Despite its scalability, very few content teams in SaaS do programmatic SEO still. This is because of some false beliefs and myths. Let’s debunk them here & see why should you do programmatic SEO!
Why you don’t do programmatic SEO – and why you should.
1. You’re sitting on the “moral high horse” of “content quality”.
Programmatically generated content =/= poor quality AI-generated content. You can use top-quality human-written content organized in databases to generate content from these “building blocks” at scale. You can even add Subject-Matter Expert quotes and opinions there. In fact, developing some types of content programmatically improves quality due to:
– higher consistency
– version controlling = keeping your content always up-to-date by making it super-easy to update (incl. screenshots, links and images) it when anything changes (your tool or your competitor updates its interface, you change your pricing, ) – across *all of your articles*, all at once, pretty much automatically.
– you can create more contextually relevant CTA banners, by generating them dynamically based on variables you’re mentioning in specific parts of your post.
2. You’re afraid of “AI” content and “Google updates” eating your blog alive/ “cannibalization” issues.
What did we say about irrational beliefs? 😉 Again:
- Programmatic content =/= AI content
- Programmatic content can be very low or very high quality, just like human-written content; Google doesn’t care how you created it, as long as it’s helpful
- Cannibalisation is a mostly cross-domain issue, plus you can avoid it entirely if you don’t mindlessly scrape content from other sites + if you implement certain mechanisms that will make the content varied even between programmatically generated posts (we’ve done that in our templates).
3. You don’t have the time to set it up/ you don’t want to learn a completely new process/ you don’t have internal buy-in
Well, I think that’s just not very smart ;p I believe in a few years’ time, producing all content by hand, one blog at a time, will be the equivalent of sending newsletters from Outlook.
Yes – the ‘startup costs’ may seem high – is *a lot* of a learning curve and upfront investment in learning how to do it, debugging your scripts/templates, and building the databases. If you do it from scratch, expect to invest 100+ hours.
Yes – initially it’s cheaper and faster to produce content by hand.
But so is using the calculator instead of Excel because you’d don’t have to learn formulas. And it’s equally unscalable.
Once the initial ‘startup costs’ are over – you can produce potentially hundreds of great, maintainable blogs in minutes.
Why you SHOULD invest in programmatic SEO:
- Easy and centralized maintenance = content is always up-to-date.
Keeping your content in databases allows version control for automatic updates of e.g. images, features etc. across all your databases. E.g. If your dashboard changes or your competitor changes pricing, you just need to change the relevant database entries and hit ‘update’ to update all your content pieces using this information. - Ability to add relevant and contextual CTA banners – to improve your conversion rates, your call to actions should be extremely relevant and contextual. You can build CTA banner templates with html+CSS and swap the variables e.g. <H2> content to be relevant to each blog content, or even each paragraph.
- More internal linking, taking care of your internal linking structure – by adding links to your database, you make sure your writers don’t forget to insert important links. Also, you can insert certain links into certain anchors automatically, and update them easily across your entire content body.
- Improved QUALITY
All this leads to a *higher* quality of posts, rather than lower.
Change my mind.
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