Every year it becomes even more important for brands to build an online presence. SEO accounts for a significant part of site traffic as well as revenue. It builds brand awareness as well as traffic.
Most leading businesses in the B2C segment and sometimes B2B segment like Amazon, Yelp, and others use programmatic SEO to rank. These brands appear with their results on the first page.
How do they do this?
Programmatic SEO is one of the best ways to boost organic traffic in this age. And with tons of easily available tools there’s nothing stopping you from creating pages at scale and driving traffic to your site.
How do massive programmatic sites pull this off? By using educational, relevant, engaging content to answer queries and drive real traffic. Let’s understand the inner workings.
What is Programmatic SEO?
Think of programmatic SEO as a tool that enables you to make hundreds of thousands of webpages with just code.
What do you want to achieve with your content marketing efforts? Is it to generate leads, boost sales, increase brand awareness, or establish thought leadership? Your goals will help you create a more targeted and effective content marketing strategy.
What types of content do you want to create? Blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, eBooks, whitepapers, webinars, or social media posts? Select the content types that will help you achieve your content marketing goals and resonate with your target audience.
Since these pages are created based on keywords, you can manually select or automatically direct the program to create the types of pages you want. With some direction from SEO, you can create several hundreds of landing pages and choose different focus keywords or variations of groups of keywords.
To drive leads with content, you need to have a clear content marketing strategy in place. A content marketing strategy involves publishing tons of pages with programmatic SEO.
a. Defining Your Goals
b. Creating a Content Calendar
When will you publish your content? How often will you publish new content? Creating a content calendar will help you stay organized and consistent with your content marketing efforts. You can utilize task management tools and other content marketing platforms to help create your own collaborative content calendar.
Identify Your Main Topics: Begin by identifying the main topics or themes that are most relevant to your business. These can be broad topics or more specific areas of focus. For example, if you work for a MVP development company, you can write about startups and technologies they use.
Professional SEO companies stay on top of the latest trends and changes in search engine algorithms, ensuring that your keyword strategy remains effective over time, thus, keeping your website optimized and helping you achieve higher rankings in search engine results pages.
Programmatic SEO aims to create content with the same depth as that of a traditionally published article but repeated at huge scale. Its purpose is to ensure that each page serves a unique and essential purpose in the customer journey.
The famous travel giant(Tripadvisor) has a webpage for almost every possible travel location or travel related keyword. Trip advisor for instance ranks for every travel related query. And given the huge focus on content, the remaining article will focus on Tripadvisor at several places.
The company has pages for each and every city worldwide. The layout of these pages is similar and they are all geared toward specific keywords.
The company has thousands of similar pages for almost every city worldwide. The layout and design of the content are identical for all. Since each page is tailored to a specifc keyword the page ranks for that keyword leveraging on the massive domain authority of Tripadvisor.com.
How to Do Programmatic SEO?
1. Conduct exhaustive keyword research
Keyword research is the first and the most seminal step of programmatic SEO conducted in the following stages:- Identify all head terms
- Tripadvistor lists things to do places to travel
- BrushDial lists several pages for its brushes like anime brushes, cartoon brushes and so on
- Yelp lists restaurants and gyms
- Walmart has groceries and electronics
- Kamayobloggers lists discount pages and free trials
Building Links at Scale
There’s no set process for link building in programmatic SEO. Companies are often on their own to find strategies that work for them.
Ego-Bait that Scales
Marketplaces like eBay and Yelp use ego-bait to get links. If you ever visited a site that has a tripadvisitor logo and recommended by tripadvistor this code, badge or star to a business helps cement authority and also gives links to Trupadvisotrs.
This embed code is eays to generate and websites tend to carry them around as badges of honor.
Head terms are broad categories of both relevant and high-volume keywords a business wants to rank for on serch engine results pages.
For instance the head terms for a travel site are hotels, flights, itinerary among others. Once you choose the keywords check search volumes with GOogle trends.
- Identify all modifiers
In the next stage identify relevant modifiers. Modifiers are terms that describe head terms. Some modifiers can be 2 star hotels, budget rooms or direct flights.
