A beginner’s guide to programmatic SEO, including examples of websites with fantastic pSEO strategies, a recap of mistakes you won’t want to make, and a step-by-step process for identifying keywords.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing your website’s visibility in search engines like Google. Often, that means creating webpages designed to rank well or appear near the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) for specific keywords or phrases.
There are many different types of webpages you can create. For example, many companies create blog posts or editorial content. In 2024, more companies are considering launching a programmatic SEO (pSEO) strategy as a part of their overall content strategy.
But before launching your pSEO strategy, you’ll want to think critically about the types of pages you’re creating, so you can avoid several common mistakes.
In this article, we’ll provide a beginner’s guide to pSEO, including some examples of websites with fantastic pSEO strategies, a recap of the six mistakes you won’t want to make when launching your pSEO initiative, and, importantly, a step-by-step process for identifying the keywords you’ll want to target.
What Is Programmatic SEO?
In brief, pSEO is the process of quickly creating a very large number of pages on your website, often using a data source and landing pages.
When done correctly, pSEO is an attractive approach because it will allow your website to rank for a very large number of keyword phrases and won’t require you to manually create a large number of blog posts — which, if we’re being honest, can take an incredible amount of time.
Companies often use pSEO to rank for large numbers of long-tail keywords. A long-tail keyword is a more specific version of a head term, or a broad keyword, and it often has a very specific search intent (the reason that someone is doing a search). Long-tail keywords are often less difficult to rank highly for in search engines.
As a quick example, a head term would be a keyword like “teacher salary,” and a long-tail keyword would be “teacher salary Charleston South Carolina.”
Your programmatically created pages will typically target keywords that have a head term and a modifier. In our example, “Charleston South Carolina” is the modifier that our programmatically created webpage will serve specifically.
To continue with this example, you could, in theory, create a very large number of pages for teacher salaries in different cities or locations very quickly, thus ranking for a large number of keywords and driving meaningful amounts of traffic. These pages would likely be very similar in structure and design but would be altered or customized with unique data so that each page would answer a specific search query.
You may, however, find that your keywords are just long tails without a head term to modify. That is also totally fine — for example, Redfin ranks for a large number of street address keywords that don’t have a clear head term: the entire keyword is just a long-tail (more on this example below).
The terms “programmatic SEO” and “product-led SEO” are often mistakenly used interchangeably. However, they are quite different concepts. A product-led SEO strategy is one where the product itself is largely answering the intent of the search or the keyword (think “Expedia flights to Miami”), and pSEO is the process of creating a large number of pages programmatically, which could be used for a product-led SEO strategy. However, it’s possible to build a product-led SEO strategy without pSEO.
There are some common mistakes to avoid, and we’ll outline those in depth below. In short, know that most companies struggle to make their pages uniquely helpful enough. As a result, they often run into indexing issues very early on in launching a pSEO strategy. Duplicate content issues, thin content, and keyword cannibalization are common problems (more on this later).
4 Examples of Good Programmatic SEO (with Explanations)
There are, unfortunately, more examples of companies doing pSEO wrong than companies doing it right. I didn’t want to call out anyone specifically for doing pSEO wrong in this article, but if you’d like to see some examples, just reach out to me.
Instead, here are four examples of companies doing pSEO really well. What I like most about all of these examples is that they go above and beyond in creating unique value for the searcher.
Glassdoor
Glassdoor is a website that provides salary information and tools for both job candidates and companies looking to hire. In this example, I Googled “Atlanta copywriter salary,” and I found this URL.
What I Love About Glassdoor’s Programmatic SEO Strategy
In theory, this search query, “Atlanta copywriter salary,” could have been answered by a single number or a compensation band. But I’d argue that with that simple of an approach, Glassdoor wouldn’t be adding any unique value to their page, and that the page could be considered thin content.
Instead, Glassdoor goes above and beyond in trying to create unique value for site visitors after immediately answering the question posed by the query and addressing the search intent.
For example, on this Glassdoor page, they:
- Provide filters, such as industry and years of experience, so searchers can get a more precise number.
- Provide pay trajectory and information about career paths.
- Provide searchers with a breakdown of the compensation, including base pay and bonus amounts.
- Provide a clear explanation of the methodology they use to calculate their data, including a confidence score.
- Provide a list of the top-paying companies for this role in the specific location.
- Provide compensation band examples at local companies, for example, Home Depot and Delta, which are large employers in Atlanta.
Glassdoor quickly provides the searcher with exactly what they’re looking for. Then they enrich their pages with other helpful information and give the searcher many options for the next step to take on their website.