Case Study: The Programmatic SEO Approach that Got Attention from Oracle and Google
What if I told you there’s an SEO tactic that allows you to create hundreds of thousands of high quality pages at scale and at a fraction of the cost of doing so manually? Welcome to Programmatic SEO. In this case study, you’ll learn how my team at The Search Initiative grew our client’s organic traffic by 38% sessions. This was achieved by adopting a programmatic approach to SEO. Instead of hiring writers, we designed a single page template and let programming do the rest, creating 500 pages.. On top of this, the site received links from over 700 referring domains including industry heavyweights like Oracle and Google – without us doing any link building ourselves. In this case study, you’ll learn how to: If you’d prefer to watch rather than read, I cover some of the key insights in this video. Before that, here’s some more information about our clients goals and the main challenges that we overcame during the campaign. The Challenge The client operates in the software industry, offering a platform to secure and manage open source development for processes that involve custom combinations of tools and platforms. The client didn’t have any visibility for keywords that would make them money which meant that there was a large pool of lucrative keywords that were missed out on. Ranking one or two new pages wasn’t going to cut it. So we created a long-term plan on how to attain tens of thousands of keywords and without manual effort optimizing each page… programmatically. Find out how you can overcome these challenges for your website by following the steps below. Generating Content Through Programmatic SEO Traditional SEO focuses on enhancing a website’s search engine visibility through high-quality content and keyword-centric landing pages and blogs. In most cases, it’s a perfect way of building keywords, links, and mentions, as long as your content is well-crafted and adds value to the end user. But what if there was a way to do this at scale? What is Programmatic SEO? Programmatic SEO (often referred to as pSEO) involves creating landing pages at scale through automation with the aim of ranking them on the search results pages. Each page is uniform, targets a single unique keyword and is created using automated tools and a database. You’ve probably already used websites that have created pages in this way. Real estate websites, eCommerce sites, and even content sites (examples below) have been using this method to pass information from one system to another, allowing them to create thousands of properties or product pages populated with data from suppliers with generated titles, headings, images, descriptions etc. Here’s an example on Realtor.com. If you were to search “houses for sale in [location]”, you’re likely going to find the following kind of pages in the results. Los Angeles New York Note how the layout of each of these pages is identical, but the content (i.e. the properties) change. A quick Google search reveals that there are 19,495 cities, towns and villages in the USA. Realtor.com can’t possibly create a page for every location manually. Instead, they use programmatic SEO. What’s the Difference Between Traditional & Programmatic SEO? Although the goal of both of these is the same, to grow organic traffic, the difference lies in how this is achieved. Traditional SEO focuses on growing search visibility over a long period of time with a focus on producing high-quality, unique content that targets higher competition keywords. Programmatic SEO achieves the same goal, but at a quicker pace as you’re creating multiple pages with an identical layout at scale from a database, templates and automation. In most cases, if your template takes a page and duplicates it, only changing just the keyword – that sucks for users and will likely also get penalized by Google for having large amounts of duplicate content. However, if you use a template to create thousands of products and generate helpful content that accurately describes the specific product, you’re creating value to the user, which is what Google is looking for. However, when it comes to local SEO you do indeed get a free pass and only need to change the city name in order to be “unique enough”. Example Uses of Programmatic SEO Apart from real estate websites like Realtor.com, here are some other examples where websites have employed programmatic SEO to build their pages. Informational Sites Informational sites like Nomad List use programmatic SEO to help users find the best places to live, work and travel. The site takes data about things like cost of living, internet speeds etc for places around the world and produces landing pages in a way that is easy to understand and read. The site is essentially taking readily available data and repurposing it to provide valuable insights to its audience. Directories and Workflow Apps Zapier, a workflow automation tool that integrates thousands of applications and tools, programmatically made landing pages for every single tool they work with showing custom workflows that can be made with the unique combination of the user’s chosen tools. In the financial sector, Wise made a template for a landing page for every single currency they work with, helping their clients convert between any number of currencies. Travel Itinerary Planners Platforms like TripAdvisor and Expedia that help users plan their travel itineraries implement programmatic SEO to dynamically generate destination guides, optimize meta tags for popular attractions, and create content tailored to specific travel preferences. For example, TripAdvisor aggregates hotels based on location so that when you search for keywords like “hotels in japan” or “restaurants in london”, you’ll see pages like this: Job Portals Job search websites like Indeed or Glassdoor often use programmatic techniques to generate job listings, company profiles, and other content for search engine optimization. The template for their job listings pages remain the same. The difference here is that the content is generated by their users i.e. companies and individuals uploading the job listings to their system so that they can be displayed in the relevant listing pages. These are just a handful of examples, but regardless of your industry or size of website, you can make use of pSEO to generate pages at scale. Pros and Cons of Programmatic SEO Here are some of the advantages of Programmatic SEO: But before you commit to pSEO, here are some things you need to be aware of: Despite these disadvantages, and even if you don’t have a massive website, you can still incorporate pSEO into your SEO strategy. Read on to find out how… How to Generate Content Through Programmatic SEO Creating truly programmatic content requires data that needs to be sourced to create content for hundreds, if not thousands of pages. We’ll start by identifying keywords that you can target at scale and data sets that you can use to integrate into your content before using Google Sheets and ChatGPT to build out your web pages. Finding Scalable Keywords For programmatic SEO to be effective, you need to be able to target hundreds or thousands of similar keywords using a single page template. This requires identifying relevant keywords that have many variations that are similar. One way to do this is by entering a seed keyword relevant to your website into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer tool. For example, if you had a website about everything vegan, you might use terms like “vegan restaurants”. Then click on the Matching Terms report, which shows an expanded list of possible keywords related to the seed keyword. Top tip: consider refining the search results by adjusting the Keyword Difficulty to less than 20 and the Domain Rating (DR) of top-ranking sites to less than 30. This filter will show keywords that are easier to rank for, even with limited backlinks. Identify patterns within the keywords to see which of these can be used to create pages for programmatically. In this case, many of the keywords refer to a particular location, preceded by the term “best” i.e. “best vegan restaurants in chicago”. You can do this by sorting the keywords by “Term” as opposed to “Parent Topics”. You now have 176 keywords (in the USA) that follow a similar pattern for you to create pages for. Identify Modifiers In the previous example, the keywords identified can be split into two categories: head terms and modifiers. The head term is the top-level category of the keyword that you’ll aim for i.e. best vegan restaurants. The modifier is what turns the head term into long-tail keywords (these are highly specific search terms that have lower search volumes) i.e. in chicago. Here’s another example… For a travel website, you could have the following head term and modifier combination: “things to do” + “in [location]”. You could also narrow things down further by adding a secondary modifier: “things to do” + “in [location] + “for [target audience]”. By the end of this process, you’ll have a long list of keyword variations that you can now start to generate content for. Read More Read More
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