Before we start discussing the best practices for Programmatic SEO, you need to understand what exactly is Programmatic SEO.
What is programmatic SEO?
An SEO strategy where you create many templated but unique webpages from a data source, to rank for long-tail keywords in search engines
This is, in contrast, to manually writing long-form content like blog posts on high-volume search terms
How it Works ?
Example: a weather website.
If you make a new weather website, it’ll probably take quite a while until you can rank for competitive search terms like “weather”, “weather app”, or “real-time weather”.
The programmatic SEO approach would be to make individual web pages targeting the following search query patterns:
{{country}} weather
{{city}} weather
{{city}} weather in {{month}}
the weather tomorrow in {{city}}
10-day {{city}} weather
hourly weather in {{city}}
Your website now has tens (hundreds?) of thousands of opportunities to rank in search engines
Since you’re competing for lower-competition keywords, you have more of a chance to rank quickly
Adding more pages, it’s as simple as adding data to your data source.
Each web page just has just 2 jobs
– Satisfy the search intent for that particular search query as best it can (you’ll rank for a “family” of similar queries too)
– Link to other relevant pages on your site.
What do you need to start using this strategy?
Interesting content: Don’t add web pages for the sake of increasing your page count
If you go over the top, you’ll get penalized by search engines. Google is smart.
Think from your visitors’ perspective – does this content actually need to be a standalone page?
Your data source: This can be a hosted relational database, an external CMS, or a spreadsheet. You can use a google sheet. It enables collaboration, and I like the flexibility of adding rows/columns/sheets/formulas
Templates for the data: The HTML template that gets rendered with your data. Everything necessary for displaying the page should be in your template, or in your data source
This includes:
– the “meat” of your content
– page headers
– meta tags
– images
– links to other pages
Best Practices for programmatic SEO
Important things to consider for SEO, (especially programmatic SEO)
– your URL patterns
– text length
– internal linking between pages
– h1/h2/title structure
– sitemap to index the many new pages
– non-duplicate content
– site speed
Use an SEO audit tool early and often!
We recommend using SEMRUSH for all those SEO analysis.
