The HyperGrowth Partners Guide to AI-powered Programmatic SEO

How to scale low-CAC, hyper-targeted organic traffic with data & AI

Programmatic SEO is one of the most powerful product-led organic growth strategies of 2023. It means building thousands of web pages that target specific long-tail keywords. Surely you’ve come across it more than you think. Relevant examples include:

• Tripadvisor has thousands of pages ranking for ‘best {thing to do} in {city}’

• TimeOut for ‘best {restaurant} in {area}’

• Glassdoor ranks for ‘{job title} salary’

• Wise has tons of pages ranking for ‘best {exchange rates}’

• Statista ranks for thousands of pages for ‘{category} - statistics & facts’

• Causal has recently ranked for ‘calculate {financial formula}’

• Thomas Cook ranks for thousands of ‘{location} weather in {month of the year}’

These are all examples of programmatic SEO or pSEO for short. It usually has three core levers:

• Users create landing pages at scale through UGC. Think Notion or Figma community-created shareable templates. 

• Alternatively, the company creates them by tapping into product inventory — typical of e-commerce and marketplaces like Amazon.

• Or by tapping through first- or third-party data sets, which is more typical of SaaS.

As you can imagine, the biggest constraint of any SEO strategy, even when programmatic, is content creation. Creating and deploying content, especially editorial, can be slow, expensive, and hard to scale. 

But now, LLM and AI developments like Bard and ChatGPT are significantly reducing friction in content creation and enabling companies to create pSEO content at scale, even beyond the aforementioned levers. Especially now that most companies need to reduce costs but still aim for growth, scalable levers that can alleviate reduced paid spend come in handy. 

When you layer hyper-personalized retargeting on top of these experiments, you can dramatically reduce an already low CAC, which can help you crush competition faster and set you on a hyper-growth trajectory. AI-powered pSEO enables you to run structured content A/B testing and segment your audience through hyper-targeted queries. 

So how do you implement AI-powered programmatic SEO? What is the step-by-step framework, roadmap, and tool stack needed to implement it? 

In this blog post, we’ll unpack HyperGrowth Partners' own playbook for AI-powered pSEO — a strategy that helped Ramp become the fastest SaaS company ever.

1. Principles for effective programmatic SEO

Programmatic SEO is unlike any other, especially when powered by AI. The key to scaling pSEO pages is balancing the depth of information that brings sufficient user value with strong technical SEO that makes the content easy to crawl and index. 

To do so, you’ll need to optimize for the following tenets:

• Depth of content. To ensure your pages convert, you must provide real customer value regarding the depth and usefulness of the information. To do this at scale, it becomes key to access first- or third-party databases that are reliable and up to date, but also to know what your customer is looking for.

• Content accuracy. One of the biggest problems of AI-generated content is its accuracy, which can lead to “content hallucinations” that quickly erode trust and cause churn. A way to overcome this risk is by matching AI-generated content against web results like Wikipedia, algorithmic fact-checkers, or structured data sets. 

• Consistently high-quality user experience. The key to your pSEO is creating and indexing thousands of pages to credit your domain with high authority, which translates into traffic fast! To ensure scale, you must design page types that provide a great user experience, like top-tier design, navigation, and loading speed. This requires consistent page templates and structure to trickle down optimizations from experiments to thousands of pages of the same type.

• Evergreen content. When creating programmatic pages, aim to cater to topics and formats with long shelf life and relevancy beyond the publication date. Think of timeless information about locations, companies, people, apps, retail products, and other entities, and write about topics that never get old in your business. This way, your pages will capture long-term intent and allow your brand to become a true destination for your audience.

• Scalable query patterns. pSEO works best for customer queries that are very niche and specific but can be scaled across different permutations based on your industry. For example, a typical pSEO query is ‘best X in Y’, where X is your value proposition and Y is a modifier, like location. These queries can be low in search volume but high in intent, so when you scale to thousands of these permutations, you can capture a substantial reach of prospects with a high likelihood of converting.

