Programmatic SEO is an approach to SEO and content creation that leverages automation and technology to efficiently create, optimize, and manage a large volume of webpages.
It’s particularly useful for websites that require thousands, or even millions, of pages to rank for diverse search queries.
Ecommerce giants like Amazon or travel websites like Expedia rely on programmatic SEO to dynamically generate pages for every product, location, or service they offer.
The power of programmatic SEO lies in its ability to handle such scale while maintaining a focus on relevant keywords, content structure, and user intent.
Defining Your Objectives
Before starting with programmatic SEO, define your goals.
Do you want to boost organic traffic, rank for more keywords, or improve user experience?
Clear goals guide your strategy and measure success.
Set KPIs: Use metrics like traffic growth, conversions, and rankings to track progress.
Find Opportunities: Research your industry and competitors to uncover untapped keywords or markets.
Prioritize User Intent: Create content that answers questions and solves user problems.
Programmatic Keyword Research
In traditional keyword research, the goal is often to identify high-search volume keywords that can drive significant traffic to a website.
However, these keywords usually come with high competition, making it challenging for newer or smaller sites to rank well in search engine results.
Programmatic SEO takes a different approach by targeting low-search volume and low-competition, long-tail keywords.
This strategy focuses on creating a large number of pages optimized for specific queries, allowing you to rank higher more easily and attract a highly targeted audience.
Keywords in programmatic SEO consist of two main components:
Head Terms
Head terms are broad keywords that describe a general topic or category. Head terms often have the following characteristics:
High average monthly search volumes.
Tend to be “short tail.”
Have multiple common interpretations.
Tend to be more stable SERPs with a lot of competition targeting the query.
Examples include keywords such as “onboarding software,” “winter sun vacations,” or “crm software.”
Modifiers
Modifiers are words or phrases that add specificity to head terms, and will vary greatly between sectors.
Modifiers are easily identifiable as they follow patterns, which again vary between different sectors.
Common modifier patterns include:
“for SaaS.”
“for staffing agencies.”
“for accountants.”
“best practices.”
“2025.”
In contrast to head terms, aside from occasional spikes in traffic, average monthly search volumes tend to be lower, but when combined with head terms, they create more targeted queries with more focused intent. It helps capture visibility with niche audiences and consumers who may be showing intent.
Combined with head terms, we tend to call these “long-tail” keywords.
Reliable Datasets
To scale programmatic SEO effectively, you need a reliable dataset that can generate unique, valuable, and relevant pages.
Depending on the types of pages you’re creating, you need to understand and anticipate the change frequency of the data, and how your infrastructure will handle the changes.
Many platforms provide APIs that you can use to fetch structured data.
These include:
Yelp API: For local business details.
OpenWeather API: For weather-related data.
Google Maps API: For location-based information.
Your own proprietary data can also be a valuable source for programmatic pages. These can be:
Product catalogs from an ecommerce store.
CRM data with user or location-specific insights.
Inventory databases, such as hotel room availability or real estate listings.
Programmatic Keyword Clustering
Organizing your keywords into logical clusters is a powerful way to streamline your content creation process.