Programmatic SEO (pSEO) has gained traction in recent years as a scalable and cost-effective approach to content creation. However, its reputation as a highly technical strategy requiring specialized implementation can deter marketers.

Fortunately, the rise of low- and no-code tools makes pSEO more accessible than ever. Below, we explain how to launch a successful pSEO strategy and highlight the most important tools you need to build out your tech stack.

If you’d prefer a turnkey experience with pSEO, daydream offers full-service packages for teams that don’t have the time or resources to juggle multiple tools.

What is programmatic SEO and how does it work?

For the uninitiated, pSEO is a content strategy that combines automation and structured data to generate content at scale. Unlike traditional SEO, which generally involves creating editorial content manually, pSEO relies on two key components:

1. A programmatic page template: The framework for how a web page should be structured, including static content and placeholders for variable content such as text and images

2. A database: All the data that’ll be used to populate the page template, organized into clear fields

With programmatic SEO, dynamic content is pulled from a database to generate a large volume of pages according to a pre-defined template. This enables the efficient creation of hundreds, even thousands, of web pages in a short amount of time.

Consider marketplaces like Poshmark and Etsy. The structured data featured in their product listings provide the basis for their pSEO engine, which creates hundreds of product category pages from a single template.

pSEO is particularly effective when it comes to targeting long-tail keywords and search queries with multiple variations. Because these keywords tend to be low-competition, they’re easier to target and rank for than broader head terms with high search volume. 

With a classic editorial approach, targeting long-tail keywords is still a solid investment—but the time it takes to produce a piece of content can make the ROI less fruitful. pSEO’s scalability offers the opposite. While pages targeting long-tail keywords bring in modest traffic individually, the cumulative effect of publishing at scale through pSEO can result in substantial site-wide traffic and in a much shorter time frame than manual content creation.

Essential Programmatic SEO Tools

While pSEO offers enormous potential, it’s not without its challenges. It requires significant upfront effort to design templates, build databases, and integrate tools. Long-term success also depends on regular maintenance and performance tracking.

The good news is that with the right tools, these challenges become manageable. pSEO tools, particularly no- and low-code ones, simplify the execution of programmatic content and make it accessible to marketers without coding experience. Below are some of the most effective tools worth investing in.

Content Generation Tools

AI tools simplify content creation at scale, ensuring every page has unique and meaningful content. Original content is a must because otherwise, your pages risk being flagged as "thin content," which Google defines as offering little to no value.

Here are a few platforms that can help you create tailored content without the risk of running into Google’s penalties:

• daydream: Our SaaS platform was designed specifically for executing pSEO strategies, unlike other content generation tools that are shoehorned into programmatic implementation. As an example of what difference this makes, daydream integrates directly with content management system (CMS) platforms like Webflow and WordPress—so you can skip the data-syncing step required of piecemeal pSEO strategies. Also, from a content writing standpoint, our proprietary AI architecture digests complex company data and context in a much more sophisticated way than GPT models. This lets daydream produce more human-centric content that aligns with a business’s unique brand voice. 

• ChatGPT: As one of the leading names in generative AI, ChatGPT is widely used for mass content generation in pSEO. However, the quality of its output heavily depends on effective prompting and can require careful review since it’s prone to AI hallucinations. More detailed guidance will naturally generate better results, but this can be time-intensive. 

• Rytr: Rytr consistently delivers on-brand content, though it requires more detailed prompts and guidance compared to other AI writing tools. It’s best for writing short-form copy, so if your pSEO strategy requires long-form content, you should go with one of the other suggested options above.

Keyword Research Tools

As with traditional SEO, keyword research is essential for creating the foundation of any pSEO strategy. It validates whether your chosen niche has meaningful growth potential and spells out exactly what you should create content around.

We recommend the following keyword research tools to kick off your content creation:

• Ahrefs: Ahrefs is a beloved SEO tool for its site audit, backlink reporting, and competitor analysis features—but most of all, its advanced keyword research capabilities. One of Ahrefs’ most helpful metrics is its keyword difficulty score (ranging from 0 to 100), which you can use to gauge how competitive a given keyword is. You can use its free Keyword Difficulty Checker for this data, but a paid subscription will get you deeper keyword analyses and suggestions.

• Semrush: Like Ahrefs, Semrush is another SEO classic that offers rich keyword data and insights alongside other reporting features. Its Keyword Magic tool is especially useful for uncovering long-tail variations—once you input a seed keyword, it’ll generate a whole list of related terms, which you can also customize with filters and modifiers. This feature also includes Total Volume and Average Difficulty metrics, so you can get a quick high-level sense of how opportune a keyword cluster is. 

