Programmatic SEO: How I Scaled & Automated a Content Generation Strategy to Drive Organic Traffic, Boost Search Rankings & Crush the Competition!

This article is now available on my blog: https://semking.com/programmatic-seo-content-strategy/

I started programmatic SEO around 2009-2010. The funny thing is that at the time I had no idea what I was about to do had a name.?Yes, I had four years of SEO experience but I didn't know what the expression meant!

What started as a simple email would become one of my biggest SEO success stories.?Everything, from the people I worked with to the results we got exceeded my wildest dreams!

This article is about business, relationships, technical SEO, and content production. The paradox? I'm not a content writer: I'm much more interested in technical topics.

Many think "content is king". The truth is that you need more than good content to succeed.?Produce unique and qualitative content and associate it with a high-end technical SEO strategy, and the results could blow you away if the executive team is involved.

My definition of programmatic SEO

Programmatic SEO is a strategy that uses automation to publish unique, high-quality content at scale using templates and databases. It is not a quick hack to automatically create as many landing pages as possible.

You should see programmatic SEO as a strategic approach to create as much added value as possible, as quickly as possible, and to scale success by helping users find what they are searching for in search engine result pages (SERPs). If you have this mindset, the best is yet to come.

Initial Examples and Remarks

A company I admire in terms of programmatic SEO is TripAdvisor. Airbnb does a decent job, but it is less impressive. They could optimize everything a lot better given their ever-growing dataset. Some companies earned global recognition and benefit from new user-generated content, for free. In terms of content generation, this gives them a tremendous competitive advantage.

With SEO, the initial goal is to increase traffic and improve search engine visibility. The financial objective is to generate the highest possible Return On Investment (ROI) for businesses.?

Most technical SEO articles are dry. We are human beings, not bots. Please allow me to write as candidly as possible and I'll explain how I built a simple SEO framework that transformed a company's online visibility (and revenues).?

I worked with influential people on this project, so I will keep everything confidential. Some are in the Who's Who. Name-dropping isn't needed to make this story entertaining and exciting for those in the search industry.

This experience taught me more about SEO than any other. This project could have failed countless times. Many factors, both internal and external, led to the final success.?I will describe my experience using simple words and concepts to benefit the largest audience possible. This isn't for you if you want to read technical SEO content only. But the story is enjoyable because it shows the importance of trust and soft skills.

A success that began as a simple email

I reached out to the CEO of an ultra-luxury brand via email. I had low expectations. He replied to my email, he was interested but he said that in order to buy anything from me, he would want to meet.

And just like that, he invited me to his exclusive office in Paris, France. I packed everything I needed for the trip and went. I came dressed as the typical startup founder: casual while my interlocutor was sharply dressed, in a costly costume, tie, everything...?

His office had the most significant art collection I had ever seen. There must have been more than 10 paintings by world-renowned painters. He showed me historical documents he had bought. Century-old documents. Pieces of history. I was curious. I was in a different world.?

A Promising New Business Relationship for Mutual Growth?

The CEO was also curious and asked me questions non-stop for hours. He didn't grill me, he just asked one question after the other in a friendly way. And I answered passionately without having prepared anything. We talked until it got dark. Surprising for someone that busy.

He said: I will buy the digital branding package you are selling, but I want you to work for me. That was our first meeting. I was skeptical, and in my mind it was "words, words, words". At the time, I had just created my first company. I told him: "if you are serious, I'll think about it".?

A few days later, after several long emails, he kept insisting and told me: "let's work together". He gave me his phone number, and we started chatting. I never intended to sell my SEO "expertise" at the time because I was still a junior, and I didn't think I could offer much. But for some reason, he really liked, valued, and respected me instantly.

He told me: "I want you to become my SEO guy. I'm aware that the SEO strategy of my company is messy. I need someone like you."

He insisted and showed me he was serious. I ended up saying "yes" because I respected the tenacity of a guy who would not take no for an answer. I had no idea what I was saying "yes" to. I had no idea this "yes" would lead to my longest SEO experience. Our business relationship lasted nine years.

