Everyone is asking me about programmatic SEO (search engine optimization), often referred to as pSEO. The truth is that programmatic SEO doesn’t make sense for the vast majority of websites or companies. But once in a while, I’ll chat with a business for whom there’s a clear use case for it.
Now, I’ve been a traditional content-led SEO guy for most of my career. But at times, I’ve leveraged programmatic SEO alongside my core content-led SEO strategy to target highly structured long-tail keywords.
Before we dive in, I’ll define some terms:
SEO is the process of improving your website’s visibility or rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Traditional SEO, or content-led SEO, is the process of manually creating webpages — typically blog posts or landing pages — to target specific keywords being searched for on search engines like Google. While traditional SEO is more manual and might require creating hundreds or thousands of pages manually, it can be very scalable. At my first company, we published thousands of blog posts on our company’s blog.
Programmatic SEO is a specific strategy that involves using a data source to programmatically create a large number of pages. With programmatic SEO, companies are often targeting a large number of long-tail keywords that are very similar, albeit slightly different from one another. You could use programmatic SEO to build a product-led SEO strategy or a strategy that involves creating webpages that, in and of themselves, are the product being offered.
You might use a programmatic SEO strategy to target thousands of keywords that follow this pattern: “car insurance [name of city and state]” — for example, “car insurance Charleston, SC.” In this example, you could roll out thousands of city-specific landing pages for car insurance. And then you might target a keyword like “best car insurance companies” with a blog post or roundup of the best companies and products available. And this is exactly what I did in the past.
Most companies that build programmatic SEO strategies also develop traditional SEO strategies, too, as these two strategies work best together.
In this article, I’ll explain when it makes sense for you to develop a programmatic strategy and when it makes sense to lean into traditional SEO. I’ll also provide a few examples along the way.
When Programmatic SEO Makes Sense
In certain cases, programmatic SEO can help a company move fast and drive large amounts of organic search traffic, all while costing less than manually creating thousands of webpages.
That being said, there are a few things to consider when you’re deciding whether programmatic SEO is a strategy worth deploying.
Are there a large number of closely related keyword variations?
For a programmatic SEO strategy to make sense, you need to be targeting a group of closely related, but different, keywords. Typically, these keywords will have a core head term and then modifiers.
For example, above I mentioned that I served the keyword “car insurance Charleston SC” with a programmatic page. In this example, “car insurance” is the head term, and “Charleston SC” is the modifier.
As you would guess, there are many potential modifiers that you could attach to the head term, such as: “Portland ME,” “New York City,” or “Miami.”. And you could build similar but different pages for each of these locations — ideally, customizing the pages programmatically for each location.
Do you have a data source you can use to enrich your pages?
You’ll need a data source to build your webpages from, or to make each page unique to serve its keyword modifiers.
What you don’t want to do is roll out hundreds or thousands of nearly identical webpages, with H1s and title tags being the only unique components of the pages.
For example, Value Penguin, a company in the insurance comparison space, has thousands of programmatically generated webpages to serve long-tail keywords for insurance products in specific locations:
They’ve programmatically generated a webpage for people looking for car insurance in specific locations. And they enrich these pages automatically with quote data, average costs by provider, and other helpful information.
Value Penguin is building truly unique pages for each modifier, and these pages are helpful for searchers.
Another example would be G2, a software reviews website. They’ve got thousands of webpages serving keywords related to different reviews. The head term would be “review” or “reviews,” and modifiers would be the names of the companies that they have review data for:
G2 has a rich and in-depth data source of company reviews. And they leverage this data source to create truly unique and helpful webpages that aggregate this information for searchers.
As a quick note, know that I don’t consider a generative-AI writing tool like, ChatGPT, by itself, to be a unique data source. You could certainly use generative AI to help enrich your pages, by I believe that you’d need additional data or unique inputs included in your prompts to actually provide unique value within your webpages. What we don’t want to do is publish hundreds or thousands of ChatGPT generated blog posts, and call that programmatic SEO.
Are SERPs preferring programmatically generated pages today?
In SEO, you very rarely want to go against the grain. Before building a programmatic SEO strategy, check the search results for your target keyword to find out whether any programmatic webpages are already ranking for the keywords you’d like to target.
For example, if you Google a potential keyword and see that the entire first page of search results are in-depth editorial pieces of content, and not programmatically generated webpages, then a programmatic webpage probably won’t rank for that keyword.
However, if you see that the search results today are primarily programmatically generated webpages, or that at least a few of the top search results appear to be programmatically generated, you should have confidence that you could also rank a programmatically generated page for the keyword in view.
For example, for the keyword “ClickUp reviews,” the results include both programmatically generated reviews webpages and traditional blog posts:
Given the diversity on this SERP, I think we could target this keyword with either a programmatic webpage or an editorial one.
Do you have the engineering resources available?
Standing up a traditional SEO strategy often requires very little in the way of technical resources, especially if you’re using an off-the-shelf content management system (CMS), like WordPress or Webflow.
However, if you’re standing up a programmatic SEO strategy, you will likely need to dedicate engineering resources internally or hire an engineer to help build out the webpages and connect the data source to them.
An Example of Programmatic SEO
As mentioned above, simply generating hundreds or thousands of blog posts with a tool like ChatGPT isn’t programmatic SEO. In fact, Google would likely call it spam.
But if you’ve got a unique data source that you can use within your prompts, generative AI can be helpful for launching a programmatic SEO strategy.
