Programmatic SEO examples: the ultimate list with use cases

Programmatic SEO examples demonstrate how powerful this strategy is. Every SEO team devises new and original ways to make the best possible strategy and get to the first place in Google search and thus to visitors. Some of them achieve this quickly, and others struggle a bit, but they achieve breathtaking results in the end.

Programmatic SEO is the method of mass-producing pages of content using a database to rank high in Google's search results. It is no secret that finding keywords is the only secure way to accomplish that. More accurate, adequate keywords.

There are various ways to find keywords for Programmatic SEO pages and even more diverse ways to perform it.

In the following, you will have the opportunity to see the best examples of the Programmatic SEO strategy and the results and benefits various companies have achieved thanks to this approach.

For a step-by-step process I wrote a guide that explains in detail how to do Programmatic SEO.

When it comes to programmatic SEO, keywords are essential. It's important to target the right keywords to attract the right audience. Here are some tips for selecting keywords for programmatic SEO pages:

Programmatic SEO can be used for a variety of purposes. Here are some examples of how programmatic SEO has been used in different contexts: 

Programmatic SEO can be a powerful tool for optimizing your website for search engines. However, it's important to know when to use it, which keywords to target, and what examples of its use are available. By following the tips and examples provided in this article, you can implement programmatic SEO in a way that's effective and efficient for your website.

Programmatic SEO has a specific role in establishing landing pages on a large scale and fulfilling the ever-going search demand and online traffic.

In other words, an effective programmatic SEO campaign can increase your website's domain authority, link building, and organic keyword rankings. To accomplish this, developers write code that automatically creates large-scale web pages. This is how your or any other website can pop up on the SERP seemingly out of nowhere.

It would be a lie to say that Programmatic SEO is not one of the most effective ways to achieve the desired results in the shortest period. Programmatic SEO strategy brings a lot of benefits, to name a few:

First and foremost, programmatic SEO aims to attract as much organic search traffic as possible. Any website should prioritize driving organic traffic. Advertising can boost revenue and brand awareness in the short term but also drain cash from your company's account. Using programmatic SEO, you can target a wide range of long-tail keywords with low competition so your content reaches the largest possible audience.

Why is organic traffic so important? Did you know that 70% to 80% of users completely ignore paid advertisements? Or that almost 15%  of users that find websites through proper SEO tactics become customers? Considering the stakes, paid search is a good short-term solution, but organic search creates long-term, compounded returns. Building your brand on social media is essential, but targeting high-intent customers with organic search is even more crucial. Don't you agree?

Consistency in design

Additionally, each page's content is formatted identically in your (headless) CMS. Decoupling the content from the design elements allows the page layout to be easily replicated with content variations. By using programmatic SEO, you can build a structured library of components that can be reused and modified.

Easily scalable

Marketers often encounter programmatic SEO when creating a large-scale content marketing strategy. Delivering it will require a lot of work. Since programmatic SEO is code-driven rather than manual content creation, it can be scaled rapidly. As a result, brands can target less competitive long-tail keywords and generate steady traffic from low-volume keywords - all that on the scale.

Programmatic SEO provides a better user experience

UX can be improved with any SEO strategy. Using keywords alone is no longer enough for search engines to evaluate web pages. A website must understand user intent and provide a rich user experience to rank highly in organic search engine results. Programmatic SEO understands and responds to those specific search intents through long-tail keywords.

Programmatic SEO puts you on the map!

Your website's chances of appearing in the SERP for the related keywords will increase the more SEO-friendly pages you have. You can create SEO-optimized pages using programmatic SEO by targeting keywords that help users with specific intents. You must keep in mind that a page that users love will be loved by search engines as well. In spite of low monthly searches, targeted long-tail keywords are much easier to rank.

For example, instead of writing four texts for 20,000 visits per month for some high-competitive keywords, you can create 100 programmatic long-keyword SEO pages, each of which gets 300 visits.