2. Define and validate your query syntax

Define your query syntax

The first step to effective programmatic SEO is defining the Google search query pattern you want to rank for, which can scale across thousands of permutations. It’s normally composed of a specific keyword and one or more modifiers.

Query syntax = head term + modifier(s)

It’s always wise to start with your customer in mind and ask yourself things like:

• What are they searching for in the context of your product and business?

• What kind of information or content would be useful to them that is related to you?

You can brainstorm your query by starting with these common head term structures and adapting them to keywords common in your industry, business, and audience.

• Rankings: ‘best/top 10 X’, where X is your keyword (eg. ‘best restaurants’).

• Templates: ‘X template’, where X is your keyword (eg. ‘pitch template’).

• Data points: where the keyword is the data point category you’re looking for (eg. ‘salary’, ‘revenue’)

• Integrations: ‘X + Y integration’, where X and Y could be integrated (eg. Slack + Salesforce integration).

• Comparisons: ‘X vs. Y’, where X and Y are items to be compared (eg. ‘Rome vs. Milan best places to live in’).

• How-to questions: ‘How to X’, where X is your chosen keyword (eg. how to organize a trip’).

As you can see, pSEO queries don’t address users at the top of the funnel or at the beginning of their user journey. 

In the “See-Think-Do” content funnel framework, they’d fit more into the “Think” and “Do” buckets, which are aligned with the consideration/conversion type of content that reflects higher customer intent. To fully capture it, you need to add modifiers to your query syntax. Use up to 1-2 modifiers to ensure the query syntax is relevant to your keywords and can scale up to thousands of permutations.

Your customer segmentation criteria are great starting points for identifying your keyword modifiers. Examples include:

• Geolocation: ‘near me’, ‘in Rome’, etc.

• Market category: ‘in SaaS’, ‘in healthcare’, ‘in SEO’, etc.

• Persona: ‘for men, ‘for marketers, ‘for VPs’, etc.

• Company size: ‘for startups’, ‘for enterprise’, etc.

• Industries: ‘in real estate’, ‘in tech’, etc.

• Device: ‘for iPhone’, ‘for tablet’, etc.

• Use case: ‘for sale’, ‘for rent’, etc.

• Alternatives: ‘X alternatives’

To inform your query syntax brainstorming, you can use Ahrefs, MarketMuse, or Voxel to scan your (or your competitors’) website and identify low-competition pSEO opportunities.

Ready to build your own programmatic SEO strategy to drive organic hypergrowth? Hit us up at HyperGrowth Partners. We’ll assemble a team of best-in-class content & SEO advisors to develop and execute this strategy.

Validate your query syntax

Before going into the landing page structure, don’t forget to validate your query syntax. Optimize for the principles we’ve identified above, especially:

• Search volume vs. competition. What’s the balance between search volume and keyword difficulty for your query syntax? Is any other player already dominating the SERP for that query syntax? If your answer is yes, think about how you could add modifiers to your query to narrow your target keyword. For example, Thomas Cook wanted to first rank for ‘{city} weather’ but realized that weather.com was dominating the SERP for that query. They then spotted an incredible opportunity with significant volume and low competition for ‘{city} weather in {month of the year}’.

• Content value. What’s the value of the content that’ll match the query’s intent? Remember that the goal of pSEO is not just to generate traffic but to convert. Talk to 5-8 of your existing customers to validate whether the pages you’re about to create will actually match their needs.

• Scalability. How many permutations can you make out of the query syntax? We recommend having a potential of at least hundreds of permutations for pSEO to be meaningful. For example, if you take Booking.com use cases, they could match {hotels}, {things to do}, {car rental}, with >1 million cities around the world. This adds up to several million pSEO landing pages!

• Evergreen content. What’s the estimated shelf life of the syntax and related pages? Optimize for query syntax and content types that cater to long-term intent.

3. Create your pSEO landing page template

Define your page elements

With a clear query syntax, you can now create your programmatic landing page template. Think about which components are needed on your page. For example, you could have things like:

• Widgets for weather, maps, charts, and tables

• Structured snippets for recommendations with images, videos, and recommended content

• And don’t forget structured text!