- Primary modifiers: Using primary modifiers you can create a whole new category
- Secondary modifiers: Using these terms you can describe the head terms in a better manner.
Next are local modifiers that contain a head term together with a place for which you want to get local leads. Local modifiers include words like hotels in Mumbair or direct flights to Mumbai. Use these local modifiers in your programmatic SEO strategy to boost rankings.
- Compile all keywords in one mega list: Finally, create a full list of all keywords as well as modifiers present. Having all of these keywords together in one place helps you streamline the process and avoid both confusion and duplicate content.
2. Conduct thorough competitor research
This step helps you understand what bigger competitors are doing. Once you have a list of keywords, enter them on Google to see who competes against those.
Study the top results and check how these businesses create their title tags.
3. Create landing pages at scale
This is the most critical part of any programmatic SEO. Once you have both keywords and competitor information you can create landing pages at scale. Determine searchers’ intent for keywords and then proceed to creating landing pages accordingly.
Ideally you can do this by looking at related searches at the bottom of Google’s search results page for specific phrases.
The related searches area will show you intent based keywords that help you create landing pages. As an addition step to reinforce your own understanding of programmatic SEO best practices follow brands that regulary implement programmatic SEO.
Think of the related searches area as the goldmine that gives you access to tons of intent-rich keywords to create landing pages at scale.
Additionally, you can follow the leads of brands that regularly implement programmatic SEO. These brands are quickly able to produce content at large scale using templatized formats such as listicles, user reviews, Q&A forums, and location-based content. G2 for instance has the same review setup for every software they cover on their site. It generally has a description followed a star-rating system for user generated reviews.
4. Interlink at a large scale
Finally you need links built at a massive scale. This scales your programmatic SEO strategy further. Link building boils down to producing quality content at scale to add value to readers. Focus on publishing industry insights and other data that will help you get media attention.
This means you can use ego baits to boost your backlink profile. This includes featuring other brands, businesses and putting and embedded badge on your site say Tripadvisor recommended.
Common Programmatic SEO Challenges and How to Fix Them
There are several challenges associated with implementing programmatic SEO. The most common ones are as below:
1. Google indexing challenges
Google has limited resources, as vast as they may be. That means not all your landing pages are indexed quickly. Even if you added thousands of pages.
What to do in this case is to first list and get your most important pages indexed first. These pages will have a better content quality and Google will likewise see them as more valuable. This helps maintain your indexing speed as well as get you better rankings. Make sure you have a great site architecture and both internal and external links.
As an additional step, implement good site architecture.
2. Google penalizes thin content
Google’s official documentation states that Google penalizes automatically generated, also known as thin content. This is content that only includes keywords but barely adds any value to the readers. Programmatic SEO tools can sometimes add sparse content to web pages that get labeled as thin content.
To avoid this, add a lot of descriptive text, useful charts, and even user-generated content.
3. Duplicate content issues
Duplicate content is content that appears multiple times on your website. The issue of duplicacy can often occur when you have to create content on a vast scale. And this can negatively impact your search engine rankings.
To avoid this, you must use an online duplicate content checker. You can also identify the duplicate URLs, use the canonical tag to tell Google its a copy, and change the title tag.
Benefits of Implementing Programmatic SEO
Programmatic SEO is a great way to save time and money while improving your search engine rankings. Here are some of the most notable benefits of implementing programmatic SEO.
1. Increased organic traffic
First and foremost, programmatic SEO can help to attract as much organic traffic as possible. A successful programmatic SEO strategy can boost your website’s domain authority, build a robust backlinking profile, and create a superb user experience by addressing various user search intents.
2. Improved scalability
For businesses like Tripadvisor that attract a large number of different search queries, manually creating content is both time-consuming and expensive. By using programmatic SEO, these businesses can 10x content production. Each of your landing pages can address specific questions, thus enhancing engagement quickly.
3. Better ROI
Lastly, programmatic SEO is much better in terms of yield than other business processes.
Conclusion
What do you think of the different steps you need to take with programmatic SEO for your site? Let us know in the comments below.