Why is the second option better?

For high-competitive keywords, you won't rank in the first two places on Google, and you will get maybe 100 visitors a month, but for long-tail keywords, you can rank mostly in the first two spots, and you get over 10,000 visitors.

Programmatic SEO isn't always the best option. In some cases, it's better to use a manual approach to SEO. For instance, if you have a small website with a limited number of pages, manual SEO might be more efficient than using programmatic SEO tools. Similarly, a manual approach may be more appropriate if your website requires customization or personalization.

Well, like anything in life, it can be if you don’t nurture it.😅 So, to do it right, consider these common problems, challenges, and failure points you need to know, avoid, and overcome:

Keyword research is the foundation of SEO. Creating content that features the keywords and head terms your target audience is searching for seems like the most logical approach, but it can bring some risks.

If you use keywords in a way that doesn't seem natural or complement your web page's content, you will come across as spam. The user may not click because of this. Create informative, easy-to-read content, avoid keyword stuffing, and prioritize user experience. How to do that? You will find answers in this guide: How to find keywords for Programmatic SEO pages.

If you already have a large site with a million visits and dozen pages to sift through, Google may already have issues finding and indexing every single page.

Each page should exist to serve a purpose and to be unique in some facet and, in general, need to provide quality information. Mass-produced page content can lead to troubles for indexing if the pages don’t have a sensible structure or enough authority.

Google may not index some pages if you have a lot of them. You must improve their interlinking if you want Google to find all your pages. How:

For Google, duplicate content refers to the parts of content that are either identical to one another or very similar. This “Copy-Paste" content can harm your SEO rankings.

On the web, duplicate content is available at more than one URL. Multiple URLs show the same content, so search engines don't know which URL to rank higher. In this case, both URLs might be ranked lower than each other, and other web pages may be preferred.

There are two types of duplicate content:

In many cases, the best way to fix duplicate content is to implement 301 redirects from non-preferred URL versions to preferred URL versions.

Besides redirects, there are numerous methods and strategies available to prevent the creation of duplicate content on your site, such as:

Thin content can be defined as low-quality pages that have little to no value for visitors. It is not uncommon for a Programmatic SEO strategy to be based on visuality. There are images, videos, and graphics, but there is a lack of text, especially descriptive ones.

Your goal is to create pages that will provide value to the users while keeping Google pleased. Remember that: It is imperative to show your users the most valuable content. Google evaluates content across your entire domain, so thin content does not rank as well as dense content.

It is simple; thin content can be fixed by:

I know this sounds weird, but removing thin content from a website can increase SEO results. How? Simply, Google will pay attention to other/relevant content. Of course, you need to do this carefully, so choose outdated content pages with no target words or head terms or are made of off-topic categories.

Improving requires more time, but at least you won't give up the content you've created. And you can improve your content in various ways:

Consolidating pages

This step may seem as same as improving, but it isn’t. Consolidation requires a more progressive approach to problem-solving but also a bit of cunning. 😈

I will show an example:

Let’s say I wrote various blogs about Headless CMS:

As you can say, I did it ( isn’t that cunning? 😊), but let's say that all those blogs Google considered as thin content. What should I do? Delete them? NO! Improve them? Already did! What is next to do? Mix those two steps into one!🤓

It would be best to remove sufficient parts of content from all of the blogs and then merge the remaining fragmented posts into one cohesive piece. And the result could be this:

Once you’ve removed, improved, or consolidated your thin content, you are back in the game for the highest SEO rankings. 🤩

It may not be as dangerous as Hannibal Lector, the most famous Hannibal, but it can harm your content, perhaps even more than him. 😅

Keyword cannibalization occurs when several pages on your site target the same keyword.

You create unnecessary competition on your website when several pages target the same keywords. You reduce your site's organic reach/performance when your web pages compete with each other. Due to this, none of these pages reach their full potential.