Create your CMS collection(s)

Once you’ve decided on your landing page elements, you can use Webflow to create scalable, SEO-optimized landing pages with top-tier design. You can create a CMS collection page for each query syntax type and programmatically scale that template for thousands of variations.

For example, if you have two query syntaxes — ”top {use case} templates for {persona}” and “best {use case} tactics for {personas} ”, you can create two collections — the first called /templates and the second called /tactics — and scale each for the respective permutations.

Create your design template

There’s no one-size-fits-all landing page structure. As mentioned above, we recommend creating a page structure that balances search engine friendliness (eg. information architecture and depth, structured data) and user experience (eg. narrative, design, value, UX/UI).

For example, each landing page should have these components:

1. SEO metadata — titles, descriptions, and rich snippets — that match your target keywords

2. Easy to navigate main navigation, with clear CTA and sharing buttons

3. Breadcrumbs and table of contents to skim through the long-form content

4. Structured markdown formatting for long-form content (H1, H2, titles, bullets, etc.)

5. Social proof elements like logos, reviews, badges, and data points

6. Rich content like data snippets, images, charts, and videos, including alt tags

7. Internal linking to related content, editor picks, recommended topics, etc.

8. FAQs block that could be featured in the SERP with schema markup

9. Structured footer that mirrors your sitemap

When you design your Webflow templates, you can use HTML embeds to populate the above components by pulling copy, images, and metadata from a data set (more below).

For reference, here are some pSEO landing page examples that we love.

• How to articles — Causal

• Templates — Notion, Canva, Airtable, or Figma

• Places and things to do — Booking.com, TripAdvisor, Nomadlist, TimeOut, Thomas Cook

• Apartments to rent or buy — Airbnb, Realtor, Zillow

• Integration pages — Zapier, Tray

• Product analysis — G2 (comparisons and alternatives), DelightChat (tips)

• Data and stats — Glassdoor, Wise, Statista, Payscale

Add advanced SEO settings

Also, these additional settings might be more advanced, but they do make the difference if you have the technical resources:

• Technical SEO: crawling, rendering, Indexing, site structure, structured data, SSL, page speed, status codes, canonicalization.

• Mobile SEO: If applicable to your product, you should optimize crawling and rendering and speed specifically for mobile devices.

• International SEO: If applicable to your business, consider your URL slug to include translation/localization capabilities. International SEO can be quite a feat — but it can also yield substantial scale benefits.

4. Populate your landing pages with data sets and feeds

Prepare your Airtable database

Now that you have your page-type design templates, you’ll need fresh data to feed to your landing pages. First, you must set up a database table to store your pSEO landing page data. We recommend using Airtable and setting up your database this way:

• Each database table is a landing page type for each query syntax you create.

• Each database column is a landing page component to customize with data. For example, that can be your URL slug, SEO metadata, headline, body text, images and videos, related content, and so on and so forth.

• Each database row is an instance of your pSEO landing page. In the example of TripAdvisor, that could be a location.

Here’s an Airtable database template by the Whalesync team to inspire you. Remember, the more customized these landing pages are, the more useful they’ll be to your high-intent customers and the higher your conversion rate.

If you want to set up your AI-powered pSEO datasets, our roster of growth ops advisors can advise you on the best tooling and roadmap to accelerate your company’s trajectory toward hypergrowth.

Scrape data from the Web to populate your dataset

Once your database is ready, you have two options: either you ‘build’ your own data by feeding your own data set to your Airtable DB, or you ‘buy’ it by tapping into an existing one from a third party. In the latter case, you can use ScrapingBee, Simplescraper, or ScrapeHero — or specific public APIs like Unsplash, Yelp, or Google Maps — to scrape data that match your query and fill in your landing pages. Some examples of data you can pull:

• Asset prices and other indicators of stocks, bonds, crypto, or currency exchanges

• Product pricing, availability, and review data from e-commerce sites like Shopify

• Financial asset prices data across stocks, bonds, commodities, crypto, and more

• Real estate data across listings, agents, brokers, mortgages, and more

• Job market data like salaries, job listings, and vacancies

• Travel, hotel, airline, and rental data such as reviews, prices, and availabilities

