Much like a halo, entrepreneurs and business people always have a cloud of concern hovering over them. It is either that they are thinking of the things they could do to drive growth or that they are devising ways to overcome one business challenge or the other. Concerns like this may be worrisome to an onlooker. 

However, they aren’t as bad as one would think, because, whether an entrepreneur is imagining entering a new market or how to go around a delayed product shipment, the end result is usually that they can scale their operation and deliver better on their products and services.

If you are a business owner having this common concern for growing your business, then you’re about to learn something really important. This is known as programmatic SEO. Programmatic SEO is a business growth strategy that is much different from others like the 4 Ps. 

It focuses on online marketing of a business’s services or products through landing pages that are curated using codes. Read on to find out more about this new strategy, how it is implemented, and how it impacts growth. 

What is programmatic SEO?

Programmatic SEO is a marketing tool that merges search engine optimization (SEO) as we know it, with the use of an application program interface (API) or some level of programming to produce website pages. The main goal of this strategy is to meet highly specific search intents and then, afterward, convert website visitors to leads. 

The marketing method consists of four key elements. Number one among these elements is keyword research (fundamental to all SEO processes). The second element in programmatic SEO is a template for the articles or webpages which a business intends to use for its SEO marketing campaign.

After this comes element number three which is well-organized data originating from the keyword research activity above. Finally, the last and most unique element that you would see in programmatic SEO is writing and executing codes. 

Getting all this together gives businesses the power to produce unimaginable amounts of high-value articles or web pages within a short period. Don’t worry, we will explain what each of these elements is and how they work later in this article. 

What are the pros and cons of programmatic SEO?

There’s no doubt that programmatic SEO assumes high relevance, especially for businesses looking to grow their organic traffic. Nevertheless, the strategy is not without its cons. Let’s take a look at some of the positives and negatives associated with implementing programmatic SEO in your business.

‍Pros: 

Easy Scalability:

The application of programming is the highlight of the programmatic search engine optimization (SEO) hack and the most outstanding benefit of the feature is that it offers mind-blowing scalability. 

Scalability here means two things. First, it refers to the ability to generate results on a large scale or magnitude. Secondly, it confirms that the programming feature allows businesses to implement a range of capabilities, for example, altering the components and results of the programmatic SEO approach. 

With this level of scalability, businesses are continuously proving that it is possible to produce thousands of functional contents within a very short period. Two shiny examples in this category are DelightChat which reportedly built 300 pages in one week, and Crisp which created 23,000 pages automatically. 

‍Improved User Experience:

Programmatic SEO leads a business to discover long-tail keywords which are relevant to its customers. These keywords give the company near-accurate insights on what their customers or potential customers are looking for and what questions they need answers to.

With this in mind, each article produced through a programmatic SEO marketing campaign is designed to achieve a high conversion rate. 

This will mean that the website visitors find exactly what they are looking for - on the first page they arrive at - whether it is a piece of information, a resource tool, or a service. This creates a satisfying user experience and it keeps users coming back over and over again. 

‍Generates High Volume of Leads:

Web pages that are designed using programmatic SEO typically appear at the top of any search engine results page (SERP). In addition to their ranking high, these web pages are extremely resourceful. They eliminate the stress of surfing through countless pages by offering the precise information which a user is looking for. 

The combination of these two features unfailingly attracts traffic to the programmatic SEO website and quickly converts this traffic to leads, rewarding businesses with a huge volume of customers. 

‍Reduced Marketing Cost and Effort:

Regular SEO marketing involves performing keyword research and then manually creating search engine-optimized content around select keywords or related data. This means spending a lot of time and effort and even paying a content/copywriter for their service.

Despite every commitment, however, SEO businesses still typically end up having their marketing campaign process extend over several weeks or months. 

The exact opposite of this happens in programmatic SEO. SaaS Base reports that by building web pages using Next.js codes, they were able to produce 3-weeks long writing tasks in just 30 minutes.

Things even get much better for programmatic SEO businesses as they don’t service bills from content writers, and they have more hands on deck. 

‍Cons:

Requires Technical Knowledge:

The very first challenge of the programmatic SEO strategy is that it requires technical expertise. Any business looking to implement the result-driven SEO practice will probably think of hiring someone to organize the source data, create templates, or handle the codes. Finding the right person for this easily determines whether a business succeeds or not. 

