Programmatic SEO guide 2023: Basics and Challenges
Time to program your way to the top
Programmatic SEO is the future of search engine optimization. Ambitious much? Well, there is a good reason for that.
It is based on data and metrics that help to optimize your content. It’s a methodical, data-driven approach that helps you fully understand the user intent behind keywords and creates dozens of pages of high-quality, optimized content.
In this guide, we’ll show you what programmatic SEO is, how it works, and why it’s the future of SEO.
We’ll also give you some tips on how to get started with programmatic SEO.
What is Programmatic SEO?
As a business, it can be hard to make consistent web content your customers find informative and helpful. That’s where programmatic SEO comes in. It allows you to create large numbers of pages using specialized code with the help of keywords you select or input to tell the program what type of pages to make for you.
These new types of pages will be created in real-time, meaning they’re always up-to-date with the latest information on your topic.
Programmatic SEO is one strategy that can help you create a lot of landing pages with similar content and keywords in order to grab the attention of potential customers.
There are so many different ways to optimize your content for search engines and improve efficiency:
- Keyword research: Helps you identify new keywords to target.
- Competitor analysis: Keeps an eye on your competition and helps you adjust your strategy accordingly.
- Rank tracking: This helps you track your progress and monitor your rankings.
- Link building: Automates link-building tasks such as link prospecting and outreach.
If you’re looking to improve your SEO game, programmatic SEO could be a good solution for you.
Basics of Programmatic SEO
Programmatic SEO is the process of using automation to manage and optimize your website for search engine visibility. The goal of programmatic SEO is to increase your website’s organic traffic and improve your search engine rankings.
There are a number of ways to automate your SEO, including using tools like SEM Rush and Ahrefs, as well as hiring an agency or consultant.
When it comes to automating your SEO, there are a few things you need to keep in mind:
- Make sure your website is well-optimized before you start automation. This means having high-quality content, a responsive design, fast loading speeds, and more.
- Research the right keywords for your business and make sure they’re included in your website’s content (including title tags, meta descriptions, etc.).
- Monitor your website’s progress regularly so you can adjust your programmatic SEO strategy as needed. This includes tracking your organic traffic and keyword rankings over time.
Programmatic SEO Benefits
Programmatic SEO can help you save time and money while improving your SEO strategy. Here are some of the benefits of programmatic SEO:
Improved Quality
Programmatic SEO can also help improve the quality of your results. This is because it allows you to scale your efforts quickly and efficiently. When done correctly, programmatic SEO can help you achieve better results in less time than traditional methods.
Greater Flexibility
Another benefit of programmatic SEO is that it offers greater flexibility than traditional methods. With programmatic SEO, you can customize your approach to fit your unique needs and goals. This means that you can tailor your strategy to match your budget, resources, and goals.
Better ROI
Finally, programmatic SEO can provide a better return on investment than traditional methods. This is because it helps you achieve better results in less time while freeing up your resources to focus on other aspects of your business.
How to do Programmatic SEO?
In this article, we will give you a basic overview of how you can create a programmatic SEO strategy.
Search for keywords
There are many different types of keywords to look out for. Search engines like Google and Bing may penalize your site if you have spun content, so be sure to pick good words that fit naturally in a sentence.
Head terms
To maximize your chances of ranking well for a particular keyword, a good place to start is by including broader keywords. For example, with Tripadvisor, an important term might be “hotels” while with Yelp it might be “restaurants” or “bars.”
Keywords are search terms that users type in Google, and they can hold a lot of search volume. Some tools like Google Trends can help you find the keyword’s search volume, or you can use related searches to figure out what kind of keywords they are. These head terms are often associated with modifiers, which brings us to our next type of keyword.
Modifiers
Semantic keywords are keywords that are related to your head terms but are specific and offer more options for search engine optimization. Searching for these words will probably yield higher search volume and success rates. This category is split into two types: primary and secondary.
If you’d like to keep your keywords organized, make a list of all your head terms and modifiers.
Search the web for possible competitors
To find out the sites that are achieving the best results, type your keywords into Google. Those will be your competitors.
