Programmatic SEO: How It Works

Want to 10x your website traffic?

Want to publish hundreds of pages targeting thousands of keywords automatically?

Want to rank your website for high-volume topical keywords without much effort?

But you don’t know how to do it?

Don’t worry!

This is where programmatic SEO comes into play.

It is a hell of a strategy that allows you to scale content operations like never before.

Unlike traditional SEO – creating content, optimizing, and publishing manually – programmatic SEO automates the entire process and creates thousands of optimized pages in no time.

Many great industry leaders like Tripadvisor and Zapier use programmatic SEO, and their results have skyrocketed.

In this article, I will explain everything about programmatic SEO’s workings, benefits, and some real-world examples of its implementation.

What is Programmatic SEO?

Programmatic SEO is a data-driven approach for creating and optimizing content at a large scale through automation or near automation.

It can generate thousands of pages optimized for specific keywords, user intent, and search queries using algorithms, scripts, and databases.

Since it can publish several pages targeting thousands of keywords within seconds, it saves time and ensures consistency and accuracy across all pages. 

While comparing traditional SEO with programmatic SEO, programmatic SEO is efficient and scalable.

Suppose you follow the traditional method to create hundreds of pages targeting thousands of keywords. In that case, you’ll need extensive labor and time to conduct keyword research, create, optimize, and publish content.

With data and a page template in hand, following programmatic SEO can alleviate those pains and easily target a wide range of keywords and audiences.

How Programmatic SEO Works

The base of programmatic SEO is data and automation.

Like traditional SEO, this process also starts with keyword research.

You have to feed in the seed keyword to extract a large set of keywords or topics you want to target and rank.

Once you have pulled off the keyword data, you feed them into the database to create templates for content generation.

Based on the data, the template will automatically include dynamic elements like keywords, locations, or user intent.

When the templates are finalized, you can use a content template created by a human writer, ChatGPT, or other content creation tools to generate SEO-optimized content. 

Each piece of content is automatically optimized for search engines—think meta tags, headers, and internal linking structures—before getting published across multiple pages or subdomains, each laser-focused on different variations of your chosen keywords.

Here are the tools and technologies that power programmatic SEO:

The Benefits of Programmatic SEO

Here are the benefits of programmatic SEO that would urge you to include in your SEO strategy:

Content Production

The biggest benefit of programmatic SEO is the scaling of content production. 

Traditional SEO demands a lot of time and human effort to write content and optimize each page. 

But programmatic SEO flips the screen by automating the entire process. With a predesigned template, you can create thousands of pages quickly without compromising quality. 

This is an absolute game changer, enabling you to target and rank for many keywords.

Since each page is automatically optimized for search engines, it improves the user experience and boosts rankings.

Drives Targeted Traffic

Programmatic SEO improves search visibility by allowing you to create relevant content for specific keywords and user intents.

Focusing on long-tail keywords and niche queries can attract more targeted traffic to your site. This is crucial for businesses in competitive industries where ranking for broad keywords is difficult. 

Since the programmatic SEO process is automated, it ensures the relevance of the content and optimizes it for search engines. This satisfies both the user and search engine and increases the likelihood of ranking higher, driving more traffic and higher conversion.

Cost-Effective SEO Strategies

Another major advantage of programmatic SEO is its cost-effectiveness. 

Traditional SEO methods require substantial time and resources, from keyword research to content creation to on-page optimization. 

Programmatic SEO cuts these costs by automating the process, allowing businesses to get high-quality content using a couple of automated tools that cost only a few dollars.

In comparison, programmatic SEO has the upper hand regarding flexibility, time efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.

With less, the business can scale more using the programmatic SEO.

You can target a broad range of keywords without additional resources by automating content production and optimization.

This makes programmatic SEO an attractive option for businesses looking to maximize their ROI on SEO efforts.

Leading Programmatic SEO Examples Across Industries

Here are some of the well-known companies across different industries that have scaled using programmatic SEO:

How to Implement Programmatic SEO? – A Step By Step Guide

Now you know about programmatic SEO, its benefits, and how top businesses have included it in their strategies and acquired astonishing results. 

Let’s move to the implementation part. 

Here is your 5-step process to implement programmatic SEO in your business:

Begin With Keyword Research

For any SEO strategy building, whether traditional or programmatic, keyword research is the key.

Programmatic SEO aims to target thousands of keywords by creating hundreds of pages using similar content but different data.

So, begin by brainstorming your head term.

Head Term

A head term is a broad, competitive keyword with a high search volume. 

Assume you run a digital marketing firm providing worldwide service. So, to find you, your audience might use keywords or phrases like this:

So, to find the head term for your business, you should understand your niche and audience to know what kind of head terms they use.

B. Modifiers

Once you have identified your head terms, move on to modifiers. 

Modifiers are words or phrases used before or after your head terms.

Let’s take the same example: since you’re providing service worldwide, you can use (place) as your modifier.

For example, “Digital Marketing Agency in San Francisco,” “Content Marketing Agency in San Diego,” or “SMM service in the UK.”

By adding the head term and modifier in the keyword research process, this is what you’ll get:

These modifiers add specificity to the head terms and help you create a dedicated page.

