With each passing year, it becomes more crucial for brands to make their online presence impactful. Programmatic SEO will help you with that! Many SaaS clients have seen programmatic SEO’s profound influence on a website’s organic traffic.
What is Programmatic SEO?
Although programmatic SEO has been around for years now, it’s only recently that SEO experts have been experimenting with programmatic SEO. And it’s safe to say that the results they are witnessing are jaw-droppingly amazing! Now you must be wondering what makes it different from the old SEO techniques. Well, programmatic SEO is a tool that lets you create landing pages at scale using AI. The landing pages it creates for you are solely based on long-tail keywords, and if done right, businesses and brands can capitalise on both high and low volume search queries with transactional intent and grab the top rank in the SERPs. If you follow the right programmatic SEO techniques, you can skyrocket your traffic in no time. All you need to do is to make a page template and create variations of these pages with your data. That’s the whole gist of programmatic SEO!
For example, if you search for “activities to do in Birmingham,” Tripadvisor will always appear near the top of the results because they use programmatic SEO to reach their target audience by providing them with a bunch of SERPs.
What makes programmatic SEO vital?
With the help of programmatic SEO, you can assign pages for every category, product, and service available on your website. You can also avoid creating each of these pages yourself, which saves money, effort, and time. Because each of these pages is optimised for a large number of keywords or a specific set of keywords, they will all rank highly in organic search results.
A quick rundown of context: organic search results are the first ones that pop up when a user types in a given phrase or keyword. Advertisements don’t count as part of organic search results. The element that makes them ”organic” is that they earn their spot using SEO and not by paying over the odds.
Programmatic SEO holds the power to drive a mammoth of traffic to your website without going out of the way for your business end. You don’t need to hire a bunch of people to curate content for hundreds of web pages, saving you ample time and money.
How to do Programmatic SEO?
There has been a lot of chatter in the SEO community about the quantity of content and how it will make your search ranking climb in no time. While it is partially true, programmatic SEO is an effective way to bypass the harrowingly slow process. It’s less about the quality of content, and the main focus is on creating a good user experience and the number of landing pages with transactional intent. Now, to answer the question “how to do Programmatic SEO?” let’s cut to the chase and learn how you can do programmatic SEO.
Find Thousands of Keywords
Keyword research is one of the key SEO strategies, but in programmatic SEO, you must modify this practice to a massive scale. Here’s what you should do:
Explore Your Head Terms
Once you sign up for programmatic SEO, it all comes down to finding head terms or head keywords that you can target. These head terms/keywords are the main factors in whether your programmatic SEO campaign is going to work or not. So, you must put more effort into searching keywords your users are looking for that you can rank for. Here are some examples of head terms:
- London: activities to do, best sights, hotels
- vacations: getaways, hotels, Airbnb
- Walmart: gadgets, groceries
Once you get the hang of it, you can check the volume of your head terms using a keyword research tool. Google Trends and the keyword generator are incredible tools for finding new keywords.
Identify Long Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords will be known as the modifiers alongside your head term. Each landing page should be constructed to include your head term plus one unique long-tail keyword. For instance, Tripadvisor uses their head term “activities to do in/things to do in” with modifiers such as “Arizona”, “San Diego”, or “Phoenix”, with each city having its landing page. Google Trends is extremely useful since you can see the cyclicality of keywords and compare different keywords.
Find Your Modifiers
Your head terms are likely to have a big chunk of volume. However, it’s more probable that the actual volume comes when combining them with a modifier. You can utilize the same tools, i.e. Google Trends and Keyword Generator, to see your modifier search volume. There are two categories in modifiers, for example:
Primary Modifier:
- Food: cuisines, Italian, Mexican, Indian, Japanese
- Clothing: clothes for kids, clothing for women, wedding dresses
- Bags: handbags with pockets, leather bags, leather wallets
Secondary Modifier:
- Food: pre-workout snacks, keto-friendly food, cheap restaurants, restaurants around me
- Clothing: belts, hats, polo shirts, puffer jackets
- Bags: hand carry bags, carry-on suitcases, cheap suitcases
Primary modifiers generate a whole new category, while secondary modifiers describe the head term. Secondary modifiers can either modify the head term or the primary modifier.
Create Landing Pages with Search Intent
Many target keywords have low competitiveness; writing long-tail, quality and authoritative content will be less necessary. The key to programmatic SEO is understanding the user’s intentions. Most programmatic SEO strategies revolve around transactional intent, meaning that users are looking to take a specific action or find a particular solution. Long-tail keywords, these niche searches are often lower in the funnel and therefore signify a high intent.
Generate Pages Automatically at Scale with Data
To start the process of generating pages, you must begin with collecting data for each page. Oftentimes, you may already have the necessary data readily available. Other times, you may need to research and curate the data manually. Regarding software tools, there are a bunch of leading platforms for generating pages programmatically, including, Webflow, WordPress and Hubspot.
Bottom Line
Programmatic SEO is not a cakewalk. However, any business seeking to gain organic traffic by publishing at scale will see a positive impact of this SEO strategy. Make sure to create content that is helpful to users. Otherwise, Google will see your pages as tricky, and all your work and efforts will go down the drain. Programmatic SEO can be a tremendous organic growth tool for SaaS companies, given the infinite possibilities. Aside from its search engine optimization implications, this strategy also aligns with other important factors, such as efficiency, scalability, and speed to market.