Once you’ve identified your competitors, you can use a keyword tool to find out which keywords they rank for and how many times they come up in search results.
Create high-quality landing pages
Programmatic SEO is all about scaling landing pages. One of the best strategies for doing this is to create landing pages around keyword-related search intent. Remember, though, that you don’t define what search intent people are looking for – Google’s algorithms do that. Spend some time analyzing SERPs to understand which keywords are ranking and what the search intent behind them is. One way to do this is to look at the “Searches related to” section of the SERPs.
Programmatic SEO challenges: How to fight them?
When it comes to programmatic SEO challenges, there are a lot of things to consider. Sometimes the results include generated pages that won’t be helpful for your site. They can also be harmful to your website. So programmatic optimization is a subtle craft that needs to be used wisely.
Some of the biggest challenges faced when using programmatic SEO include:
Crawlability
When your website has thousands of pages, it’s important to figure out what pages should rank highest in search. If Google can’t find the page, it can’t rank it.
It’s also important to establish an internal linking pattern so that the search engine always knows where to find more information about specific topics. For best results, each page should be properly categorized and accompanied by a sitemap.
To help crawlers find new pages, make sure you create an HTML sitemap. A sitemap can be the most effective strategy on a large-scale website that has millions of pages.
The best way to organize the site in categories is to establish a logical structure using hierarchical navigation. You might also want to include your priority pages first… that way they’re most likely to get noticed.
Not having enough content
A lot of SEO programmatic landing pages are based on visuals. There are images, videos, and graphics, but don’t forget the descriptive text.
The descriptive text has a huge influence on ranking. Without enough text, Google will treat content on your page as thin content, leading to a lower scale because inadequate content for Google is low value.
The best thing to do is to have both – good text helps interpret data better, and graphic content provides a more attractive experience for users.
Original content
When creating content on a large scale, you can fall into a severe trap if you create duplicate content. There are a number of causes for this problem; some are identical to others and some are quite close. Identical content is a common issue because you create content following the same pattern for every page.
There are two types of this content: internal duplicate content, which shows up on one domain but not elsewhere on the same website, or external duplicate content, where two websites have either the same or similar content on their respective pages that Google needs to choose between.
To avoid this problem as much as possible, use an online duplicate content checker and see how Google analyzes your web page so you can address it accordingly.
In conclusion
I hope this article on programmatic SEO has given you a better understanding of what it is and how it can help your business.
Programmatic SEO is a great way to automate your SEO tasks and save time, which is why more and more businesses are turning to it. If you want to increase your online visibility and attract more customers, then programmatic SEO is definitely something you should consider.
We know a bit about SEO ourselves and if your business needs some re-wiring, we will be happy to help in reaching your goals.
The Benefits of Blogging for Business
Blogging for businesses can feel insanely daunting, but don’t worry! You aren’t alone. It’s very common to feel intimidated about writing the perfect blog post that will give you the benefits of blogging for business. However, when done correctly, it can be a really amazing tool for marketing.
You might ask, “will blogging help my business?” or “do blogs increase SEO?” Blogs have a great number of viewership. You can connect with your audience in a personal and authentic way and build a community while bringing new viewership to your site.
The many benefits of blogging for business
There are an abundance of benefits from blogging that businesses can acquire. First, blogging for your business is a great way to increase website traffic. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is essentially the gateway to your website, and if you are not optimizing your content, it will not be discovered.
The Google algorithm can be tricky, but by blogging, you can easily bring in website traffic if you have a proper understanding of how to utilize keywords and the different factors that go into website ranking. To do this, you will need to have a strong understanding of who your client is. Thoroughly researching your customers is the first step to understanding why your customers should or will care about what you have to say.
Ultimately, you want to bring people into your website through the various points of their customer journey. After you have a strong understanding of who your audience is and the kinds of questions they are asking, then you can look for keywords that could match to identify blog topics. Blogs are like the initial hook to your website for many customers and can provide tremendous organic traffic growth rate when done correctly.
