A Beginner’s Guide to PROGRAMMATIC SEO – Allison Seboldt

Updated

November 30, 2022

Listen to my episode with Allison Seboldt:

or listen on Apple Podcasts \ Google Podcasts \ Spotify

And here are some of my top takeaways:

What is programmatic SEO?

Programmatic SEO is a specific style of publishing content for Google search, and mostly involves using content templates to dynamically create content (in bulk) based on a dataset.

Have interesting data
Create content templates
Use a tool (like PageFactory) to transform that data into blog posts at scale (thousands at a time, even!)
ALL BASED ON Google search queries and user intent, as always!

Instead of creating each blog post individually, you’re creating BULK content “programmatically” using data.

Think “mail merge.”

What are some real-world examples of programmatic SEO?

Here are a few I like:

Nomadlist.com

Levels.io has gathered data from his users and has used that to create individual pages.

CoinDesk

Want to know the latest price of FILL_IN_THE_BLANK currency? Or stock?

Constantly updating data is PERFECT for programmatic SEO (since you wouldn’t want to individually update stock price blog posts every minute/hour/day!)

Sites like CoinDesk are built using powerful code though–probably not accessible to most of us.

GardenAuntie

This is Allison’s example programmatic site, and it’s really well done!

This is a MUCH better example of an accessible topic that any of us could create.

How to find niches for programmatic SEO

It’s not quite as simple as “choosing a topic I’m interested in” or even “choosing a topic based on keyword research.”

Finding a niche for a programmatic site boils down to a few things:

What’s a question that people ask about a RANGE of different things?
I.e. finding patterns
Is there suitable and/or interesting data I can use to answer those questions?

Here’s an example niche:

Baseball stats.

There are a ton of baseball teams, their related cities, players, etc.

People might be asking the same questions for DIFFERENT teams:

If you can find a great dataset (spreadsheet) for baseball stats, you could possibly whip up several hundreds blog posts with the following:

When did the Braves win the world series?
When did the Mets win the world series?
etc

Or the following…

When did the Braves move to Atlanta?
When did the Pirates move to Pittsburgh?
When did the Marlins move to Florida?

I didn’t actually research those last ones, but it was just a quick idea I had. You’ll always want to check to make sure people are searching for these!

Niche Selection Pro Tip: Long-tail is king.

Rather than doing keyword research to find 100 articles you could create, you’d be looking to create 1,000+.

Search volume is much less important for each individual keyword!

If you only see 10-100 searches a month for a KW, that’s ok in programmatic SEO.

Where to find datasets for Programmatic SEO

There are a few places that are just BUILT for data:

Kaggle.com
Datahub.io
Data.gov

You can search these sites easily enough, but there are also several communities on Reddit to find interesting data.

There are constant posts with interesting data there, and everybody links to the source data (which is publicly available to anybody).

Past these, you might just start with a Google search for the data you’re looking for!

So you have data and keyword ideas, next up is creating a content template!

You won’t be creating 1,000 articles by hand.

You’ll be creating a few templates up front, and filling the templates in dynamically with the data (to bulk produce content).

This is where Allison S’s tool comes in handy.

Where to learn more about Programmatic SEO.

First, I HIGHLY recommend checking out PageFactory’s free course for more on creating these templates.

Second, go follow people like Allison and Ian Nuttell on Twitter.

They’re constantly dropping gems.

Questions? Drop me a comment 🙂