• Ubersuggest: A newer keyword research tool from Neil Patel, Ubersuggest is a lower-cost alternative to Ahrefs and Semrush. It offers largely the same features as its more well-established rivals, including a Keyword Ideas tool that helps generate different types of variations related to your inputted phrase, e.g., comparison keywords, question keywords, and keywords with prepositions.

Data Scraping Tools

A robust dataset, generally organized using Google Sheets or Airtable, is a must for successful programmatic SEO as this is the information that’ll populate your pages. 

You could use your company’s own proprietary data, or you can source information from public datasets. Many pSEO practitioners turn to website scraping as a faster and more scalable solution, using tools to extract large amounts of data—product details, reviews, comments, even images—directly from web pages with minimal manual effort.

Below are a few of the top-rated data scraping tools out there: 

• Bardeen: Bardeen’s automation app supports a variety of use cases, but data scraping is one of its strongest features. Its intuitive UI makes it very accessible and it integrates easily with Google Sheets and Airtable.

• Clay: Though it’s often used in a sales and lead generation context, Clay makes an excellent pSEO web-scraping tool because of its strong data integration and manipulation features. Its proprietary AI feature, Claygent, is especially useful for research since it’s powered by GPT-4.

• Data Fetcher: Data Fetcher is a simple Airtable extension that pulls data from any app or API. For example, you can connect it to Coinbase to import cryptocurrency prices and market data or even to YouTube’s public API to scrape channel and video information.

• Octoparse: Octoparse is a no-code web scraping tool with many user-friendly templates. Though generally easy to use, it does have the occasional bug and can be sluggish when it comes to cloud scraping.

If building your own dataset feels overwhelming, you can also hire freelance data scraping experts on platforms like Fiverr or Upwork. Many of these professionals use programming languages like Python, JavaScript, or PHP to efficiently gather and process data tailored to your needs. 

Data Syncing Tools

After scraping and collecting data, there’s syncing—the step where you connect data with your page templates so that it can be transformed into fully functional, search-optimized pages. This involves mapping the columns in your dataset to the variable fields in your page template and syncing the data with your CMS.

Specialized tools automate the connection between your database and CMS, but it’s important to choose one that’s compatible with your chosen platforms. Below are a few of the most popular data syncing tools used for pSEO.

• Make: Make is a no-code visual platform that facilitates complex data workflows with a drag-and-drop interface. Though its existing integrations are straightforward in their setup, it can be challenging connecting to apps where you need to create a webhook from scratch.

• Nobull: Nobull is an Airtable extension that syncs Airtable columns with Webflow CMS fields, making it easy to add, edit, remove, and publish CMS items directly to Webflow.

• Whalesync: Whalesync makes data syncing fast and easy between platforms like Airtable, Webflow, Notion, and Postgres. It’s especially ideal for more complex pSEO needs since it allows for two-way syncing, something that tools like Zapier don’t offer.

• Zapier: Perhaps one of the best-known automation tools out there, Zapier connects virtually any software, including Airtable, Clay, and Webflow, with its one-way “Zaps.” Very on-brand to be useful as a pSEO tool given that Zapier’s also known for its own pSEO success.

Image Generation Tools

Images go a long way in making a page more engaging and visually appealing—a big plus for user experience all around. After all, they help illustrate key points, break up long blocks of text for better readability, and grab readers’ attention. Whether you pursue traditional or programmatic SEO, images are a big boost to both user experience and discoverability.

While you can certainly use stock images, AI-driven tools make it possible to include custom visuals on programmatic pages without tedious manual effort. Try one of the following AI image generation tools to bolster your pSEO strategy. 

• Placid: Placid is a customizable image generator that integrates with Airtable so you can create unique images from Airtable records with dynamic text and logos.

• TailGraph: TailGraph is a free API that helps developers and content creators generate custom Open Graph images using TailwindCSS.

Kick off your pSEO engine with support from daydream

Programmatic SEO is the next frontier in content marketing, especially with today’s wide availability of tools for keyword research, data management, and content and image generation. By leveraging daydream and the other tools mentioned above, businesses can unlock the full potential of pSEO and quickly turn niche search phrases into measurable ROI.

That said, success in pSEO ultimately requires a thoughtful strategy and meaningful time investment. For the best results, consider partnering with a company like daydream. Besides our SaaS platform, we provide expert guidance to help streamline the pSEO execution process from start to finish. If you’re interested in trying us out, send a message to thenukak@withdaydream.com to start the conversation.