After you have finalised the keywords for your pSEO project, it really depends on the available modifiers that how many pages are going to be under the topic. Most of the time, finding modifiers is straightforward, but sometimes, it can be a real pain.

In this short blog post, I will be listing out and explaining some interesting ways to find 100s and even 1000s of modifiers for programmatic SEO.

Let’s take a look…

What are modifiers in programmatic SEO?

Programmatic SEO keywords consist of two parts — head keywords (or head terms) and modifiers, as shown in the below screenshot.

While head keywords are the broad-level categories, modifiers are the terms that can be combined with the head terms to create different combinations of pSEO keywords.

For example, “resume templates” is the head keyword but “students”, “freshers”, and “marketing managers” are modifiers, as you see below:

• Resume templates for students
• Resume templates for freshers
• Resume templates for marketing managers

Finding pSEO modifiers

1. Use keyword research tools

Keyword research tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs are extremely useful when it comes to finding modifiers for pSEO head keywords or topics. After finalising the head keyword, you can take the help of * (asterisk) operator to find the modifiers.

For example, I am using SEMrush to find modifiers for “email templates for” head term. I can just put email templates for * in the keyword magic tool, it starts showing all the possibilities, as you can see in the above screenshot. From here, I can quickly export all the results, and I now have 600+ modifiers after cleaning up a bit.

Lowfruits is another option here, where you can use the asterisk search operator to find all the possible modifiers, which you can see in the screenshot above.

You can use multiple tools to get the modifiers, and then combine the results from all the tools. I do this all the time. And note that these are just examples, you can use the asterisk operator (*) multiple times as well if required.

But there is a problem with using these tools for finding modifiers! These tools only show you the terms which are getting some searches according to them (and their monthly search volume count is seriously underestimated, according to me).

My advice is, to combine the modifiers data from keyword research tools along with the data from other sources as well.

2. Find datasets containing modifiers

This is the most interesting way that I use to find pSEO modifiers — find datasets that may contain the list of modifiers that you’re looking for.

Let me demonstrate…

For example, if I am doing pSEO for the topic “can {fish 1} live with {fish 2}” then I know that the different species of fish are going to be modifiers. So now, I will just try to find a dataset that contains names (and preferably other important data) of different species of fish.

Another example is if I am creating programmatic pages for “pool cleaning services in {city}, India” then I would just look for a dataset that contains the list of all the major Indian cities.

You get the idea, right?

Yes, finding the dataset can be tricky at times, but… I have written a detailed guide on finding useful datasets for programmatic SEO that you can refer to. In the guide, I have shared several tools and tips-tricks to find exactly what you’re looking for, but if it doesn’t work, you still have the option to scrape the data from one or multiple sources.

Read Next: The complete programmatic SEO guide

Final words

While the above-mentioned methods work for most of the topics, sometimes, you may need to brainstorm and manually note down all the modifiers. This method becomes compulsory for the topics for which there isn’t much data available online.

That’s it.

I hope you get something from here! But if you get stuck somewhere, kindly feel free to let me know in the comments below.