Another benefit to blogging is enabling credibility to be built with your audience by sharing your expertise. By writing relevant information in your blogs, your readers will consider you to be known as a thought leader or industry expert.
The importance of customer loyalty
Gaining customer loyalty comes with gaining customer trust, and if customers view you as an industry expert, they will trust you to have the best knowledge in the field. Becoming an industry leader is clearly one of the largest benefits of blogging for business.
Sharing your area of expertise through a blog will enable you to build credibility with your audience. Writing relevant information will be useful for your readership. In turn, this simple action will allow you to be known as an industry expert or thought leader.
If you have the customer’s trust, you are halfway to gaining their loyalty. For this reason, becoming an industry leader is a huge advantage and most certainly one of the benefits of blogging for business.
Next, blogging gives you the opportunity to target a specific type of customer. You can target your audience with your blog posts, reaching out to customers that are in various parts of the customer journey.
The increase in sales
A big and often overlooked connection and benefit of blogging for business is the increase in sales. Many fail to realize that by attracting a broader range of relevant buyers through blogging consistency, you will start to see enhanced returns. You will gain the awareness of potential customers and engage with them through your blogs, increasing customer engagement to your website.
If a customer has their question answered on your website, they will more than likely return to you to seek out more information or purchase a product as they now view you as a trustworthy source that is worth their time. This, in turn, will increase sales and become one of the many benefits of blogging for businesses.
Brand awareness
Another benefit of blogging is that you have the opportunity to bring more brand awareness and reinforce your brand. Blogging creates a unique space for you to tell your story and share the company’s personality. Your blog should be a continuation of your brand with a consistent style, tone, and color palette. You are able to strengthen that personal connection with your customers through your blog.
New relationships are another essential benefit of blogging for businesses. As mentioned, many connections can often be made with your customers and even other companies as well. Ultimately, you are adding to your industry’s community.
By engaging in your industry’s community and providing useful information, you will build trust with customers and create valuable links for future business opportunities. As such, these new relationships are one of the fundamental benefits of blogging for business.
The biggest advantage of business blogs is that they are essentially a fairly low cost method to gain publicity and website traction. By creating a consistent blog, it opens up the opportunity for others to link back to it and share your content. This will greatly increase your website traffic because backlinks support your site in the search engine algorithm and show you as a trustworthy and knowledgeable source. This will allow for your website to rank higher and more customers will view it.
How to achieve success with blogging
There are a couple of things that need to be crossed off and considered before you can achieve the benefits of blogging for businesses. First, consistency is key. Being consistent in your blogging is extremely important as it will drive more traffic to the site.
Next, the more blogs that you can pump out, the better it will be for your business. When you start writing, keep writing! The more blog content you put out there, the more opportunities your small business will have to increase search engine optimization and bring in organic traffic to your site. When thinking about frequency, posting multiple times per week is ideal.
Quality matters
Yes, you should be posting as frequently as possible, but you also want quality blog posts. Many companies just pump out blogs without doing the research needed for those posts, so it actually ends up harming the site rather than helping it.
The search engine algorithm is tricky, as mentioned. It wants to be able to identify your site for a particular reason to then help users find what they are looking for. If you are posting random blogs that aren’t actually useful to your audience and send a confusing message to the algorithm, search engines will place you at the bottom of the list so as to prevent recommending searchers incorrect information.
You want your blogs to make sense with the rest of the content on your site. If your company is about boats, don’t spend a blog post focusing on scuba gear. All of your keywords within your different blogs should tie into each other.
Shareability aspect
One of the best things about small business blogging is the shareability aspect. You can promote your own blog content through social media platforms, and guess what? Your audience can too!
When people read your blog, they can feel that they have knowledge and ownership of what they just read and choose to share with their own network, being the pioneer in their social circle with that information. When this happens, other social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram can create a stronger tie to your site and boost you in the search engine algorithm.
This is the beauty of blogging: you can invite feedback and questions, creating a two-way conversation with your customers. Blogging develops an interactive platform on a particular topic. The more engagement you have on your article, the more feedback for improvement you will have, which will, in turn, boost sales and boost you in the search engine algorithm.
