Speaker 1: 0:52

Hi, ed Dawson here, and, as I'm a bit busy at the moment and need a break, welcome to another one of my best of SEO is not that hard podcasts. These are the episodes from the back catalog that I think have the greatest hits and ones that are still relevant and provide great value for you. So, without further ado, let's get into the episode. Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson. The founder of keywords. Of keywords people use calm, the solution to find the questions people ask online. I'm an affiliate marketer, seo, and I've been building and monetizing websites for over 20 years. I built sites from the ground up, bought sites and sold sites in large exits. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years.

Speaker 1: 1:32

Today, I'm going to talk about programmatic SEO. So what is programmatic SEO? Well, really, it's just a way of creating web pages at scale. So, rather than creating each individual web page, post by post, page by page, what you do is you use automated tools, whether ones you've built yourself or ones that you've bought off the shelf, to create essentially almost unlimited number of web pages based upon some programmatic rules. So let's start with an example. That's the easiest way. So if you were to go to google and search for pet friendly Airbnb Edinburgh, then you'll see Airbnb ranking probably in the number one position, I imagine but it is for me definitely. And they've got a page with the title pet friendly home rentals in Edinburgh and if you visit that page, you'll see a dedicated landing page on Airbnb's site all about pet friendly home rentals in Edinburghinburgh and it has lots of different um so airbnbs that you can rent that allow pets. They've got things like pet friendly house rentals, pet friendly home rentals with a pool. I'm all based in the scotland area and right around edinburgh and if you did the same for pretty much any city or place in the world, you will get a very similar looking page with very similar content, but all dedicated to the particular area that you're searching for. Now there's no way that Airbnb could profitably build these pages individually, so they've created them programmatically using programmatic SEO.

Speaker 1: 3:17

Programmatically using programmatic SEO these programmatic pages that often they target lower competition or low traffic keywords, where to create them manually would just take too long and wouldn't generate enough traffic for the amount of time it would take for a person to go and manually create and then keep those pages up to date. So they use programmatic techniques. The two key elements for programmatic SEO are templates and a database of content. So in the example of the Airbnb pet friendly pages, they have a template for that page where certain elements will stay the same but other elements will change depending upon the location that's being targeted. So key ones are obviously titles like top-rated pet-friendly home rentals in. That's going to be the same everywhere and then they're just going to change the location, like Edinburgh, london, manchester. That location will change on every part of the page where it mentions a particular place. They will also change from the database the content of what properties are available to rent based upon the location that you're searching for. So you'll obviously you'll see different properties listed in Manchester compared to Edinburgh, and I also feel the content on the pages like hero images might be here image of Edinburgh on the Edinburgh page and a heroine image of Manchester on the Manchester page. So it means you can set this template up that you then dynamically populate from a database and in this case database of pet friendly rentals based on the location.

Speaker 1: 4:44

Now, I've done this myself plenty of times on websites before I even realised that you know there was a term called programmatic SEO. We used a term called database driven website. So you're basically creating a website that is powered by content that you keep in a database and then you put that content through page templates that change depending on certain variables. So, for example, on broadbandcouk, we built a database of broadband providers and the deals these broadband providers offered and then we created landing page templates for providers and for deals. So, for example, there would be a provider page and it could be BT, it could be EE, it could be any broadband provider for the landing page, and they would use the common template and then it would just populate the images and details and features of that broadband provider based upon content it drew from the database. So if we wanted to manage the deals and the information about providers, we didn't have to go and edit individual pages every time. We just had to keep our database up to date and that would flow through the templates programmatically and keep our website up to date and create all those pages for us.