SEO Best Practices Matter

In 2009, the SEO industry and the landscape were… a little different. However, good SEO practices have always existed. For almost two decades, search engines have been clear: follow the best practices and don't try to get organic rankings you do not deserve (don't cheat).

Website owners and search engine optimization consultants had straightforward SEO guidelines. After a few weeks of signing the first contract between his company and mine, I had access to everything. I now had complete control of his company's online identity.

And what I discovered was not pretty. This was the worst SEO situation I had ever seen. How could things be that wrong?

A Serious Loss of Online Visibility and Traffic

Part of the content was not indexed because their websites used an already outdated technology (Flash) that search engine crawlers could not understand.

There was only the desktop version of the website. The site was not responsive. Mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones were becoming a thing. The iPhone was introduced in 2007. Mobile web navigation was now becoming real. But the brand's content wasn't mobile-friendly yet in 2009.

I discovered so many satellite websites surrounding the main website that I had to write to the CEO to make sure his company managed those sites. This was the first time I had seen that much duplicate content spread over so many domain names. It was horrendous.?

Duplicate content is having nearly identical content on multiple pages of a website or on multiple domains. I knew how hard it would be to convince the CEO to change a strategy that had worked for years. I would explain that he had dozens of domain names that would no longer be part of the SEO strategy.

I would have to work on so many 301 redirects, to repurpose the content, I would have to find the best version of the content, and keep this version only... This alone seemed like a daunting task. Oh, but there is so much more!

A proprietary database and CMS

I had only seen a proprietary database management system once prior. This one was epic. I had to be shown everything on-site to have a basic understanding of the brand's process. Their proprietary database solution was stored offline on their servers in a mini data center with the largest safe I had ever seen. I didn't know you could live in a safe ??

Their unreadable database was locally stored and later locally converted into SQL format and then uploaded to a hosting provider. The executive team had to approve each upload. Yep!

Hang on because after the proprietary database came the proprietary Content Management System (CMS). They had coded their own custom-made CMS in PHP. To make things even more challenging, the Technical Lead had just left. The code was horrible, almost unreadable. No documentation whatsoever. And I was now in charge. This was a technical nightmare.

The Importance of Honoring Commitments

I realized I had said "yes" to this. I had given my word to the CEO. Our respective companies had signed a yearly, legally binding contract. I now had to deliver. Except I had not signed up for this… But my yes has always been a yes, and my no has always been a no. I know myself. I knew I would keep my word, no matter how complex the tasks were.

The CEO was convinced he was in good hands and was now relaxed. I was a little less relaxed. I spent many sleepless nights. It took me almost two months to understand how the CMS worked and to start cleaning the code.

Remember that this CMS never existed before and will never exist elsewhere.?

I had to learn a lot of PHP and SQL just to be able to start this project. I had a solid technical background, I had used almost every Unix/Linux distro in the previous years, including some very exotic ones. But the size of the project was daunting. This was so much more than SEO.

An Effective SEO Strategy: Building a Strong Foundation

It took me six months to develop a decent online strategy that required a change of the tech stack. I wanted to use the classic LAMP stack: Linux (Debian), Apache web server, MySQL, and PHP.

I got the green light. Companies don't like it when consultants suggest significant changes, but this was urgently needed. I started testing and optimizing. I mainly worked alone and silently. Nothing I was doing was visible.

This was highly technical work and most of it happened in a sandbox, not in production. I started thinking: what if the CEO thinks I'm doing nothing?

After all, he'd have to trust me blindly. How long will he accept this?

The Importance of Building Trust in Business & Life

This CEO had a quality: a clear and straightforward speech. We spoke the same language. Sure, there were minor differences. For instance, he was three times my age, and his company was a well-oiled internationally recognized money-making powerhouse with clients amongst the world's richest people, while mine was a startup with no clients but… apart from that, we spoke the same language!

I had just finished my first multi-year role as an in-house junior SEO in a listed company. My job there involved much less technical work, but the time I wasted was unbelievable because of internal politics.?I remember one of their guidelines was: "There are no negative things, just things to be improved." I profoundly disagreed but I somehow ended up being their most productive consultant.

Business Agility: Slow & Large or Small & Agile?

