Programmatic SEO, or pSEO, is a digital marketing strategy that involves creating articles, pages, or listings at scale using a keyword structure that targets a specific region or service.
There is a need for programmatic SEO for companies to design a large number of pages without the necessity of doing it manually, especially if there are thousands or even millions of records.
Wise, the online banking company that saves you money when exchanging currency compared to traditional banks, targets thousands of keywords that involve currency exchange pairs such as euro to USD, euros to GBP, and so on. To accomplish this, they design a single content template, prepare data in a spreadsheet, and then bulk publish content.
Why Programmatic SEO?
pSEO saves you money and time when you discover a keyword structure, for example, “service name in city name,” which involves creating hundreds or thousands of pages programmatically.
Example 01 – Directory Website:
If you are planning to create a directory website and you have thousands of listings to import, you will need to prepare your data in a spreadsheet like Google Sheets. The rows will represent your page records, and the columns will represent the variables (every piece of data for your pages). Then, design a layout for your listings, and finally import your dataset into your website.
Example 02 – Local SEO:
If you are offering a service in your local city or country and want to expand to other cities or cover all states or cities, you will need to create pages programmatically to target all cities at scale. Through programmatic SEO, you will need to have a list of your target cities, prepare all their content such as images, maps, schemas, SEO meta tags, and then design a landing page content template.
If you are using WordPress as a CMS, you can use the WP ALL IMPORT plugin to bulk import your spreadsheet. You simply have to save it in CSV format and then import all of your pages.
Example 03 – Ecommerce Website:
Imagine you are selling products with numerous characteristics, such as watches, and you want to include all of this data for each product since it varies from one product to another. You will need to have your product data scraped or collected manually from the manufacturer. Then, design your product fields and their layout, and import all of the data at once using the WP ALL IMPORT plugin or a syncing intermediate such as Zapier or Whalysinc if you are on Shopify or any other ecommerce platform.
Example 04 – Tools website:
The other day, while I was surfing the internet, I came across a programmatic SEO website that employs a simple strategy to generate 300k traffic organically. Their idea is to target all countries with around 200 pages and share data about each country, such as flags, populations, sizes, and inflation rates. Their target keyword is “random country generator,” and whenever you click a button, you generate a country randomly.
Example 05 – Generate Articles:
With the AI revolution, you can now generate high-quality content using ChatGPT or any other AI. The strategy always begins with your spreadsheet: you need to integrate your AI using a Google Chrome extension or script. Then, prompt ChatGPT to create content for every section. Using formulas, you can concatenate all the content together, and finally, bulk import these articles to your CMS.
Example 06 – Other use cases:
Programmatic SEO works for every business, but you need to conduct keyword research first to determine if your programmatically generated content stands a chance of ranking. Simply put yourself in the shoes of your potential customer, type your keyword into the Google search bar, and see what comes up first. If high authority websites are ranking in the first three spots, then you’ll need to search for other keyword structures with lower competition.
The key is to create hundreds or thousands of pages at scale. You’ll need to have data prepared in a spreadsheet, which is the most important part, and try to include as many variables as possible. This could be for an ecommerce website, a niche blog, or a physical or digital service. However, programmatic SEO works better for digital products.