Speaker 1: 6:00

That people ask is do I need coding skills to do programmatic SEO? The very word programmatic makes it sound like you might need to be able to code. Now the answer is yes and no, depending on the site. So Airbnb some of the sites I've created yeah, definitely, we create them all bespoke. Airbnb will be all bespoke and there'll be lots of programmers involved in that, but you don't have to do it that way. Nowadays there are plenty of plugins and tools for common CMSs like WordPress that allow you to create pages in bulk and keep them up to date in bulk, just based off a database that could be as simple as a Google Sheets document, which you keep the information, the data, in a simple spreadsheet which the plugin then connects to and will then populate and keep pages up to date from that through wordpress, with no coding required whatsoever. There's one I've experimented with myself recently called lpagery. That works really quite well. That's just building content from a, from a google sheet and yeah, and so you don't need coding skills necessarily to get started with programmatic SEO nowadays. So, yeah, it's not a barrier to entry anymore.

Speaker 1: 7:09

Probably the hardest part to create a programmatic SEO site is building a database of content to base those pages around. On broadbandcouk, it was essentially a full-time job. We employed somebody full-time just to maintain the provider and deals database and they spent the whole time just keeping on top of the market, keeping on top of what all the different broadband providers were offering and then sort of creating that mainly creating that database and keeping up to date so our site was always up to date. There are options like you can find. You can actually buy databases online of various things. Just if you have a Google for databases of data sets, you can probably find ones to build around that. I mean places like Airbnb. Obviously they've got a database of places in the world and that kind of database can easily be purchased online. But you've still got to find some other content to build in with it, and that, I say, can be the hardest part. But that's where your creativity and that's where you're going to be able to differentiate yourself from other sites by finding and mixing data sets together to be able to create some useful content that people want to find and that you can monetize. So it all sounds rosy so far.

Speaker 1: 8:21

Are there any risks? Well, there are, because if you do this poorly, if you don't do it well, what you can end up doing is creating lots and lots of low quality pages with low quality content and poor design, and you can actually end up being penalised by Google for this. They consider overdoing it and doing it in a poor, low-quality way is creating doorway pages, and they don't like doorway pages for the reason that it fills up their index. You can create hundreds of thousands, if not even millions, of pages very quickly, almost instantly, using programmatic SEO, and if you're just filling it up with loads of crap that provides no value to people, then Google is going to penalize you and consider it as doorway pages. So you've got to be able to provide value. You're not just bombing the SERPs and trying to just pick up incredible amounts of low volume traffic. You've actually got to still provide something that's worthwhile for people. Just because it's low volume doesn't mean it has to be low quality. So that's one thing. You've got to be careful of avoiding getting penalised like that.

Speaker 1: 9:28

The other issue is, especially for new sites is trying to get all these pages indexed, because you can create so many pages so quickly, but you then have to have them indexed. If Google isn't indexing them, then you're not creating any value for anyone, not even yourself. So getting those pages found, crawled and indexed is another risk that you've got to contend with, and that's why, in the first instance, obviously do good internal linking when you're creating these pages things like breadcrumbs so that the search engines can easily find them. But also you've got to have a certain amount of authority in your site because there is a limit to how much Google will crawl and index, especially on a brand new site. So that is the risk of don't overdo it too quickly in the first instance.

Speaker 1: 10:13

But, done well, programmatic SEO can help you maintain great and useful content, and far more efficiently than trying to manually edit pages. The template system it allows you to make changes to your templates, that which then updates across whole sections of your site in an instant, without having to go and re-edit lots of individual pages to try and achieve the same effect. But really to be totally effective, it needs to be part of holistic approach to content on your website. You're still going to need non-programmatic se content, such as long-form guides and the other type of content that will really make you a well-rounded authority site. So yeah, I would say I've used programmatic SEO for 20 years. Plenty of people do. It's not rocket science, it's nothing overly clever. All all it is is it's a way of scaling content production and then managing large-scale content production and updates over time.

Speaker 1: 11:14

Thanks for listening. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps. Seo is not that hard. Is brought to you by keywords people usecom the solution to finding the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at keywordspeopleusecom. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at channel five on Twitter or you can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleusecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.