Listed companies are giants that usually move very slowly. You have to get approval for minor things, you have to get ideas up the food chain. Painful. And this is one of the reasons why some intelligent and agile startups often manage to outperform and outrun global companies with seemingly unlimited budgets.?

Time is worth a lot of money for listed companies, and sometimes it makes more sense to spend a few billion to acquire a startup than to start from scratch. A large user base and "adoptability" are of high value to large businesses.

The View from the Top

The CEO was a hands-on guy: we had to convince him to validate each significant strategic decision. While some people found it scary, I enjoyed not wasting time with misplaced ego and internal politics.

His executive assistant told me she started having high blood pressure because of the stress of working with him. I had direct access to him on-site, on the phone, and via email, but unlike her, I could do most of my work remotely.

She had to be in his office every day. Some days I would be on-site in his office, and to say that the pressure was in the air would be an understatement.

The CEO trusted me even when my work was invisible for months. By behaving this way, by not questioning what I was doing, he earned my business respect, and I decided I'd do my best to honor his trust.

Speaking the Language of Business

One day I had a challenging chat with him, and I said:?

"Here's my conclusion. You have 120k+ pages indexed over multiple websites.

Your brand's content is diluted. You do not have a clean digital branding or SEO strategy. You are losing prospects and clients. Search engine crawlers are lost as well. I know what to do, but you have to trust me even more.

We need to change the entire online strategy. We need to invest much more in the main website, and it needs to be fully redesigned. We should acquire the best possible domain name for your business.

We need to forget this Flash technology you've been using for years. It looks good, but what's the point of being good-looking if no one sees you? People searching for your brand and content might not find you easily. This is bad."

The industry was competitive, and companies in this space had what seemed like limitless budgets. To my surprise, he answered:

"We've invested a lot already. I'll trust you with the online rebranding and the necessary changes in the SEO strategy, but there's no way we can spend that much to redesign the main website right now. Maybe in a couple of years."

I was very disappointed because I knew this would make my work harder. We had penalties. When the technical part isn't optimized, there's a bottleneck.?

He did however allocate a higher budget to "rebrand" the company online.

I started speaking with people in Canada and in the United States. I cannot list what was done because of the NDAs signed, but he trusted me to change the online identity of his empire. And I did.

Unprecedented ROI without programmatic SEO

After he blindly trusted me during three years of hard SEO work, I was invited to a meeting with him. The total revenues of the company were up 160% year over year. I asked: "how much of the yearly revenues are generated by the website?".

He answered: "The website now generates 75% of the revenues."

Their building must have cost a fortune. The location was exceptional. At the time, I found it impressive that a simple website could outperform large Brick-and-Mortar stores (his and the competition's).

His bet had paid off. He started inviting me to luxury restaurants.

We became what I would call "business friends". We talked about business strategy a lot. Regarding life, we had very different opinions, and we almost always disagreed, but we respected each other.

He told me he had a network of CEO friends and wanted to introduce me.

If I wanted, I could also become a consultant for their companies. I met people much more "important" than him, but the unspoken agreement was that his company would always be the priority. And for almost a decade, it was.

How I pushed programmatic SEO

During one of our chats, I told him:

"So… about this website redesign, here's what I have in mind".

I explained in detail why we needed to start from scratch to have the most optimized skeleton for the future website.?I said:

"You have these amazing databases that result from 30 years of work. I now understand your proprietary CMS better than anyone because you gave me full access to everything. You told me some of your databases were private, but I could query specific portions and inject this amazingly high-quality added-value content into an optimized website structure. That would annihilate the competition. Give me this (confidential) budget, and you'll see what is possible."?

To implement good programmatic SEO, you need clean and qualitative data sources. With this, you can save time and resources and improve scalability.

After 3 years of seeing fantastic ROI, after seeing how much my SEO strategy generated, he finally said "yes". I now had his green light to use portions of the main database to create online content.