Blogging and its benefits
As you can see, there is a tremendous list of benefits of blogging for businesses. You can transform your engagement with your customers, create brand awareness, increase site traffic, and boost sales. The opportunities from blogging are endless when approached the right way.
Future of SEO in 2022: SEO Trends to Know
SEO is constantly evolving, and to be successful with your SEO strategies, you need to stay on top of the latest trends in order to ensure your content strategies are effective. Search Engine Optimization is extremely critical to attract consumers to your online platform. If you are still relying on SEO strategies and tactics that you’ve used for years, it’s probably time to evolve to better understand the environment today.
Many of the older strategies aren’t as effective in the landscape of SEO today, and some of these strategies can even negatively impact SEO. This is why it is imperative that you continue to adapt to the future SEO trends. To ensure that you will be able to make the most significant impact in 2022, here are the future SEO trends.
Shift to Long-Form Content
In order to create relevant content and a strong digital content strategy that captivates website visitors, you will need to shift to a long-form content strategy. Long-form content has proven to be the most popular, drawing in the most traffic and shares compared to short-term content. Long-form content is about 3000 words or even more. By moving your focus to developing quality, long-form content can greatly improve your search rankings. Long-form content does, however, need to keep the reader engaged to be successful, which is a lot more challenging with more words.
So how are you supposed to keep readers engaged? To accomplish this, it is very important to break your content up into sub-sections, utilizing H2 and H3 subheadings that make your content easily skimmable and scannable. You want to eliminate big chunks of text that is usually pretty intimidating for readers to look at, especially if readers are viewing your blogs on a small screen. The goal is to basically make your readers browse through the article. It should also be very easy to share with a clear call-to-action which will improve your SEO even further. To do this, include sharing links that are easy to follow with a click of a button.
Accomplishing this task isn’t easy, and many companies tend to hire a high-quality content writing service to develop this long-form style content.
Refining page speed
Page speed is one of the biggest factors in successful SEO and determines core web vitals. More and more users are using the Internet on their smartphones or laptops. Therefore, it has become very important that businesses provide a fast and seamless website experience. Google recently launched its Core Web Vitals as its newest ranking factors. This new technology analyzes how long it takes for the largest element to load, how long it takes for elements on the page to respond to clicks, and how many elements move on the page while it loads.
Google is basically looking at how long it takes for users to start interacting with your business’s content once they land on the site. Since page speed will be a prominent factor in site rankings, it is essential to audit your page speed often. By consistently checking your page speed, you will be able to implement any needed updates and avoid feeling overwhelmed if your page speed is dragging your content down.
Artificial Intelligence Will Play a Bigger Role in SEO
Artificial intelligence, otherwise known as AI, is continuing to change how users interact with content online. Because of this, artificial intelligence will play a large role in how to create relevant content strategies and future SEO trends. AI will begin to dictate how content is ranked in the future. A prime example of this is Google’s AI algorithm that is called RankBrain, which is set to become the most important ranking factor in Google’s search engine results pages in 2022. This new release from Google left many wondering how their SEO would be affected. What is the best way to cater your SEO strategy to work with this new artificial intelligence algorithm?
Google hasn’t shared a lot of details yet on how RankBrain exactly works, but it seems that user experience is one of the most defining factors in ranking content. The amount of time visitors spend on your website and the click-through rate will be telltale signs of how RankBrain will prioritize your content. This means that it is critical that you develop extremely well organized and helpful content for your users so that they are left captivated and engaged, and therefore the click-through rate and time spent on your website will increase.
Mobile-Friendliness is Critical
Now more than ever, it is very important to make sure your content is mobile-friendly. According to Google, it is a large ranking factor and has been since 2015. Today, it is best to optimize your content for mobile devices as it is the most prominent way of looking at content online for users. Google even rolled out mobile-first indexing back in 2019, which basically means that the search engine prioritizes the mobile version of a website when it ranks the content in order. The primary version is the mobile version over the desktop version, as it is estimated that 75% of internet users access the internet solely through mobile devices.
