Guides · Programmatic SEO
What is programmatic SEO?
Programmatic SEO is generating many pages from one template and a dataset, so that a site can rank for hundreds of specific long-tail queries it could never write pages for by hand.
The idea
One page design, one list of things, and a page per thing. Flights from every city to every other city. A page per neighbourhood, per integration, per job title, per model number.
It works because the queries it targets are individually tiny and collectively large. Nobody would write four hundred pages by hand for a hundred searches a month each; a template and a dataset make it a morning's work, and the total is a lot of traffic that no single page could ever capture.
When it is worth doing
When you have real data. The dataset is the whole thing: if each generated page has something genuinely different and genuinely useful on it, this is one of the most effective techniques there is. If the only thing that changes between pages is a name substituted into the same sentences, it is a way of generating hundreds of near-duplicate pages.
And when the queries exist. A page per combination of two things you sell is only worth generating if somebody is searching for those combinations.
The two ways it fails
Thin pages. A generated page with a heading, a sentence and a table of nothing is a page a search engine will index once and never rank, and enough of them make a site look like a content farm to systems that judge sites as a whole.
Index bloat. Ten thousand pages of which two hundred are useful means a crawler spends its budget on the other nine thousand eight hundred. The fix is usually to generate fewer pages and let the ones that survive be substantial, which is the opposite of what makes the technique attractive in the first place.
Why it may not apply to you
Below roughly a few dozen pages there is nothing here to assess. A ten page business site has no programmatic section, and scoring it against this and calling the result critical would be advice nobody should follow.
Our own report says so rather than scoring a zero: a category that cannot fairly be asked of a site is marked not scored, with the reason, because a zero and a not-applicable are different statements and inventing the first when the second is true is how an audit ends up recommending work that should not be done.
Does this apply to your site?
We check for this automatically, along with everything else on the same page of your site, and tell you the exact line. The first audit is on us.