Keyword cannibalization could not even happen if keyword research and finalizing the target keywords, including head terms and modifiers, were done thoroughly and according to the existing rules. But if it happens, here is what you can do:

If you target two keywords with very similar meanings and they are describing exactly the same thing, just choose the one which has more search volume.

If you can’t decide which keywords to choose, your choice can be to use both of them or even more but then do that on the same page.

In the end, if your website is suffering from a poorly planned keyword strategy, you may need to find new keywords. Keep in mind two things; keywords need to describe your page’s content precisely, and visitor search intent.

Ok, we saw the most Programmatic SEO challenges; now it is time to see Programmatic SEO tools that will help you make better pSEO pages.

Just like any other SEO strategy, Programmatic SEO needs to be implemented with the proper tools to be as effective as possible. Today's market offers various devices, but how do you know which ones to use for Programmatic SEO?

SEMrush is a marketing tool that can increase your online visibility in search engines. Using this tool, you can look at competitors' high-ranking keywords based on their domains and associated keyword rankings.

SEMrush's solutions include a lot of technical analytics so that you can keep up with your position on search engines. The software consists of 50+ tools to sharpen your SEO strategy and offers tips on implementing keywords through content, blogs, and product pages.

Grammarly and ProWritingAid are advanced content writing tools that offer grammar and style checks for writers of all types.

Blog posts, articles, and news are all examples of small content that can be checked with both tools. With these editing tools, you can get live editing suggestions while working in Google Docs or Microsoft Word.

With these tools, you get the following features:

The Hemingway App is a free app that helps you simplify your writing. Designed with journalists in mind, this app aims to keep your content clean and clear.

When a reporter writes a report, the goal is to write at a sixth-grade level or higher. Doing so maximizes readability for a broad audience. That's what the Hemingway App does for your content.

Put simply, Screaming Frog crawls your website for SEO errors. This tool analyzes and checks everything from finding broken links to meta description and title tag overview to duplicate content alerts.

As a heavily analytical tool, it's thorough at detecting numerous ranking factors that Google or Bing crawlers look at. The feature list shows that every ranking factor is taken into consideration, and you can also try the free version with a crawl limit of 500 URLs.

BCMS is a Headless CMS that simplifies content management. It has an easy-to-use interface. Thus, content teams can focus on managing content without being restricted by tools, while developers can focus on coding. No matter how big your website grows, your costs will remain the same. In other words, it won’t cost you more if you have more visitors, users, or pages.

Using BCMS for Programmatic SEO, you’ll be able to quickly define the content structure for your Programmatic SEO pages, using {{ variables }}. Making a lot of unique pages, like “The hotels for {{ summer/spring/winter/fall }} in {{ Paris/Barcelona/Lisbon }}” takes minutes instead of weeks. Read complete instructions on how to implement a Programmatic SEO strategy using BCMS.

Google Analytics is an invaluable resource for any SEO. It provides valuable data about websites, such as the number of site visits, traffic sources, and location demographics.

With detailed insights from Google Analytics, you can adjust your content strategy and figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Ok, this one is not a tool but more a life hack. However, useful and totally free. 🤓

When you perform Google searches in Incognito mode, you will get an unbiased, 'clean' picture of what your users see and receive when they search for keywords. By searching in Incognito, you can see where you truly rank for a particular term on a search engine results page.

I have talked enough about Programmatic SEO. This massive list of examples shows how important it is to think outside the box. Creating content that people are searching for is even more crucial but remember to review and fix duplicate content on your Programmatic SEO pages regularly. Let's see what the standards say:

Nomad List is a popular site that provides information about the best places for digital nomads. As a remote worker, Nomad List helps you find the best places to live, work, and travel. The app gathers millions of data points every second. With that data, Nomad List gives you an idea of where it's convenient for you to go.