Google makes it very easy to figure out if your mobile site is effective with its free mobile friendly test. This test will help you figure out what issues you should fix with your mobile site, which will help you rank higher. Tools like these are extremely helpful in fixing mobile user issues that could be negatively impacting your SEO. You need to ensure that your mobile content is optimized to be successful in creating a mobile friendly site.
Future SEO Trends Should Include Video
Video is so prominent in effective SEO. Online video platforms have become increasingly popular over the last couple of years and will continue to become more and more popular. If you haven’t already, you should develop an SEO strategy that incorporates some kind of video aspect. Many businesses have already begun using platforms like TikTok and YouTube to involve consumers and users. Voice search has even become a popular way of searching for content online, and appealing to these future SEO trends will give you success in your SEO strategy.
By developing optimized video content, you can have a successful and effective SEO strategy moving forward. To optimize your content, you can focus on the video channel description by adding an overview that is user-friendly to your video content. Don’t necessarily cram your video descriptions with a bunch of words, but a few user specific keywords or even hashtags can help push your content to its intended audience.
First-party data hub with SEO traffic
Companies like Google are beginning to retire the third-party cookies, which means that it is crucial for businesses to build out their first-party data hubs. By building out first-party data hubs, your company will be able to obtain and create tailored marketing initiatives to drive company revenue without relying on cookies. Search will play a significant role in building the data hubs as your business can create its online presence through search engine optimization. Then, you can utilize those attracted users and turn them into leads using email newsletters, remarketing techniques, and other digital marketing initiatives.
With cookies coming to an end, it is essential not to wait to develop your first-party data hub, as it will play a massive role in the success of your SEO strategy.
Fulfilling Google’s EAT Principle
Google continuously emphasizes that content quality is crucial for successful ranking, and this won’t change for future SEO trends. Many are still left wondering what exactly quality content means and how to achieve it. The easiest way to improve the quality of your content to match SEO strategy is to follow the EAT principle, which stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. According to Google, these factors determine a web page’s quality, and businesses need to be aware of how to utilize these effectively while developing their content.
The biggest thing you can think of while creating quality content is thinking about the user. Who is the user, and what are they looking for? What is the user search intent? Who would most likely be your target audience? This will help you better understand what kind of content you should be creating to appeal to your target audience’s values. By fully understanding exactly what your target consumer is looking for, you will develop content that is intriguing to your readers and will encourage more clicks. Don’t forget to also focus on the trustworthiness aspect of your content by backing up your facts with reputable sources.
Successful SEO in 2022
By following these future SEO trends, you will be set up to have a successful search engine optimization strategy. Ensuring that your content is thoughtful and beneficial to the user while creating a seamless and simple user experience will bring you more traffic in 2022.
Important SEO tips and tricks
Understanding SEO services is crucial for maintaining a strong online presence and drawing consistent traffic to your business website. If you are looking to increase brand awareness, the first step is to understand that thousands of people are looking for content just like yours every day, and the way that you can help them find it is through SEO strategy. Many people overlook SEO strategies because they think that by putting their content online, it will be noticed. But you are competing with tons of businesses, and to really stand out from the crowd, you have to know how to optimize your content.
It takes quite a bit of research and experimentation to stay on top of your SEO strategy as it is constantly evolving with new best practices, but there are many helpful tools, tips, and tricks to guide you through the process. If your SEO is done right and combined with other technical and marketing strategies, it can help your business succeed with strong rankings and front page landings on Google search. In fact, did you know that the front page of Google search receives 95% of all web traffic? It’s crucial to keep your SEO intact and on strategy for a successful business.
Using SEO strategy and getting a better grasp on how it works can totally change your ranking on Google. Some of the tips below will help you improve your online strategy and master the art that is SEO.
Create Commanding Content
Develop content that is relevant and useful for your target audience that is even better than the content that is already out there for a specific set of keywords. A lot of the time, this means writing commanding or authoritative content in a long-form that comes from a reliable source and can compete with professional publications.
