Imagine creating thousands of pages of top-notch SEO content for your website in minutes without having to code or write content. This growth tactic is called programmatic SEO, and in 2023 anyone can do it with no code tools. And many indie creators are creating profitable side hustles through this approach! This guide will show you how to setup a programmatic SEO website using Webflow and other no code tools, examples, and other tips & tricks.
What is programmatic SEO?
Programmatic SEO is a method for targeting long-tail keywords by automatically generating high-quality website content or pages. Instead of writing editorial content from scratch for each page, you can use a database and frontend content template to instantly generate 1000s of pages of SEO content. Programmatic SEO is most effective when it targets content for repeatable search queries with many variations of keywords. Like any SEO content, it also works best when your keywords are as high intent, low competition, and high volume as possible. For example, Nomadlist programmatically generates directory content for long-tail keywords related to cities from crowdsourced data provided by its user base:
- Best places to live in [Country] in [Year]
- Cost of living in [City]
- Safest cities in [Country]
But content generation doesn't need to be dependent on crowdsourcing. It can be as simple as pasting 1000s of spreadsheet rows of business or location data into Airtable. No code tools like Airtable and Webflow make it possible for anyone to create a programmatic engine faster and for a fraction of the cost of building this with code.
Why build a programmatic SEO website?
Captain Obvious here, to let you know that the beauty of SEO is that you don't have to pay to acquire traffic. The examples below would need to pay $1000s per month on ads to acquire the traffic they are now getting organically. But that's not to say that SEO is free growth, as creating editorial content, like blogs, often requires hours of your company's time and resources in manually writing content.
Programmatic SEO offers a fast, scalable, and cost-effective way for acquiring organic traffic by sheer force of numbers. This doesn't mean you can't create great content. Many niches are underserved in terms of content, which can be addressed in a programmatic way while delivering valuable and relevant content for user queries.
No code programmatic SEO examples
In 2023, tech giants with 100s of developers like Airbnb, Tripadvisor, and Zapier are not the only ones leveraging programmatic SEO. These are some indie startups that have managed to build programmatic SEO websites using no-code tools with stacks that cost less than $70 a month.
1. Failory
Failory is a successful library of startup related content, such as startup failures, founder interviews, and pitch decks. They mostly generate listicle blog posts that target a wide range of startup related keywords, such as:
- [Count] Startups in [City]
- Best [Count] startup pitch decks in [Year]
- Top [Count] Accelerators in [Country]
Failory is using Airtable as a backend for gathering large sums of startup data and enriching it for applicable blog templates. They are then using Webflow's CMS page templates to generate new content from data in Airtable. To learn more about Failory's system, be sure to check out this video.
2. Breweries Nearby
Breweries Nearby is a programmatic SEO website for craft beer breweries. The site was created to provide craft brewery goers, a dedicated resource for finding the best breweries to visit and areas to brewery hop based on a set of attributes that are unique to the brewery going experience. Since launching during the summer of 2022, Breweries Nearby has received over 30k clicks & 1 million impressions organically with just 1k indexed pages
Similar to Nomadlist, they use data crowdsourced from users to automatically generate content. For example, if enough users shared data about a brewery being dog friendly, the brewery would be listed in the 'dog friendly breweries in [City]' faq section of the relevant city page.
Breweries Nearby was built using Airtable and Webflow with Whalesync for syncing data between the two tools. They are also in the process of creating a map that displays brewery data from Webflow's CMS either using Jetboost or Nocodeflow's new CMS map apps, so users can better plan self-guided beer tours.
3. Delight Chat
Delight Chat is an omnichannel customer support and Whatsapp marketing app for Shopify that made a programmatic directory with 300 listicles in a week using Webflow. Through this initiative, they received an impressive 6k impressions within 6 weeks of publishing this content. Every article is targeting long-tail keywords for 'Best Shopify [Type] Apps'. They are targeting not only low competition keywords, but also high intent ones as their target customers (Shopify store owners) are very much in the market for apps like Delight Chat. This means they can monetize traffic in a variety of ways, such as affiliate marketing to other apps or converting visitors to one of their products.
How to build a programmatic SEO website with Webflow?
1. Choose a niche / keyword research
This is the most important part! First off, it helps to focus on a niche that you are interested or knowledgeable in, as it not only increases the likelihood of providing high quality content, but also makes building more fun.
Next, validate there is a good opportunity in this niche by doing keyword research. Powerful keyword tools like Ubersuggest and SEMRush offer free 1-2 week free trials, which is more than enough time to validate keyword potential. Ideally, the keywords should meet the following metrics: less than 30 search difficulty, over 100 monthly volume, and some transactional intent. Bonus points if there are a few straggler long-tails with less than 100 volume and a search difficulty under 5.
