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.