What is Programmatic SEO?

Google is always trying to deliver the most relevant results to your search and businesses try to be relevant. Everytime Google introduces a new search algorithm, the definition of ‘relevance’ changes. Organizations try out various practices and strategies to retain or build their product and brand. Some resort to ads, some optimize their local SEO, some run marketing campaigns and some turn to Programmatic SEO.

What is programmatic SEO?

Programmatic SEO is a practice where you create multiple landing pages for a keyword and (or) its variations using collected data and specialized codes or rules. This means you can deploy multiple SEO optimized landing pages in days, not months. 

Sounds too good to be true? That’s understandable. However, this method is not for everyone and is certainly not a sure fire SEO strategy. We’ll get to that later. 

If you are still confused, this example might help!

Paris or London? 

Are you a travel enthusiast? Yes? Great! No? Imagine yourself as one. 

You just got back from a trip to Barcelona and now, you decide to plan your next trip. You are conflicted between Paris and London, so you google ‘Best places to visit in Paris’ first. The results load and you notice a blog page (arandomtravelblog.com) which seems familiar. Suddenly, it hits you. You referred this website for your previous trip. You click the link with no hesitation, since you like the user experience, especially the way information is presented. 

Once you are satisfied, you go back and search for ‘Best places to visit in London’. Surprise surprise, you spy another blog from arandomtravelblog.com. Great! You click again and you are happy to see the familiar template and arrangement.

Now let’s look back. Let’s try to spot the common points in this scenario:

• The search had a common phrase, ‘Best places to visit in’. We call these ‘head terms’. 
• While each page offered different content based on the keyword, they had a common template.

Programmatic SEO 101

So, how do you deploy a Programmatic SEO strategy for you brand? The short answer would be - ‘with a proper carefully laid out plan’. You’ll have to invest a sufficient amount of time for research before executing your model.

Keyword selection

You start by finding the right keywords you can use based on your industry. Just like how Nike has shoes and Adidas has well… shoes, you probably have your own niche.

You can discover and research keywords (and variations) by using tools such as Google’s keyword planner, Ahrefs, Answer the public, Moz, etc. You should also take a look at the competition for your selected keywords. Just google your keywords and check out who you will be competing with. Additionally, you can check out what sort of content is ranked higher so that you can get an idea of what your target audience is looking for.

Modifiers

‘Shoes’ is a broad search, you can specify the intent with something like ‘shoes for women’ or ‘waterproof shoes’. This can help break down your broad audience to smaller segments based on purpose of search.

You can easily find modifiers by using Google’s suggested searches, autofill suggestions and other tools such as Soovle. Based on your business, you can collect all the relevant modifiers you want.

Ready to mingle

Now that you’ve identified your keywords and modifiers, it’s time to mix 'em up! You can use any script to make all possible combinations of keywords and modifiers. ‘Woah but that’d be thousands!’ That’s alright. It’s what you want, however the number of keywords could vary greatly based on your strategy.

Since all the possible keywords have been listed, we can move to the action part.

Create your page template

You’ll need a proper and constant structure for all your pages. You can use any wireframe or design tool that you are comfortable with. Alternatively you can use a proper website building solution such as Webflow. In Webflow, you just need to create a ‘collection’ - which would be the fields which would be displayed in your page like header, slug, meta description, main image, body text, links etc. Note that every element which is dynamic has to be created as a ‘field’ in collections.