More bonus points if Google does not compete in your niche. You might want to reconsider if you see something like Google Maps results appearing first for any of your keyword ideas. This is tough, because the most common long-tail variations you will find are location based. There are some exceptions to this rule, but it's far more difficult when an owner of a playing field, like Google, is also competing.
Tools like SEMRush also offer features for discovering related long-tail keyword ideas, and also analyzing keywords of competitors. One other proven hack for finding keyword ideas is to simply review Google autocomplete answers, as it can provide insight into the most frequently searched related terms. For example, Breweries Nearby is targeting "breweries [City] with food' and '[City] breweries with patios' based suggested related terms.
The last step is to ask yourself: 'Can I create content that is valuable or solves a problem for these queries?'. If your content or product ideas seem spammy, it might be best to go back to the drawing board.
2. Buy a new or existing domain
Before even thinking of buying a new domain from a site like Godaddy, seek out abandoned or neglected websites in your niche. There might be an opportunity to buy one and modernize its design, content, and SEO. Building backlinks and domain authority is one of the most difficult parts of organic growth, so owning a domain with established domain authority will give you a huge head-start.
A great place to start looking for established websites for sale is a marketplace like Acquire. But you might unearth more hidden gems by seeking out private sellers. Check out this article for tips and tricks for private acquisitions.
3. Collecting data
Other questions you should be asking early are: 'How efficiently can I collect large sums of data?' and 'How good is the data quality?'. Based on your answers, there are three approaches you can take to acquiring data:
- Scraping: Find publicly available data sets, APIs, or websites with data relevant to your content. For example, Breweries Neaby found an online Yellow Pages style directory of every brewery on the planet. Scraping might seem technical, but no-code tools like Parsehub and Octoparse make this accessible, albeit still tricky.
- Private data: Programmatic SEO can also be effective for smaller sums of data. You can target keywords for things that require a quote: "enterprise pricing [Company]", "[Type of service] price in [Location]", etc. In these examples, they would save people the headache of a phone call or zoom call. You might have to roll up your sleeves to source this data, but you will gain a bigger moat as most people aren't bold enough to go door to door to seek this information. You might not generate as much content as the above examples, but your content will likely solve more intense problems for users.
- Crowdsourcing: The idea of crowdsourcing is to collect data from website visitors or users that you can use to generate content. For example, Nomadlist uses forms to collect images, reviews, ratings, and livability data from its registered users.
- Manual entry: If the above three aren't possible, you can always hire a data entry freelancer to manually gather and input the data.
The end goal is to have a structured spreadsheet of data that you can paste or import into a no code database / table without issue.
4. Choose programmatic SEO tools
There are many no-code tools that make it easy to automatically create and update website pages through CMS page templates and integrations with other tools. And it can be done for less than $70 a month. All you need is a frontend, backend, and syncing tool.
Frontend
Webflow - We recommend using Webflow to automatically generate pages from CMS data and templates. Other tools could do the trick, like Softr, but Webflow is superior in it's built-in design flexibility and technical SEO. Despite all the positives, one major limitation Webflow's 10k CMS record limit for non-enterprise plans. One workaround though it to set up a proxy.
Backend and Database
Airtable - Airtable is more of a a spreadsheet on steroids, but is a fantastic backend tool for beginners. It does have limitations, such as their form feature, a lack of vlookup or SQL join functionalities, and a limit of 50k records. But Airtable's community is very supportive and there are multiple apps and tutorials that can help you accomplish almost anything you want. Aside from storing data, you can also create backend logic using Airtable's automations feature and field functions, such as formulas and rollups.
Xano - If you are looking for a more robust, scalable, and advanced backend and database tool, then Xano is the way to go. Xano is far superior to Airtable in terms of backend logic, databse storage and relational functionality, but also offers an API connector in case you wanted to create custom workflows with other tools.
Syncing Data
Syncing is the glue that pieces the backend and the frontend together. In 2023, there are three tools that offer a far more user friendly and instantaneous alternative (to automation tools like Zapier) for syncing data to Webflow and other backend tools:
- Whalesync - They are the gold standard for syncing tools, but are priced higher than others on this list.
- Nobull - Free, but does not work well when syncing reference fields.
- Make - Relatively cheap but steep learning curve compared to Whalesync.