• Market research, facts, and stats data on global trends from sites like Statista

• Firmographics and technographic data on companies from sites like Clearbit

• Locations and weather data from Google Maps, Yelp, and weather.com

• Public social data from Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, and more

• High-quality images of cities, foods, and more from sites like Unsplash 

Sync scraped data with your Webflow landing pages

You can then add DataFetcher as an Airtable extension to filter, map and push each scraped data point to a field of your Airtable database. Ensure that each scraped data is mapped to create new rows of your Airtable database and populate the related columns, as each new data point will populate your query syntax and create a new programmatic page.

As a next step, you can use WhaleSync to sync your Airtable data directly into your Webflow landing pages. This way, updates in your Airtable datasets will automatically trickle down in Webflow. And — ta-dah! — your scraped data should automatically create all your pSEO landing pages.

5. Enrich your landing pages with AI-generated content

By now, you’ll have created hundreds of pSEO landing pages enriched with third-party scraped data. However, if your pSEO page type strategy doesn’t allow you to tap into this data, it’s more of a long-form content — like a blog post, an FAQ article, etc. — you can use AI to scale this process.

ChatGPT, Jasper, CopyAI, WriteSonic, RankIQ, or Byword allow you to write your content and feed it automatically to your Airtable columns to land on the right Webflow page.

• Specifically, you can sync ChatGPT directly to DataFetcher to feed your prompts automatically and create short-form headlines, descriptions, and long-form blog posts.

• Or you could use a combination of ChatGPT and Zapier to land the same info if you don’t have access to the ChatGPT API.

Here’s a great tutorial from the Whalesync team that gives you a glimpse into the full automation process across Airtable, DataFetcher, ChatGPT, WhaleSync, and Webflow. To streamline the AI prompting, you can also use these dedicated writing best practices and SEO prompts library.

To prevent content hallucinations, especially for long-form content, we recommend layering plagiarism and fact-checkers like Grammarly, Longshot, and PepperContent to ensure the AI-generated content is accurate and reliable.

To take it to the next level, you could do the same with image creation:

• Use the Unsplash API to fetch images for specific keywords in your Airtable database and populate specific sections of your Webflow landing pages.

• Or generate custom creative images with Placid and land them directly into your Airtable and Webflow pages.

Don’t forget to spot-check any output from AI since false information can always slip through.

6. Refine your pSEO landing pages

To ensure you capture your pSEO organic traffic, you must ensure your pages get crawled and indexed correctly. At HyperGrowth, we use Alli AI to:

• Automate page crawling, indexing, and optimize schema markup to climb up your rankings

• Self-run A/B tests on headlines, subheadlines, and descriptions for target keywords

• Optimize site speed and advanced SEO settings for enhanced customer experience

• Trickle-down real-time deployment for site-wide optimizations across all your pSEO pages

And if you want to get deep into conversion rate optimization to brainstorm how to run your A/B tests, we’ve written a dedicated guide for it too!

Closing thoughts

Congrats! By now, you should have created thousands of pSEO landing pages. What could have taken you months of work across content marketing, technical SEO, design, and engineering, took you just a few weeks of focused strategy and execution work.

At Ramp, we’ve used pSEO to create multiple forms of programmatic content, and not all of them worked out. The key in this strategy is to place several bets, give them time to incubate, and remove the ones that don't work. We waited about three months before iterating each play several times and calling the shots. To do this effectively, you need to have a growth mindset.

C organic traffic at scale and significantly reduce the time-to-market. As we’ve seen, AI also plays an important role in reducing your fully-loaded CAC by saving time on content ideation, creation, and optimization.

Last but not least, when you continuously refine your pSEO landing pages with structured and site-wide A/B tests, you’ll be able to consistently have statistically significant learnings on what’s driving more results and reliably scale growth.

We can’t wait to see what you can do with this playbook. With the right tools and pSEO strategy, the sky’s the limit!

Ready to scale your organic growth? Let’s work together on your AI-powered pSEO strategy.