It’s getting harder and harder to gain organic traffic as a software company. New players enter the field every day and Google introduces algorithm updates faster than ever. The more relevant and valuable content you have, the higher your chances of ranking.
But manually creating quality content at scale is a slow and expensive affair. So why not do it differently?
As Kevin Indig said, the recent rapid advancements in AI technology are making it easier than ever to scale your content production, and programmatic SEO allows you to quickly build hundreds of new pages.
Want to add programmatic SEO to your content strategy? Read on.
What is Programmatic SEO?
Programmatic SEO (PSEO) is a search engine optimization strategy that entails creating and publishing a large number of web pages using one or more databases that feed information into a page template. Each of the pages created this way targets a specific long-tail keyword pattern or a modification of a head term.
An example of such a pattern would be “x online tutor’ where “x” where “x” can be substituted to target different long-tail keywords with different pages, such as “find German online tutor”, “mathematics online tutor”, “biology online tutor”.
Programmatic SEO enables you to automate the content creation process and easily publish content at scale.
Advantages of Programmatic SEO
Rapid scaling-Programmatic SEO essentially creates dozens to thousands of pages by connecting a database to a web template. An excellent illustration of this can be found on the homepage of Mentor Cruise, where the page title is animated to alternate between various one-on-one mentorship formats:
You don’t need to hire top-notch writers to produce stuff like this. All you have to do is enter the appropriate data into your page template.The ability to generate a number of programmatic SEO pages based on a single search query also saves you time. You simply need to identify a strong keyword to build automated content around, rather than investing hours in keyword research to determine the ideal keyword for every blog post or page. Later on in this post, we’ll discuss how to accomplish that.
Hundreds of ranking keywords for the effort of one
By creating programmatic content based on a head term and building a large number of pages around similar keywords, you’re automatically also targeting that large set of keywords.
Zapier, for example, targets keywords around integrations. The more tools Zapier allows integrations for, the more programmatic content they can create, and the more keywords they can rank for. Just look at these search rankings according to Ahrefs:
At the time of writing, Zapier ranks on the first page of Google for 573 keywords based on this “x integrations” query and none of their integrations pages have manually written content. They consist entirely of dynamically inserted content.
An added benefit to this is that the more content you can rank, the higher your chances of getting backlinks and increasing your domain authority.
Easy to scale
Programmatic SEO is not only quick to produce, it’s also easy to scale. There is no need to assign an article to a writer, wait multiple days for that writer to finish the piece, then send it over to an editor, and so on, before you can hit publish. Programmatic SEO allows you to ship thousands of pages in a matter of weeks or even days.As time goes on, you can keep adding data to your data sources which means you can keep creating additional programmatic pages and updating existing ones. Understanding what data sources are is crucial for maintaining and expanding your digital content effectively.
Cost-effective
When you’re pulling all of your content from a database, there is no need to hire writers or editors to manually create manually written content. As such, programmatic SEO helps keep your cost-per-page low. This is increasingly true the more programmatic pages you create around a single head term.
Risks of Programmatic SEO
Regretfully, programmatic SEO’s advantages are closely related to its drawbacks. You risk producing a lot of thin material that Google disapproves of if all you’re doing is stuffing page templates with data without including any context, viewpoints, or in-depth analysis.Additionally, you run the danger of having your programmatically generated pages marked as duplicate content because you’re continually employing the same page structure, frequently with repeated headings and sentences.
The remedy for both dangers? Employ Thrive Digital, a freelancer, to write original introductions for every page and/or include user-generated content, such reviews or testimonials.