Programmatic SEO for Dummies

The process of doing programmatic SEO is very similar to using Mail Merge to create multiple text documents or send multiple emails.

For your information, Mail Merge is the process of creating personalised text documents like emails and letters at scale. It works based on a template with some variable fields (form letter), and a connected data source to replace those variables.

And similar to Mail Merge, programmatic SEO or pSEO is a technique for publishing multiple web pages that follow a similar pattern and design — all from fixed page templates and their respective connected data sources. In fact, the technique becomes necessary in cases where several pages with the same design are to be published.

Pages that can be programmatically generated can also be manually published by following a template, but publishing one by one takes a lot of time in repetitive tasks like formatting, adding images, and many others. And programmatic SEO speeds up the publishing process by minimising these repetitive tasks.

While pSEO accelerates your publishing process, it also helps you update 1000s of posts with the latest information in no time. And this is one of the best advantages of using the technique. And for programmatic SEO, there are specialised tools out there that can help you publish 1000s of pages in no time; I have written a post listing some interesting pSEO tools.

I have created an infographic explaining the working of programmatic SEO, which should further clarify your understanding of the technique.

Since you’re just getting started, a typical programmatic SEO process goes through the following steps:

1. Keyword research — finding keywords that can be modified and combined with other terms to form new keywords
2. Page template creation — designing the template for how you want the generated pages to look like
3. Data preparation — preparing all the required data for the data source to be used with the page template
4. Data to template connection — connecting the data source to the template by using an automation program
5. Bulk publication — publishing multiple pages based on the template and the data source

And that’s what programmatic SEO is!

If you’re willing to dig even deeper, I will recommend going through this 4000-word guide that covers all topics in detail.

Still have doubts? Please feel free to let me know in the comments below.