AI Content Generation
Integrating ChatGpt into your project can be a massive hack for creating unique paragraphs for programmatic pages. Check out this video from Whalesync explaining how you can integrate OpenAI into Airtable to generate unique paragraphs for each programmatic record. For example, if you were creating an article about the '[Count] best disc golf courses in [City]', you could write a unique paragraph about each park in a city instead of dynamically filling sentences with generic attributes from your database (eg. website, address, holes, difficulty, etc).
Most programmatic SEO projects in 2023, including the previous examples, generate content from paragraph templates that get dynamically filled by CMS data. The risk to this approach is that Google might consider your content duplicates and not index pages. From my experience, this only happens if you are swapping out a few words, and it does not affect your rankings.
There is much debate over whether Google punishes AI generated content. But your score should not be affected if you can ensure that OpenAI is generating valuable and non-spammy content for your visitors. Quality control is key!
User generated content (UGC)
Adding user generated content like reviews, comments, & forum posts can increase the uniqueness of your pages and likelihood of pages being indexed, while improving your SEO through the following:
- Increasing the amount of content & keywords crawlable on each page.
- Increasing time on page.
- When new UGC is posted, the page is updated. And Google loves content updates!
- Reviews data can be used to create an aggregate rating schema to increase CTR.
For enabling UGC on Webflow sites, Supersparks is the best no-code option for the following reasons:
- 100% customizable in the Webflow designer. No need to embed widgets!
- Doesn't use CMS items.
- Takes 2 minutes to install.
- Integrates with membership tools like Webflow Memberships and Memberstack, thus allowing you to create a community around your audience.
- Offers commenting, reviews, and community posting all within the same plan.
Scraping
All of the below products offer free plans with templates to help you scrape some of the biggest directories (eg. Yelp, Google Maps, Pinterest, etc.).
Misc Webflow Apps For User Experience
- Jetboost - If you are looking to add advanced filtering, search, dynamic maps, and pagination for organizing your programmatic data, the easiest way is through Jetboost's app library.
- Finsweet - Finsweet's open source library also offers almost everything Jetboost does and more. Despite being free, their solutions can be more limited and more time consuming to implement, replicate, and adapt.
5. Create programmatic SEO content
Think of your content as a template, and imagine how your programmatic data is going to dynamically fill paragraphs. For example, if you were creating page for 'Crime rate in [location]' you could write a template paragraph like the below, where all curly brackets would be placeholders your programmatic data:
With a crime rate of {number} per one thousand residents, {location} has one of the {highest or lowest} crime rates in {country} compared to all communities of all sizes. One's chance of becoming a victim of either {type of crime} or {type of crime} crime here is {likelihood data}.
An alternative to writing content placeholders, is to write paragraphs dedicated to certain data records based on attributes. For example, Breweries Nearby dynamically shows a paragraph about a brewery being dog friendly (using Webflow's conditional visibility,) only if the brewery is classified as dog friendly in the CMS.
Be sure to create content that is valuable and relevant to your keywords, includes your keywords multiple times, and is of a decent length. Also be careful of keyword cannibalization! For example, when Breweries Nearby launched they had indexing issues because they created pages dedicated to high upside long-tail keywords (eg) 'Dog friendly breweries in [city]') that featured many of the same breweries as other pages for the same location and didn't feature enough unique content. Since switching to targeting these keywords in a faq section on the main location pages ('Breweries in [city]'), they have not only fixed their indexing issues but seen an increase in traffic for long-tails. Sometimes less is more, even for programmatic SEO.
6. How to build a no code programmatic SEO website
Now on to the fun part! Before building, I suggest mapping out the pages you would like to dynamically create and the data fields that will make up your content. To simplify things, it helps to create 1:1 relationship between your CMS collections and database tables. To help illustrate this how to guide, Breweries Nearby was nice enough allow us to use screenshots of their setup.
Build Frontend In Webflow
Start by building your CMS collections and template page designs for your content. Below are examples of how Breweries Nearby creates directory content for Cities and Breweries keywords.
Reference fields in Webflow or lookup fields in a database tool like Airtable makes it possible to link data across data sets. In the example below, Breweries Nearby is connecting brewery data to cities so relevant breweries are listed on the pages targeting '[Location] breweries' keywords. For navigation purposes, the city data is also linked to region, county, and neighbourhood collections to improve internal linking to related data sets.
One limitation of Webflow, is that it's not possible to fill text spans with CMS fields. So you need to create custom code blocks with basic html and css to dynamically fill written content with CMS data.