Nomad List has many city pages that use programmatic SEO to target keywords like "Best Places to Live in [Continent]," "Cost of Living in [City]," or "Cheap Places in [Country]." For example, the "Cost of Living" page lists data points without written content.

Canva is a free graphic design platform for making invitations, business cards, Instagram posts, and more. Canva's vast templates allow you to edit photos and create customized designs. Design templates are just one of the things that Canva templated. They did the same with the SEO strategy by choosing Programmatic SEO to make page templates with different content.

As you can see above, Canva's landing pages are structured in the same way, but the only thing that differs is the content inside of them.

Besides the same landing page template, the true success of the Programmatic SEO strategy comes from writing content based on search intent. Canva has to create separate pages for each keyword and optimize its content. An example is simple: A person searching for "create a certificate" intends to design it independently. If someone types "free certificate template," they are looking for free certificate templates to download.

Zapier created thousands of pages about integrating tools, such as "Google Sheets + [platform] integration." There are no written contents on these pages, only dynamically inserted data, including the famous "Zaps," triggers, and tutorial links.

According to Zapier, this SEO strategy brought them two million visitors in May 2,022 with about 56,000 pages.

The Booking.com & TripAdvisor websites are permanently ranked at the top of Google searches thanks to their thousands of custom landing pages. If someone searches "hotels in [city]," these two sites are always in the top results. Don't you believe me? Take a 👀

By defining the head terms, primary and secondary modifiers, and creating a unique formula for every single content piece ( e.g. [The cheapest] in [hotels] [Paris]), they were making thousands of custom landing pages for just about every city on the planet, with the same information, putting themselves #1 on Google.

Eater.com did the same thing as Booking and TripAdvisor for food, wine, and restaurants.

In this case, Eater took a list of cities and different kinds of food and restaurants to create unique content that will make them at the top search results and visitors (in this case, me) hungry and craving to eat "the most delicious Italian Four-Cheese Pasta" 🍝

The Webflow team has created programmatic pages for their website templates, such as "Responsive [type] Website Templates."

Webflow used Programmatic SEO for the same purpose as Canva did. And again, this proved that this SEO strategy is the best one to fulfill this kind of project.

Through Yelp, consumers can discover, connect and transact with local businesses of all sizes by browsing trusted local business information, photos, and review content. Make an appointment or purchase, request a quote, join a waitlist, or make a reservation with Yelp.

By creating specific categories such as cities, different local businesses, and services, Yelp, with the help of Programmatic SEO and targeted long-tail keywords, managed to secure over 135 million visits per month. Moreover, he placed himself in the top 3 search results and became one of the biggest rivals of Google Reviews.

Aside from the fact that ProductHunt is a popular website that helps makers and marketers launch their products and gain their first real users, programmatic SEO has made it one of the top community-based sites. How did ProductHunt manage to do so? Simple, by creating alternative pages for products added to their site.

In this example above, you can see that ProductHunt shows the best 3 alternatives to Notion, but still, if that is not sufficient, you can find the full list with more than 270 products. So only for this example, ProductHunt leveraged almost 300 landing pages; imagine how many landing pages they made if it is estimated that in 2016, the website had over 100 million products across 50,000 companies.

Well done, ProductHunt; making landing pages from user content doesn't put you only at the top of the Google search results, but also, you won first place on my list of total badasses! 😎

Amazon SEO revolves around optimizing or updating your product listings to increase their visibility or placement in Amazon search results. The same principle holds for Amazon to increase its visibility and ranking on Google.

Amazon determines which product listings are relevant to a user's search by considering several factors related to user behavior. For example, if someone who did the exact search purchased the product.

Campus Arrival provides essential college items for students moving into a dorm room. Almost all of the products on this list are accessible to students at any university worldwide.

