinska continues, “It has cost us an average of $97 per programmatic post compared to $275.09 for regular posts.”
Now you’re curious how it works technically. Kurchinska shares her workflow. Her team uses post templates (a different template for each keyword style) built in Google Sheets, and two databases are also built in Google Sheets.
Kurchinska states, “VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP formulas pull information from the databases for each tool/use case and embed it into the template to generate a blog post. We then upload a CSV file containing all the blog posts into our WP.”
2. ClickUp uses programmatic SEO to publish over 1000 pages monthly.
ClickUp went from 25 pSEO pages and expanded publishing to thousands of pages monthly. That’s how things started along with critical pSEO tips from Mason Yu, Product and AI Consultant at ClickUp.
It can
Search engine optimization campaigns can stumble, says Yu, for two reasons.
Yu says, “First, they are disgusted by the idea of thousands of duplicate content that adds no value to the internet. They cannot find a keyword pattern that feels deserving of a programmatic campaign.”
According to Yu, programmatic campaigns should take an experimental and flexible approach. You don’t need to start with ambitious plans to launch 10,000 pages at once, he says. Instead, check for sufficient reasons to pursue a programmatic keyword set with 20-30 keywords perhaps.
Yu shares this approach with his team at ClickUp.
Yu says, “Every time we expanded our campaigns, our results came very close to our projections because we had enough learning to get approval for further expansion.”
3. Tango is building how-to guides using programmatic SEO at scale.
Hal Zeitlin’s B2B marketing agency, Candid Leap, is expanding content marketing production for Tango using pSEO. Let’s take a look at her workflow.
The campaign “created using Tango” in its early days. However, it’s a great example of how a brand can showcase its product value in a unique way when directed by a focused search strategy.
Let’s see what visitors can get in this showcase.
- Multiple categories for filtering by multiple (use case and program).
- Tags displaying what you have filtered, with x buttons.
- Call to action within the network.
Team Zeitlin showcases pieces of content for different filters, leveraging programmatic SEO to the fullest.
4. Flying Cat published 1700 programmatic integration pages in 3 months, resulting in 45% of all their demo requests.
Asman Akram, Head of SEO Growth Strategy at Flying Cat Marketing, integrates programmatic SEO into client SEO growth strategies. With his team, they achieve astonishing results in terms of conversions and return on investment.
Akram describes a client in the hospitality tech sector, providing a middleware solution that connects various tools to facilitate seamless operations. Think of Zapier but specifically for hospitality.
Akram’s team created 1700 BOFU pages for the company. These pages played a significant role, he says, contributing to about 45% of all their demo requests arising from organic traffic from search engines.
Akram says, “While our client’s website features pages for direct integration, our analysis using session recordings in Hotjar revealed something interesting.”
After some creative thinking, Akram and his team identified three types of scalable content that could be produced for every integration enabled by the client’s product:
- Partner pages. These pages highlight each direct integration with the client’s product. For example, “Connecting [our client] with [partner].”
- Partner integration pages. These pages illustrate the benefits of linking two of the client’s partners together.
- How-to pages. For each partner, these pages provide instructions for common use cases, such as “How to create a home guide with [partner].”
Akram says, “Implementing this SEO programmatic campaign wasn’t the challenge: we created some templated pages with custom variables, built a large database of all variables, and published it live using the CSV import plugin in WordPress.”
However, Akram notes that perception and planning were the real challenges.
Akram says, “We were charting an unconventional path with our research, as we didn’t kno
Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/programmatic-seo
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