Build Backend In A No code Database
In the below example, Breweries Nearby has a main table for Breweries that uses lookup fields to connect data across tables. After scraping data, they simply structure the data and paste it onto the end of the 'Brewery details' table. This then automatically creates new pages for breweries and updates the breweries listed on city pages. In the below example, if there wasn't already a record for Fort Collins in the city table, a new page would get created for Fort Collins after data is pasted.
They are then using Airtable functions to:
1) Create a slug for each pages url - This column would be synced to the 'slug' field in Webflow. This is an often ignored part of SEO. But to summarize quickly, it's important to keep this slug short and include your keyword.
Sync Data
Use a tool like Whalesync and match the collections and fields from your database to your frontend CMS. After, any data added in your database will be immediately added to your CMS.
Bonus: Crowdsource Form Data
To add crowdsourced layer to your project, you need to: 1) Create forms to your pages to collect data from visitors or users about certain programmatic data; 2) Create backend logic to summarize the data (eg. average ratings). One way to instantly sync the form submissions from Webflow to a database tool is through webhooks - you can learn more here.
7. Grow organically
Newsflash! SEO is a long-term play that requires patience. But these are a few tactics that can help accelerate your organic traffic growth.
Build Backlinks
This is the most difficult part of any SEO project. You can google and find hundreds of tactics for building backlinks online. Unfortunately, there are no great growth hacks. My main suggestion would be to get out there and share great content relevant to your niche. If you want to take a shortcut, there are multiple paid options for building backlinks, such as Help My Rank and EIN Presswire. You can also find directory sites related to your niche or startups, that will allow you to post your project and receive dofollow backlinks.
Add Content (Gradually)
Simply put, by adding more content, you increase the keywords you can rank for. It's important to do this gradually after launching as submitting 1000s of pages all at once can turn on Google's spam radar.
Refine Your Content
Once you launch, the answers for what content to add or focus on will fall right into your lap. Just go to Search Console, and read through the search terms you are getting impressions for. If you noticed any that you aren't directly targeting, there might be an opportunity to create focused content for those keywords.
8. Monetize your programmatic SEO traffic
It's never too early to think about how you are going to make money from your content and organic traffic. Below are some methods for monetizing your programmatic SEO site:
Display Ads
By adding display ads you are making a trade off with your site's UX. And since almost everyone and their grandmother now has an adblocker, it makes display ads less enticing. While there is an opportunity to make passive income from it, you will need a hundreds of thousands of visitors to make a standalone business from this revenue channel. Be sure to check out Google's online calculator to understand the potential of display ads. Despite it's relatively low upside, it remains the easiest way to monetize.
Direct Ads
Instead of installing Adsense and letting Google provide you with advertisers, you can source your own and bake your ads into your content more naturally. Below is an example of how a programmatic SEO site for beaches shows an ad after every 2-6 beach on their list, and also uses an 'Advertise' CTA in their navbar to attract potential advertisers. Using Finsweet's CMS combine attribute, you can accomplish the below by combining a collection for ads with another collection.
By cutting out the middle man, you have the potential to profit more off your ads. But you will need to roll up your sleeves more and cold email / call to acquire most of your advertisers. Once you can show results from your first few advertisers though, this will become a much easier.
Affiliate Links
By linking to affiliates in your niche you can gain commission for any traffic, sign ups, or revenue generated from your programmatic site.
Premium Listings
If you are running a directory site, then you can follow the Yelp or Houzz playbook of offering more visibility to the businesses (listed on your site) that pay you.
Private Data Transactions
As mentioned earlier in this post, there is a great opportunity to programmatically create content for private data that would usually requires money or peoples' time to acquire. So if a visitor wanted to know the price of the enterprise plan for a certain SAAS product, you could show a preview, but only reveal the full article to users that pay a one time fee. Or if visitors might be interested in staying up to date or seeing other similar data reports, you might be able to charge a subscription fee.
Wrapping up
Well that ended up being more in depth than I originally intended. Hopefully this article provided you with some inspiration for your programmatic SEO initiative. In my opinion, this is a unique side hustle that not every one will have the persistence to do but can be run truly passively once live. And with no-code tools, you can now build something that would traditionally be technically complex like this in a matter of weeks. Also, this is not like a traditional tech side project where you are screwed if you start solving the wrong problem. With programmatic SEO you are taking a diversified approach to delivering a wide range of content to an underserved niche - believe me, there are too many :).
Despite no code already being a leaner approach to product development, it's important to still remain lean. By that I mean, don't spend 6 months trying to build the perfect programmatic site. Release something basic, gather feedback, review data, and continuously improve.
If you have any questions or need support do not hesitate to reach out to me at ian@supersparks.io. Thanks for reading!
