How much time can you save with programmatic SEO content vs. publishing posts in a traditional way? Let’s do the maths.
TL;DR: Programmatic seo time savings
– a good traditional content editor can produce 4-5 blog posts per week
– a Programmatic SEO content editor can produce 1140 blog posts per week, working only 25 hours.
I had a great call with the Head of Content at another SaaS (one of Userpilot’s prospects, actually 😎) and she asked me: “what should a Programmatic SEO content editor do per week, exactly?” This was, honestly, a great question.
How much more can you get done with ProgrammaticSEO vs. traditional content editing?
Now, when we started our journey with scaling content ops through the Content Epics System, the scalability of the whole process relied on our Content Editors and their ability to write detailed briefs. At least 5 briefs & edits per editor per week (20 per month), to be precise. This also proved to be the biggest bottleneck to the process.
In theory, it should all work smoothly. One brief should take 2-4 hours, and one edit should take around 2 as well.
In theory, the content editor should be able to produce 1 post in 6 hours tops. So they should be able to produce 6 posts per week.
But in practice, it wasn’t always the case.
Because people are not robots, we set 1 brief + 1 edit per day as our target. The editor should have more than enough time to deal with the 1brief+1edit per day workload.
But even that proved challenging, and the best editors managed only 4 posts per week. This means that every post takes 10 hours of editing time to produce.
If the editor was late with a brief, was off, or was not feeling well – the piece of content was getting delayed, sometimes derailing work for the writers for the following weeks, and having a knock-on effect on our content plan.
With every extra 20 posts per month, we needed to hire a new editor. Now at 60 posts per month, 3 full-time editors, and 1 part-time one – it was evident to us this is not the most scalable system either.
Conversely, programmatic SEO is a lot more scalable:
1 editor can take anything between 30 minutes to 2 hours to fill in one row in the database (30 mins for easier databases, like the ‘use case’ database, and 2 hours for more difficult databases – like the ‘tools’ database)
Tools database:
Use case database:
Now, how many posts (on average) can be produced from *one* row in each database? (= max 2 hours of manual work?)
It depends on the number and type of Programmatic SEO templates. You also need at least a few entries in the databases, to produce some post types (e.g. but let’s calculate the efficiency of programmatic SEO assuming you have the two databases, you’ve entered 10 rows into each, and you have the following templates:
1. [tool1] vs [tool2] – with 10 tools in the database, there are 45 unique combinations
The “problem” with calculating the efficiency of content editors using Programmatic SEO is that the efficiency actually increases the more rows are filled in the database. You can produce “only” 45 posts out of 10 tools, but with 20 tools filled in the database you can already produce 190:
This, of course, is a good problem to have 🙃
2. [tool] alternatives – 10 posts with 10 tools
3. Best tools for [use case] – 10 posts with 10 use cases
4. [tool] reviews – 10 posts with 10 tools
5. [Tool] [Use Case] – 45 posts with 10 tools and 10 use cases
6. [Tool] for [JTBD] – 45 posts with 10 tools and 10 JTBDs (included in the ‘use case’ database’)
7. [Tool1] vs. [Tool2] – which is better for [use case]? – 45 competitor combinations x 10 use cases = 450 different posts
8. [tool1] vs [tool2] for [JTBD] – which is better? – Again, 45 competitor combinations x 10 JTBDs = 450 different posts
9 . [Tool1] vs [Tool2] vs [Tool3] – 120 posts
So with these templates, and 10 entries in each database (taking 20 hours for tools, and 5 hours for use cases in total = 25 hours in total) you can produce 350 posts.
And there’s no writing time required on top!
This means that…
a Programmatic SEO editor can *easily* produce 1140 posts per week, working 25 hours per week.
This means 45.6 blog posts per hour 😱
And as I mentioned, there’s the “good problem to have” – with every new row in the database, it it possible to produce more content combinations…
P.S. You can play with the combinations using the Combination Calculator.
Will you look into implementing this system in your SaaS? 🙂
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