You’re starting to work on a new content plan for a new website/blog/affiliate site and want to implement the programmatic SEO strategy for it? Great. In this post, you will learn how you should do your Keyword Research differently for programmatic SEO.
Keyword research for Programmatic SEO – the key principles
There are some common principles behind programmatic SEO that dictate how you should do your KW research:
– the blog posts generated with programmatic SEO templates should follow certain fixed patterns, e.g.:
- Best {use case} tools / software
- {Tool1} alternatives and competitors
- What is…{use case} + Question (e.g. how to {verb} {use case})
- [N] Best {use case} tactics that actually work
- Best {use case} services / agencies for your business / {industry}
The words in curly brackets {} are your variables – keywords that you are going to put into ideally several different templates to cover different search intents, that you’re going to build databases for, and generate posts from those databases and templates in a scalable way.
But how do you find your variables? 🤔
And how do you decide which templates you’re going to produce?
- Sometimes coming up with programmatic templates is quite obvious – e.g. everybody needs a template like “How to do keyword research for Programmatic SEO? ” or “Best {use case} tools/software”
But some programmatic templates you can use are not that straightforward. And it may be helpful for you to reverse-engineer the process by first classifying your KWs by epics, then coming up with topics for each KW corresponding to the search intent, and then looking for patterns of variables within the keywords, and coming up with programmatic templates that could generate content for these variable patterns.
This is what I’m going to cover in the post below.
Step-by-step Keyword research for Programmatic SEO
STEP 1. First of all, you need to decide which EPICs – broad topic areas – you’re going to build your Keyword Clusters around.
In my case, while working on KW research for my partner’s business – BacklinkManager – I started from 4 broad topics:
1. Linkbuilding – various Use Cases (list your tools’ main use cases here)
2. Tools (incl. Competitors and Alternatives) (list your tool’s competitors)
3. Services / agencies
4. {use case} Campaigns / tactics / strategies
In general, to build your clusters, you should first list:
– your tools’ main use cases
– your main user personas
– your main competitors – both direct and indirect ones
STEP 2: Do a Content Gap Analysis between your domain and your main competitors
This will help you generate a ton of different keyword ideas for your niche based on KWs your competitors have already invested in.
Now, the main report will also include a lot of “trash keywords” – so you should filter them by the keyword clusters – esp. use cases and personas – you have listed in STEP 1.
Now, you should have filtered list of good results.
Download the results as a CSV file. If your website is really new, you can limit your Keyword Difficulty to 40, and filter out the most difficult KWs. I’d probably skip that, as the more difficult KWs will rank over time.
STEP 3: Cluster your KWs using a KW clustering tool such as ClusterAI or Keyword Cupid to eliminate duplicates and avoid “cannibalization”.
While Cannibalization is not something I’m particularly worried about in terms of SEO, if is a costly endeavor to create blog posts on topics that in fact overlap in terms of search intent (= and thus should be covered in one post.)
Moreover, duplicate Keywords (e.g. variations of pretty much the same Keyword, e.g.: backlink profile audit, backlink audit, backlink audit guide, backlinks audit, link audit, link audit SEO) make it harder to create a good content plan.
So before you set out to classify your Keywords by EPICs – first use a clustering tool to remove all duplicates/overlaps and get yourself a “clean” KW list.
STEP 4: Classify your Keywords by EPICs listed in STEP1.
Open your cleaned Keyword List in Google Sheets.
Add a column “TOPIC” to the left, and columns “EPIC”, “Date”, “Can be programmatic” and “Programmatic Template” to the right.
Now, first assign all the keywords to the epics you’ve listed in STEP1. You’ll need to think on your feet and look up each KW’s intent in Google / Ahrefs to figure out which topic you should cover for this Keyword and which EPIC it should fall under.
STEP 5: Write down topics for each KW.
Write down the topics you think you should cover for each Keyword on your list.
STEP 6: Sort your Keywords by EPIC.
As you see in the image above, I’ve already sorted my KWs by epic. This helps you get an overview of the patterns between keywords in one cluster.
STEP 7: Review all keywords within one EPIC at a time. Note patterns. Note if the topic can be executed using a programmatic SEO.
As we said before, “Programmatic keywords” are typically variables that fit into topics following a specific pattern, e.g. ”
STEP 8: Filter out KWs which you think can’t be executed programmatically.
These are the ones you can execute using “traditional methods” – briefs + writing them up using freelance writers.
They should be still arranged in EPICs so that you can follow the Content Epics Workflow for them.
STEP 9. Come up with a template for each programmatic KW in each epic. List all the templates you have for the different epics.
You can move epics to separate sheets to keep more focused.
As you can see, the templates for the “Campaigns” epic all share one variable – {use case}. This means all 3 will in fact be very similar, and will be variations fo the same template. It will mean they will be easier to make.
[N] Best {use case} campaigns and tactics you should try / that actually work
{Use case} – the Ultimate Guide
Top {use case} tactics for {industry}
The last template has an additional variable which will modify the main variable as the KW was a long-tailed one.
List all the templates you have for the different epics, in my case it was:
1. Linkbuilding – various Use Cases
1. What is…{use case} + Question (e.g. how to {verb} {use case})
2. Tools (incl. Competitors and Alternatives) (list your tool’s competitors)
2. Best {use case} tools / software
3. Best software/tools for {role}
3. Services / agencies
4. Best {use case} services / agencies for your business / {industry}
4. {use case} Campaigns / tactics / strategies
5. [N] Best {use case} campaigns and tactics you should try / that actually work
6. {Use case} – the Ultimate Guide
7. Top {use case} tactics for {industry}
STEP 10. List all the databases you’ll need for these templates, and start thinking about database structure.
Based on the variables in these 7 templates, I now know I’ll need the following databases:
1. Use case database
Including information about:
– roles (job titles) that have this specific use case, so you can use them as a modifier
– description of industries that use the specific use case e.g. use for SaaS, use case
– campaigns, strategies, and tactics to improve the use case
– tools used for each database (without detailed descriptions, these will go into the “tools database”)
2. Tools database
Including the tool description for:
– each use case from the use case database
– each industry mentioned in the use case database
– each role that uses this specific tool
3. Services/companies agencies database
Including information on:
– which use cases they serve
– which roles are they for
– which industries are they for
4. Industry Database
Including:
– industry description
5. Role Database
Including:
– role description
– tools for this role
Now you can fill in each programmatic template you create with not only the KWs from your content gap, but also all the use cases, tools and roles you have listed in STEP 1.
Hope this makes it clearer how you can go about KW research for your programmatic SEO strategy. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask them below in the comments!
English