The optimizations before programmatic SEO

Waiting was painful but in a way, I'm glad he didn't say "yes" to my programmatic SEO idea right away because during the first years, I optimized almost everything you could think of:

• Internal linking (probably the best you've ever seen)
• Crawling (speed/errors) + webserver optimizations
• Website performance (including DNS work) + DOM reduction
• User engagement was at an all time high and UX/UI were now optimized
• Keyword research and competitive analysis (I understood the industry and the audience almost perfectly after a few years)
• Structured data / Schema.org / JSON-LD / robots.txt exclusions
• Sitemap optimizations: XML for the crawlers + HTML for prospects/clients
• Web Analytics + search intent + user behavior analysis once on site
• Extensive CDNs and caching tools?tested
• Automatic image compression APIs
• Hreflang optimized everywhere (we had dynamic & static sections)
• Extensive backlink profile analysis, mostly without using popular tools such as SEM Rush, Ahrefs or Moz!
• A great "Google Webmasters Tools" setup (yes, it only became the Google Search Console in 2015)

I had solved the duplicate content issues for a while. I had a clear picture of what to do in my mind. I started showing the CEO sketches of his company's future website. He didn't like the first versions.

I had to work even harder with teams of developers and designers.

My goal was to build the perfect website to offer a great user experience to this particular audience. The site would become the foundation of my biggest programmatic SEO project.

The Impact of SEO on Offline & Online Advertising

This company had large online targeted ad budgets. They had been running advertising campaigns for years, they tracked the ROI, the CTR, and the overall effectiveness and adjusted in real time.?

They also had huge print advertising budgets. As soon as I joined as a consultant, I wanted to know as much as possible about print campaigns, catalogs, press releases, online ads, etc…?

I wanted to use the ad team's precious data. I wanted to prepare servers for whenever a big news story would generate a traffic spike. I wanted to do everything I could.

In the end, SEO impacted SEA/PPC budgets, and I asked the company to consider online branding even when launching print campaigns.

SQL, PHP, HTML & SEO guidelines

I obviously cannot disclose much, but the initial private databases (multiple) were all created and stored inside a proprietary solution.

Without the costly license, no one could decipher the content. That happens when tools are not open source: users are locked into a given software ecosystem, often for a long time.

The executive team had access to the proprietary software.

I could only see things, I was not allowed to edit anything.

Now that I'm thinking about it, the central database alone would have been worth a fortune because of the quality and quantity of the content. This is the first time I'm considering these databases in terms of monetization!

The C-level could export a public database version in SQL format and upload it to a server hosting it. Europe's new framework for data protection laws, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), was coming in a few years. We anticipated and hosted our data in two European countries.

Of course, we had multiple safety nets, including incremental backup solutions on-site and periodic backups of the online public version of the database.

I started testing by sending SQL queries to the database using PHP functions inside the HTML code. I remember some serious issues with our character encoding system, UTF-8.

The primary language was not English, which meant dealing with many different accentuated characters. I spent so much time on this!

Once the encoding/decoding and other small problems were solved, the SEO challenge was to have optimally structured and formatted content.

I was a little concerned about metadata. The meta titles and descriptions would contain PHP functions I wrote to display specific text strings.

While title tags are essential SEO signals, meta description tags are written for the users, with the goal of influencing their behavior. You want humans browsing the organic search results to click on your website, your goal is to increase the click-through rate.

I had to work on formatting the text stored in the database in a specific way: it would have to respect a given structure, length, etc... I was always on the safe side regarding SEO and I decided to stay below the limits.

For the description tag <meta name="description" content="Description automatically generated by a PHP function I wrote calling the public SQL database">, my max length was 150 characters.

The content generated by <title>PHP Function</title> was longer than the 50-60 characters of the title displayed by search engines. This meant I had to truncate the text strings to respect SEO guidelines. It would be 50 characters max. I used SQL and PHP tricks to format, order, and often trim the text.

For the <body> tag, which defines the HTML document's body, I wrote PHP functions inside the <h1>, <h2>, <p> and <div> tags. These HTML tags were used to structure the content stored in the database. My objective was to generate pages that would be optimized for search engines and humans.

Any mistake in the PHP functions or SQL queries and the whole thing would come crashing down. This is one of the risks of programmatic SEO. But the rewards are unbelievable.