To write valuable and engaging content for your target audience, you have to have a solid understanding of who your target audience really is. To do this, take time to understand your target consumer and their persona. What is your target audience’s demographic, psychographic, and even geographic location? What do they like to do, or where do they live? Once you have an understanding of who this consumer is, you will be able to understand what they will most likely be searching for and can form your content around their search.
Develop a Varied Content Marketing Strategy
There is no specific one-of-a-kind trick that will keep your site in the top position since Google uses multiple factors when ranking their websites. By creating relevant content that is varied, it will help your audience find it quickly. It is also great if the original content has links to your social media content and the other way around. Many people find content through social media these days. It is best practice to intertwine your different marketing channels with inbound links. The more opportunities there are that lead to your website directly, the better. Make sure you are looking for keywords and topics that are currently trending to increase your chance of being found amongst the many other websites out there.
Don’t forget to audit
Auditing your competition is crucial to make sure you are optimizing and creating relevant content. The search engine rankings for a website change based on about three things. The most important is the site’s own optimization. Once you nail this, the second component is the site’s positioning compared to its competitors’ positioning. Lastly, the searcher’s intent makes up the third component to decide website ranking. With this being said, if you can figure out how to improve the website besides your competitors, making it more relevant in the consumer’s mind, you will move up in the search rankings. This is where understanding your consumer better than your competitors comes in.
Spend time on long-form content
Long-form content with an average of about 1,800 words makes up the majority of content on the first page of Google for any keyword. Comprehensive long-form content is the quickest and most tangible fix to improve your SEO. It can be done through FAQ or specific headers that include targeted key terms throughout a website.
Create readable content
While this may seem painfully obvious that you should create content that is appropriate and relevant to your audience with the correct keywords, many overlook this and just pile on content that they deem will be popular. If the content is not filled with clear and concise writing that makes sense for the viewer, no one will see it. Don’t get caught up with super technical requirements, but it is important to have strong readability, not just a keyword-focused page. The content should be interesting and very relevant to your brand. Don’t mislead consumers with clickbait headers, and make sure that your keywords are used properly.
Pillar articles
Google can get confused on what to prioritize when there is a lot of content. Pillar articles are very detailed articles depicting how to do something. These can help Google figure out what you are talking about. Also, if you include a table of contents at the beginning of the articles that link back to different parts of the post, Google will favor this and rank your content higher among the rest.
Elaborate meta descriptions and titles
You should try to maximize the character limit for meta descriptions and tags using qualifiers or even adding the current year of the article. Common successful qualifiers include words like “shocking” or “important” that will draw a reader in. The more robust your title and meta description is, the more likely it has a chance to rank in a higher spot on the first page if you nailed the rest of the SEO strategy. The goal is to make the search engine algorithm and your consumers view your content as relevant.
Knowing your market
SEO is not a standard technique and never will be. It all depends on your audience and market and will differ widely between different markets. You should think about all the different kinds of content Google serves, whether it be carousel cards, answer boxes, or local results, and optimize to each kind of result. Always put yourself in the customer’s shoes. How will they search for it?
Niche Optimization
Extensive keyword research against your competitors will open your eyes to the missing search terms on your site. To do this successfully, it is essential to be critical and realistic. This should act as a gut check to make sure you have good content and relevant meta tags to the specific search terms. If you notice keywords or terms that do not rank well, build pages with excellent content to optimize those words.
Don’t forget user experience
While SEO factors like keywords and tracked links are still very important in ranking, Google is now emphasizing user experience more and more. So what does this mean? Does your website have a high-speed loading page? What about an appealing design? Is it mobile-friendly for your customers? By focusing on UX, you will have happy visitors and a strong SEO as an added bonus.
SEO strategy is crucial
SEO won’t go away. In fact, the higher you rank on Google, the more traffic you bring to your website, and the more business you bring in. It is so important to have a strategy behind your SEO. Without knowledge of how SEO works, you can not see success in your website ranking for a long time, but you can hit that first page by tweaking a few things and doing some research. These days, it is so crucial to spend time on your SEO, and by following the tips in this article, you will be set up for success.