Here are some real-life examples of head terms and modifiers:

The ones that are in the brackets are the modifiers.

So, based on your business and your audience’s needs, select your modifiers.

C. Long Tail Keyword Research

Once you’ve established your head keywords and modifiers, use tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, Google Keyword Planner, and Ubersuggest to begin keyword research.

First, use the head term to come up with keyword ideas.

Then, apply the following filters to shortlist the long data:

Filter 1: Add modifiers in the include section.

Filter 2: In KD, enter the custom difficulty range 0 – 30.

Note: The idea behind keeping the keyword difficulty range from 0 to 30 is that you can easily rank for those keywords without using any backlinks. 

This will help you shortlist the keywords you want from a long range of data.

In most cases, in the shortlisted data, you might find some keywords that won’t have any search volume or sometimes won’t even be on the list. Don’t panic. You can still use them.

This is because the idea is to target hundreds of keywords and cover the entire niche to create a synergic effect that leads to significant organic traffic.

That’s how you can drive the best results using programmatic SEO works.

Add all the data to an Excel or Google Spreadsheet database.

Create content outline

As I mentioned, “the content remains the same, only the data varies.”

Here is an example of that: Zapier:

The above one is their service page for HubSpot integration.

This is their service page for Slack.

What difference do you see?

Yes, they have only changed the name and logo. 

Yet, The rest of the content remains the same.

So, for programmatic SEO, you need a content template like Zapier—a template that includes content format, structure, headings, paragraph breaks, and keyword placements.

Also, you should create a template for the meta title and description following the best SEO practices. 

Because meta tags help search engines understand the content on the page and to lure the audience.

To accomplish the task, you can use AI or ask your conversational copywriter to create appealing and engaging copy that aligns with search engine guidelines and user intent.

Create your website page template

Consider your content template as the body and your web page template as the skeleton. When both are combined, your webpage comes to life.

Create a web page template with the header, footer, image, etc.

Follow  UI/UX principles to design the best page template optimized for both search engines and visitors.

And importantly, while creating your web page template, ensure it is optimized for mobile and page speed.

Here are some optimization tips:

Combine content and page template to create pages

Now that the content and page templates are ready, it’s time to automate the content creation process and add keywords to the specific pages. 

To automate, use tools like:

Set up internal links

Internal links are crucial to distribute page authority between pages and improve navigation. 

They also improve the user experience by making users spend more time on the website by making them read another page or article.

However, creating internal links manually for 100s of pages published in bulk will be daunting. 

So, automate the process.

You can use plugin tools like Internal Link Juicer or Link Whisper, or you can ask your developer to write a script to create internal links to automate the linking process.

Once the automation is done, ensure all the anchor texts are linked to the appropriate pages. 

Real-World Programmatic SEO Examples & Case Studies

SaaS Success: Workbook PDF’s Landing Pages

WorkbookPDF, a SaaS company offering downloadable resources, nailed programmatic SEO by creating optimized landing pages for each product. 

By leveraging a database of keywords and a solid landing page template, they generated thousands of pages quickly. 

The great part was that each page was optimized for specific keywords, user intents, and search queries, resulting in increased organic traffic and conversion rates.

WorkbookPDF’s success story is a testament to how programmatic SEO can scale content production without sacrificing quality or relevance.

Creative Use: GradientPage’s Color Directory

GradientPage, a color palette site, used programmatic SEO to build a searchable directory of color schemes. 

They categorized each possible color combination and used programmatic SEO to create pages in bulk, each focusing on a dedicated color combination.

This strategy has helped them generate thousands of pages optimized for specific color-related search queries.

As a result, they saw massive growth in traffic and user engagement. As it appealed to its target audience, it helped GradientPage build a loyal user base and increased its search engine visibility.

This case shows how programmatic SEO can drive traffic and engagement, even in specialized markets.

Visual Strategy: OG Image Gallery’s SEO Directory

OG Image Gallery, a site offering a directory of optimized images for social media sharing, used programmatic SEO to build a searchable database of images. 

They created thousands of search-optimized pages by categorizing images, creating a template for each page, and pulling relevant keywords from a database.

As a result, they boosted their organic visibility, with the site ranking for a wide range of image-related search queries.

This success shows the power of programmatic SEO in creating large-scale, optimized content that caters to user needs and search engines.

WordPress Mastery: Peliqan’s Programmatic Approach

Peliqan, a WordPress-based website, embraced programmatic SEO to scale its content production. 

With automation tools and a well-curated keyword database, Peliqan created optimized pages for each service and product. 

This helped them scale big by significantly improving search engine ranking and organic traffic.

This case study proves that programmatic SEO works best in WordPress as well. 

Conclusion

It’s agreed that manual SEO strategies take time to implement and produce results. As a result, growth will be slower.

On the other hand, with programmatic SEO, you can publish thousands of pages all at once and skyrocket your rankings, traffic, conversions, and revenue.

Each SEO strategy has its own pros and cons.

Likewise, programmatic SEO too has its cons.

If it is executed wrongly, then you can be penalized by Google.

But when it is done right, nothing can stop you.