For example, on a recent episode of the Optimize podcast, I spoke with Alex Ross from Greg, an app that provides plant owners with expert advice and community. Alex and the team have built a wonderful programmatic SEO strategy using ChatGPT.
They’ve published thousands of blog posts for plant owners looking to diagnose health issues with their plants:
But they are generating these webpages from their own user-generated content community. The input to the prompts is primarily from the expertise shared by their platform’s users. ChatGPT packages this data and uses its own training to further enrich it.
The result is highly differentiated content, uniquely helpful webpages, and content that has a moat.
And it’s working for them. As of this writing, the company has published thousands of webpages, is ranking for 671k keywords, and is driving 938k visitors each month from organic search:
When Traditional SEO Makes Sense
While programmatic SEO can be a fantastic strategy for some, traditional SEO, or content-led SEO, is where most companies typically start.
If you are really just getting started with SEO.
If you’ve just launched your website on a fresh domain name, you should be very hesitant to start with programmatic SEO.
I actually chatted with a SaaS startup the other day. They had a very new domain, and they had recently published 12,000 programmatic pages to their domain overnight. Ultimately, Google didn’t even try to crawl or index these pages, and why should they?
In other words, before launching a programmatic SEO strategy, you need to build topical authority and domain authority, or convince Google that there’s a good reason to crawl and index all of your webpages.
By starting with traditional SEO, you can more easily build topical authority, or show Google what your website is a great source of information. And it’s usually a lot easier to build backlinks or naturally acquire backlinks to traditional SEO pages, helping your website’s domain authority.
Do SERPs have in-depth editorial content?
In your keyword research process, you’ll want to look at the SERPs and determine the right type of page to create.
For example, for a highly technical keyword like “Kubernetes cost optimization,” you’ll notice that nearly all of the top search results are very in-depth guides:
There is a lot to say on this topic. And Google is clearly preferring “complete guides” and tutorials, so for this keyword, I’d want to deliver Google something that it’s expecting: an in-depth editorial piece of content.
In short, as you take stock of the primary keywords you want to hit, if you notice that for many or most of them, Google is favoring traditional editorial pieces of content, that is what you want to create.
Are the keywords you want to target substantially different from one another?
If you notice during your keyword research process that each primary keyword you want to serve is substantially unique and different, and that there aren’t clear modifiers upon which to build a programmatic strategy, then these keywords should likely be served by a traditional SEO strategy.
Do you want to repurpose this content for other use cases?
While creating content for SEO is great and all, I love to create content that both hits a primary keyword I want to rank for and can be repurposed and distributed in other ways.
I’ll often repurpose our blog content for channels like LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as customer support and sales processes.
While it’s not necessarily impossible to repurpose programmatically generated webpages for other platforms, it will usually be much more challenging.
In other words, if you want to create content for SEO, but also leverage that content for other purposes and channels, you’ll probably want to start with traditional SEO.
An Example of Traditional SEO
There are so many examples of companies crushing it with traditional SEO. As much as I’d like to promote the work we’re doing on our blog, I’ll pick another example. :)
HubSpot, a company that offers software products for marketing and CRM, is often credited with having a wonderful content-led SEO strategy. Their blog has thousands of pieces of in-depth content.
HubSpot’s blog is ranking for 1.2 mm keywords and driving 3 mm visitors from organic search each month. And if HubSpot were to go out and bid on Google Ads for this same traffic, it would cost them a whopping $6.2 mm each month.
HubSpot targets the different stages of the sales funnel with its blog content. For example, HubSpot targets keywords toward the bottom of the funnel with posts that compare the best marketing automation tools:
They also target evergreen keywords for which the purchasing intent is slow, but they are still getting out in front of folks in their ICP, for example, with this piece of content about sales planning:
Doing Both Together (An Example)
Ultimately, if there is a fit for a programmatic SEO strategy at your company, you should deploy it alongside a traditional SEO strategy.
Zapier, a software company in the automation space, is often credited with having a fantastic programmatic SEO strategy. And that is true; they’ve got thousands of webpages dedicated to ranking for long-tail keywords related to connecting different software products — for example, connecting Stripe to Gmail.
Zapier hosts their programmatic webpages on their /apps directory, and as you can see, this directory is ranking for more than 90,000 keywords, and driving more than 65,000 visitors per month from organic search:
However, when you look at Zapier’s blog, located on the /blog path, you see that their traditional SEO, or content-led SEO, strategy is driving significantly more traffic than their programmatic SEO strategy. Zapier’s blog is ranking for more than 550,000 keywords and driving more than two million visitors per month from organic search:
If you’re planning to launch a programmatic SEO strategy, doing it alongside a traditional SEO strategy is ultimately going to be really helpful when it comes to indexing and ranking. And that would be my advice for any company thinking about programmatic SEO.
Final Thoughts
Programmatic SEO, if it makes sense for your company, will allow you to quickly scale to hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of webpages. With pSEO, you’ll be able to target very long-tail keywords efficiently, without needing to manually build individual webpages to serve what might be low volume keywords.
If you’re just getting started with SEO, you should be careful not to roll out too many programmatic SEO pages at once. My advice would be to scale into it, watching for indexing along the way. Google Search Console (GSC) provides indexing information, and Google will tell you why they’ve decided not to index a webpage — for example, if they’ve discovered the URL but decided not to crawl it.
Traditional SEO is where most companies start. Traditional SEO often requires creating editorial content or blog posts, but that isn’t necessarily always the case. You could roll out a traditional SEO strategy with landing and product pages, too.
At the end of the day, these strategies work best together.