To avoid future problems, I had to keep testing everything for months until I was sure what I had written would stand the test of time.

Optimizing UX/UI, cleaning the code and to the moon!

I learned so much about UX/UI. I never had so many imperatives to work with. Finally, I had a version of the new website the CEO and I both liked.?All I had to do was clean the code to make it as light, fast, and as compatible as possible.

I optimized everything: from the hosting solution to the Javascript and the fonts loaded, the final result was a real beauty, a work of art. I was happy but I had yet to see the result in production.

Very few SEO know the thrill and the stress of being the only one responsible if something "breaks." Big amounts are in play.

When I had worked in a listed company prior, there were so many people around me that the blame would have been shared had anything gone wrong.

I now understood the saying: "With great power comes great responsibility".

At this point, whatever I decided became the future of the online brand if the CEO approved. It may sound great, but the level of pressure was unreal.?

Website Migration: a High-Stakes Game

We were ready to go live. The launch was supposed to start on a Friday night. We were all prepared to work day and night for an entire weekend. We had identified that we had less traffic at specific dates and times. The website migration would have to happen then.

I had configured everything perfectly. Each URL of the new programmatically generated pages would be automatically rewritten. The executive team uploaded a public version of their database without confidential data, and I was allowed to inject some portions into the new website. It was empty, apart from a few permanent pages but in a few hours everything would be different!

Automating SEO with Programmatic Strategies

The proprietary CMS and the new public SQL database were now interacting with each other precisely as I had planned. I had "coded" things so each new programmatically generated page would execute PHP code to query specific sections of the SQL database that would be injected into the HTML code.

The meta titles, meta descriptions, the body text, the images, everything was automatically called and formatted. Sounds simple today with great Content Management Systems such as WordPress or Drupal, but this was a proprietary CMS and an enormous database that was not designed for this...

In a few minutes, we generated an incredible amount of ultra-high-quality content! I knew it would be a great success but I was not prepared for what we would see in the coming months.

SEO as a Zero-Sum Game: a Competitive Online Landscape

SEO is a zero-sum game: when you rank first, a competitor must lose their position. We now ranked 1, 2 and 3 for generic keywords of this industry.

For long-tail keywords, we were organically ranked in positions 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.?Yes, one website, our new optimized website, owned 50% of the first page.

There was no infinite scrolling at the time, only 10 SERPs on the first page. And we controlled the top 5 organic results. The competition was destroyed.?

That is the power of programmatic SEO associated to a great technical SEO strategy. The backlinks came from everywhere without asking anyone!

The CEO didn't deeply understand what I had done with his SEO strategy. He just enjoyed the financial results and told many of his CEO friends. After this success, unsolicited SEO contracts reached unprecedented levels.

SEO vs Paid Ads: How Organic Search Came out on Top

The CEO told me their targeted advertising budget had never been this low. He didn't want the ad budget cannibalizing the organic search results. After this great success, their SEO budgets kept increasing every year.

Completely discarding Search Engine Advertising might not have been the best idea because it could make sense at specific times of the year or for short-term campaigns but my influence had limits (and I was in favor of SEO)!

I reviewed and adjusted the programmatic SEO strategy based on performance data and KPIs for years. The already amazing content became even better every year. The website became faster, leaner.

After almost 10 years of successful B2B relationship, I told the CEO I was going to start a new venture and that I did not have enough quality time to stay as a consultant. He said he understood and asked me to never work for the competition. I asked him: "OK, but for how long?". He replied: "Forever".

We stared at each other for a long time, in silence.

I said: "I give you my word" and left.

The future of programmatic SEO

If you apply the best practices, programmatic SEO really is an extraordinary method to improve search rankings and increase organic traffic.

Programmatic SEO's future will involve machine learning and powerful Large Language Models (LLMs). Use those tools to improve the processes instead of trying to trick search engines by generating low-quality content.

The search giants are masters of artificial intelligence. If you try to use AI to generate a lot of content artificially, you will suffer penalties which could lead to the disappearance of your website from the index of Google and Bing.

My suggestion? Use your intelligence to create high-quality content, build long-lasting SEO strategies and reap the amazing rewards!