0x003 - Programmatic SEO 🛺
Hi, y’all! This is the third issue of unzip.dev, a newsletter dedicated to developer trends, where we unpack trending dev concepts. My name is Agam More, and I’m a developer generalist that loves learning & sharing. Join the ride and have fun!
Programmatic SEO
Who said you can’t program your way to the top of the SERP 😉
TL;DR:
- Problem: Trying to target each query a user might search for in your site is too time-consuming to do manually.
- Solution: Leverage code to generate landing pages at scale for long-tail keywords, which results in a lot of organic search traffic.
- In Sum: Programmatic SEO is becoming a fundamental SEO strategy.
How does it work? 💡
- Identify the combinations of keywords that might relate to your product or service niche.
- Think about a sentence, then modifiers you can replace, like a format string (e.g.
title=f'{modifier} rental properties in {city}'
).
- Think about a sentence, then modifiers you can replace, like a format string (e.g.
- Generate landing pages, one for each generated term (with different content, so the page will have a unique value for the visitor).
- Profit! get more organic inbound traffic from all those long-tail terms.
Use cases ✅
- Your data could be used for SEO.
- As a general rule, it is preferable that the data you use is either hard to acquire or hard to parse, so you will have less competition for those topics.
- Creating the potential landing pages won’t require a lot of manual work.
- You’re a Developer and you are aspiring to get into technical marketing. Programmatic SEO can be your way into the scene.
Why? 🤔
- Increase # of incoming leads: Targeting long-tail keywords to expand the start of your funnel, which might not have been utilized otherwise.
- Value creation: Generate new valuable content (landing pages) from existing unused data.
- Coding is leverage: Leverage your coding skills to automate content creation, be more impactful for your business.
Why not? 🙅
- Spam: You need to be careful you aren’t creating low-value content, Google will punish you if you generate content that is low quality.
- Low quality programmatic landing pages can be seen as doorway pages, to mitigate, make sure the pages are unique and useful.
- Labor-intensive use cases: If each keyword variation requires manual work, automating the creation of landing pages can be less viable.
Tools & players 🛠️
- Webflow - A website builder, you can leverage its CMS capabilities to generate dynamic landing pages.
- Keyword Research - Isn’t dev related, but here is a start if you want to get to know the SEO land:
- ahrefs - One of the most known keyword research tools.
- semrush - A direct competitor to ahrefs, leading in the space too.
- ubersuggest - Free keyword research tool from Neil Patel.
- Google Keyword Planner - Google’s own free PPC keyword tool.
- SEO report - Use lighthouse to measure your SEO score, fix any issues that may arise.
Update 2023
Some new tools I found:
- Placid - use airtable to generate images in bulk.
- PageFactory - a no-code solution for Programmatic SEO.
Forecast 🧞
- Market adoption: Programmatic SEO was utilized for a long time but was in the shadows up until recently, coming into the market's consciousness. I suspect to see more players leveraging programmatic SEO.
- This will probably make Google enforce doorway pages more rigorously.
- Emerging tooling: I still think that this concept is relatively under-utilized, there is a place for new tools to streamline this methodology. We will see newly-sprung products aiming to solve programmatic SEO needs for customers without such in-house skills.
- Jobs: I think there will be a greater demand for developers doing marketing work in this space. On the flip side, we may see more marketers learning to code.
Who uses it? 🎡
- Pinterest, Tripadvisor, Zapier, Airtable and many more...
- We’ve all come to hate Grepper, but undoubtably their programmatic SEO strategy works (one of the top results in Google for “urlllib decode utf-8”).
Extra
- For a more in-depth guide on how to do classic programmatic SEO, check this guide by @RiojaAlejandro.
- Consider leveraging static site generation and CDNs to create fast-loading landing pages, most probably your landing pages won’t change that frequently, and if they do use Incremental Static Generation.
- A very interesting twitter thread from @iannuttall about his experience and tips about Programmatic SEO for more than 1.2m visitors.
Thanks 🙏
I wanted to thank @TomGranot (the best DevRel I know), @AndyKatz (tons of insights about technical recruitment) for great insights on this issue.
EOF
(Where I tend to share unrelated things)
- I just finished writing about unzip.dev’s newsletter tech-stack if you ever wondered: “Self-hosted newsletter tech stack for $7/mo” — agam.me
As a developer, it’s really hard to gauge the quality of my writing. It feels like using those old room-sized, punched-card computers where you had to wait all weekend for the results and only then get feedback 😪 So your comments are, truly, most appreciated:
Tweet at me @agammore or simply reply to this e-mail, and I promise to reply! 🤞