Campus Arrival programmatically generates a curated list of college-ready items to pack for campus moving day based on the college's official recommendations. That brings more traffic to their site, helps students in the moving process, and CampusArrival even figured out how to monetize their website. By linking it to Amazon and its best sale deals. Pretty clever, I have to admit 🎓

Failory is a content site for startup founders and entrepreneurs. The website contains interviews with founders of failed startups and their experiences. That is actually how Failory got the name from failure + story. But besides the failed stories, they shared some awesome results using Programmatic SEO.

According to Failory, programmatic SEO contributed about 45% of their Google traffic in January 2022, with over 50,000 users. They programmatically generated over 400 pages using a pitch deck + [industry] as a keyword formula.

With more than 500k unique pages, Veed.io has successfully built several programmatic SEO campaigns. As a result of these efforts, the website now receives over 100,000 daily visitors.

Besides ranking #1 for "online video editor" on Google, Veeed.io ranks in the top 3 for over 6000(!!!) keywords.

Initially, Veed.io built programmatic landing pages for each of its existing features. By focusing on what users searched for on Google, they reversed this strategy and added features based on that. These features are now available as standalone tools.

Anyone who wants to travel to another country will find the Visa List helpful in understanding the visa requirements along with the relevant things to remember.

The major ingredients Visa List uses for creating programmatic SEO are:

This example shows how Programmatic SEO helped Visalist to turn its datasets into millions of dollars.

This startup did programmatic SEO with NoCode on a $50/mo stack! It is quite easy to navigate Breweriesnearby's website. Each brewery is displayed as a separate card with the following content:

With this content categorization, Breweriesnearby's was able to leverage landing pages that target:

Again, this is a pure example, and whoever is looking for information has the opportunity to get all the answers in one place. And in this case, the risk of getting drunk 😅 Cheers, mates 🍻

DelightChat is a customer support SaaS for Shopify. Using a programmatic SEO strategy, they created more than 300 articles under the heading “Best Shopify [Category] Apps,” replacing “Category” with topics like “Accounting” or “Affiliate.”

Thomas Cook's tactics and point of view are a pure example of how, through programmatic SEO it is possible to gain 467,000 visitors from 3,744 weather pages. As an airline travel company, that provides package holidays to hundreds of destinations around the globe, Thomas Cook nailed it with their original Programmatic SEO approach.

Thomas Cook created landing pages showing the weather in destinations they travel to for each month of the year, e.g., "Madrid weather July." It was a very low-competition keyword, but people looking for a holiday used it, making Thomas Cook the target audience.

Thomas Cook did top-quality keyword research, finding the relevant search terms their competitors had missed, which helped them elevate their business.

Gawk Outdoor is an advertising company producing outdoor billboards across regional Victoria. Having decided to build a website to acquire a new direct business, they turned to Programmatic SEO for assistance. What did they do? They used the locations of their billboards to create numerous landing pages that will give potential clients an insight into where they can advertise, at what price, and what size billboards.

This intelligent move increased website traffic, with 41% of its leads from programmatic content. Gawk Outdoor proves they can provide high-quality outdoor advertising for all Victorian businesses – large and small outdoors and on-site, too.

Pipedrive is a web-based CRM tool that uses a Programmatic SEO strategy to build programmatic comparison pages and template pages.

Using "Pipedrive VS [competition name]" to build landing pages on a large scale led to better ranking, the creation of relevant content, and authority among competitors.

With ColorHexa, you can generate matching color palettes for your designs based on any color information.

We at BCMS also couldn’t resist, so we tried this tempting strategy for our website. We leveraged our web development, serverless, and headless CMS knowledge to craft meaningful dynamic landing pages. We used the formula [CMS] for [different kinds of websites] for our landing pages. And the best part is that we used our headless CMS to build and scale those landing pages.

We did the whole Programmatic SEO process on our own. If you want to know the flow of that process, you can check out the step-by-step Programmatic SEO guide, where we documented how to generate 3k organic visits for the site for 2 weeks and reach the second position on Google without any campaigns and paid ads to look alike. We even share the Programmatic SEO tools we used so you can replicate our strategy.