‍Majorly Suitable for Big Companies:

Small companies are typically at a disadvantage when it comes to implementing programmatic SEO and scoring big on traffic. You may be wondering why this is so. It is because, unlike big companies, smaller companies may find it difficult to purchase the necessary tools or hire professionals who will oversee the process.

This creates a scenario where “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer” as big companies go on to develop resourceful pages at rapid speeds, gaining more traffic and leads and realizing even more revenue. 

How to implement programmatic SEO 

If you are a non-techie business person, it might be a little challenging to even think of setting up programmatic SEO but we’ll be explaining each element in detail over the next few paragraphs. 

Perform Keyword Research 

Keyword research is the first point of call when engaging in search engine optimization marketing which is also known as SEO marketing. Businesses that perform keyword research seek to understand the words or phrases which their customers or potential customers type when they use a search engine.

These could either be single words (short-tail keywords) or a string of words (long-tail keywords). 

For programmatic SEO purposes, the most effective keyword in many successful campaigns has been the long tail type. These keywords work well because they offer clear and crisp outlines of a user’s search query. 

Another important trick for digging up the right keywords is by using identifiers and related terms. You get these when you find searches that include or revolve around a timeframe, searches that compare, and searches that contain a certain specific parameter. 

Create Template

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A template is the second element required for implementing the programmatic SEO marketing strategy. That being the case, creating one of these is the second step you would have to take after performing keyword research. 

At this stage in your SEO implementation, you need to choose between developing multiple articles or landing pages. The choice here is yours - literally. However, the type of business you run and the occupation or interests of your customers can point you to either articles or web pages as the best option for marketing.

Once you’ve made a choice, you can then proceed to build a template. 

The template itself is a structure consisting of several data points which help build a final article or web page when the data for each point is supplied. Building a template is not the same as creating an actual article or web page.

Instead, it is simply putting together a format for easily creating one of these. 

‍Organize your Keyword Research Data

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After performing keyword research and creating a template, the next step in implementing programmatic SEO will be to organize your keyword research data. There are many ways to source data for this phase of the project. A few of them are:

• Reviews from customers:

Customers speak about their experience, leave feedback or review, and even share what they would love to see in a product or service. All of this could serve as valuable data. 

• Publicly available data depositories:

There are some free data available in public depositories. This also offers a huge source of data. 

• Industry trends 

Industry trends sometimes contribute significantly to your project database. Trends could appear based on the occupation, age, intent, or social grouping of people in an industry. Alternatively, a trend could originate from the events in the industry. 

Always bear in mind the importance of having a reliable data source and having quick access to this data source whenever the need arises. 

Create and Launch Articles or Web Pages 

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The last stage in a programmatic SEO strategy will be the creation, launching, and monitoring of articles or web pages. This stage is quite critical. To implement it, businesses may have to first write, run, debug, and fine-tune program codes, for example by using the next.js language.

If you are wondering how to go about this, we found a SaaSBase article with open-source codes and an easy tutorial to guide you.

Program codes written for a programmatic SEO marketing campaign will produce hundreds or thousands of functional landing pages or query-satisfying articles when executed.

The way this works is that the program accesses the preset data sources, extracts relevant parts of it, puts these data pieces into the template, and then works up a complete form of an article or a landing page.

Big companies that have an audience for such large amounts of content typically find this exciting. However, the huge turnout is only the icing on the cake.

The real deal is that the programmed web pages and articles are delivered in far less time than usual.  

Finally!!!

The key takeaway from our discussion about programmatic SEO is that:

- It is effective in generating high-volume website traffic and business leads

- It works for creating both landing pages and blog articles, and finally 

- It requires low-cost or one-time expenses for setup and management

The fact that articles produced programmatically are readily indexable, crawlable, and search engine optimized (SEO’d) also serves as a big point for businesses that utilize it.

However, if a programmatic SEO strategy fails (by having pages that are not indexed), then a business will have a lot of junk on its website.

This could cause serious problems. The good news is that users can track the performance of their strategy using tools like Oncrawl and Google Search Console.

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