Intro to programmatic SEO
I recently made a post about SEO tactics that you might not have heard of and mentioned programmatic SEO.
As a personal intro, I started doing location based SEO for my web dev agency in Canada. https://www.influencelabs.ca
Essentially how it works is...
I enter a location/major city into an airtable base/form and this triggers an automation in make.com. Basically using chatgpt, I generate content for specific paragraphs on my website and populate the airtable with it. The automation then creates a live CMS item in webflow with the generated content.
I also have an automation to update each item if its updated within airtable
Ranking with a single page can be hard, so I'm trying to increase my reach with locally related content.
Just sharing an example of how programmatic SEO can be beneficial to us Indiehackers!
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I’m using similar tactic for Singing Carrots. What I’ve learned over the last couple of months is that Google might punish you for generating misguiding low quality content by “decreasing” your overall domain authority.
For now I’m trying to do regular clean-ups of badly performing pages. Might be useful to do so if you do not have any other QA process in place.
You definitely need QA. Purely AI-generated might work in the short term, but once you start seeing traction to some pages, start improving them. Had a bunch of clients who do pSEO and at some point they reach out for editing help to make sure their impressions stay high.
I've heard of this problem, thats why I'm trying to play it safe with location based programmatic SEO instead of content based for now to test out the waters. Do you have any QA processes to recommend?
Can’t vouch for it, but I’m using bounce rate as a metric for now. Would be interesting to see what you com up with.
Low quality articles. Good way to get banned.
People need to stop looking for this kind of quick shortcuts. Long term you'll most likely lose and competitor with better written content will for sure outrank you.
In my case, I'm not writing low quality articles, ChatGPT is just used to change locations and very specific keywords through out the human written landing page. I think it increases efficiency since I wouldn't have to create individual pages per city, one by one. You can see in the image attached that majority of content is the same other than location names (in the green hosting column for example)
I agree shortcuts and 100% AI written content is an easy way to get flagged and banned, but I also believe that when used correctly, AI can actually be useful ASSISTANT. Like in my case, where I'd just need to change location names
Nicely done. This is one the growth hacking leverages that when. Pulled well can turn a business booming. Good luck to your agency
That's a really good example of how to implement pSEO.
Thanks @marcs_dev !
Curious to know How many pages you've successfully published so far? and how many of them are indexed already? and What's the age of the website.
I was thinking about developing an idea like this, I even made the plan of how to carry it out in a PDF. However for your idea the best thing to do is to position yourself for long tail keywords. You should have a good volume of searches and little competition.
This strategy allows you to get a few visits from each page but in the end it is a lot.
Good luck with your project!
I want to go with programmatic SEO for my lottery website. how can I done this? I want to rank it in india.
Programmatic SEO is the coolest thing in content/SEO since backlinks! I'm not in favor of using 100% AI for the content, but it is an awesome way to build topical authority and cover a lot of niche questions in one go, so the visitor can bookmark you as the ultimate resource on the topic.
Awesome intro, thank you, Myles!
Thank you for sharing your experience with programmatic SEO! It's fascinating to see how you've integrated automation and AI technologies into your location-based SEO strategy for your web development agency in Canada.
The process you've described, using Airtable and make.com with chatbot-generated content, sounds innovative and efficient. Leveraging programmatic SEO to create locally related content is a smart approach to increase your reach and target specific audiences.
As an Indiehacker, it's inspiring to see how you're utilizing cutting-edge tools and techniques to enhance your SEO efforts. Wishing you continued success with your SEO endeavors and web dev agency . Keep up the great work and thank you for sharing this valuable insight! 🚀🌟
Thanks for sharing. Can you also link to the mentioned SEO tactics blog post?
Here you go: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/seo-tactics-you-might-not-have-heard-of-b1c4428f57
Oh, ChatGPT spam, ok...
I wouldn't call it spam, when done correctly it can actually be very useful and beneficial to your business and website SEO. I am not encouraging people to use 100% AI generated content or "AI spam". I think most content should be human written, like my Canadian landing pages., but it makes sense to use the help of AI to do to write and do things that dont require a lot of human thought or personality, like changing the name of a location in text as mentioned above, or comparing products, or answering FAQ's.
I agree, AI spam is extremely annoying and has screwing up markets, but that isn't what I'm advocating for
I think the main problem is that you acknowledge you are not an expert, yet share information generated by ChatGPT which is known to have a high rate of false positives and misinformation. I am not saying what you shared it wrong or not, but this is a very dangerous practise.
I am not talking about articles meant for SEO purposes, but the article on IH linked. This is a community for humans to discuss, not for AI marketing content.
How can it be used to improve local SEO?
Creating location based pages can build your local authority. If you rank for keywords that match multiple cities, you're more likely to gain views from local clientele
Nice. Any reason you chose Make over Zapier?
I notice with Zapier, it doesn't create the webflow items. Make gives me more control over error handling and appears to be more consistent with delivery overall. I also notice that Make handles bulk submissions a lot better than Zapier.
How much does it cost? I wrote custom code to do it. Felt it would be too pricey.
Make is about $10usd per month, it feels a lot more worth it than Zapier
Not bad! Last time I looked at Zapier pricing I felt it would drain my pocket instantly.
Thanks, Zapier can be worth the price if you have a lot of repetitive tasks that you want to automate, but you burn through your limits quickly. I spend $30 on zapier and get about 750 tasks per month, while with Make, I spend $10 and get 10,000 tasks per month and more control. They both have their use cases, but I think for programmatic SEO, Make work better!