🚀 SEO + Programming makes a KILLER marketing strategy!
SEO can be an effort-intensive process. But, programming + SEO can quickly create 1000s of SEO-optimized pages! Here's how you can use it!
We absolutely love SEO at buildd!
"Why", you ask? You see, Google gets over 63,000 searches every second. That's 5.6 billion queries in a day!
Now, imagine even a small fraction of that traffic coming your way. That constant stream of users can do wonders for your startup.
Sadly, most SEO tactics are super effort-intensive. Take the example of blogs - they work brilliantly for SEO but creating 100s of unique pieces of quality content can be difficult.
So, how do you scale your SEO efforts then?
Well, the key lies in combining programming and SEO, to create 100s or even 1000s of SEO optimised pages automatically for you!
I know this sounds exciting and almost unreal. But, we have first-hand experience of doing this while scaling our startup's (Remote Tools) traffic to 1M every month!
So, read on to know more about this KILLER SEO strategy!
Firstly, what is Remote Tools?
Remote Tools, or RT for short, is a platform where you discover tools used for remote working.
On RT, startups can directly submit the details of their product via a simple form. And after a short review, their tool gets published on the website.
Given the diverse set of tools we receive, we organize these tools under different categories. This includes categories like productivity, remote hiring, product management, virtual office, etc.
Now, in a previous article, we explained how we used blogs to get close to a million monthly visitors on Remote Tools.
But, there is another strategy that has helped us drive more high-value traffic than our blogs. It's called "Programmatic SEO".
So, how do we use Programmatic SEO at Remote Tools?
Since Remote Tools is a tools repository, our target audience is naturally users who are looking for remote working tools online.
Now, to get these users we first need to understand what they are searching on Google. In our research, we came across two types of keywords with distinct search intent.
The first intent is to "explore" while the second is to "compare". Based, on these 2 intent types we have created 2 sets of pages — /category and /alternatives.
Explore = Category Page ➝ "virtual office software", "code collaboration tools", "standup tools", "whiteboarding tools", "document collaboration tools", etc.
Compare = Alternatives Page ➝ "doodle alternative", "total alternative", "zoho mail alternative", "loom alternative", "product hunt alternative", etc.
So, users performing a general exploration search for say, virtual office software tools will come across the category page. While users who are looking for an alternative tool for Zoho will come across the alternatives page.
The Product, Category & Alternatives Hierarchy
You already know that startups could directly submit the details about their tool on RT. So, we already had a bulk of data on 2500+ products on RT!
Product Page
Once the product is approved, this basic data appears directly on its "product" page on RT. Let me explain with an example:
Product ➝ Flexiple
Product Page ➝
URL structure ➝ remote.tools/Flexiple/product
Since Flexiple is a Freelance Hiring Platform, the product will basically come under the "Hiring Remote Talent" category.
Category ➝ Hiring Remote Talent
Apart from this, the page contains the product's logo, a short description, "When to use sections", all the social media links, pricing models, etc.
Category Page
Now, on RT we have a total of 52 such products under the "Hiring Remote Talent" category. All these 52 products have their individual product pages.
But, since they fall under the same category, we have a separate "Category" page for them. The page looks something like this.
These category pages are basically listicles that list all the 52 products under this category.
URL Structure ➝ remote.tools/category/tools-for-hiring-remote-employees
Alternatives Page
Now, to target the alternatives type search query, each of these 52 pages has its own alternatives page.
So, Flexiple's alternatives page will list all products similar to Flexiple in the remote hiring category. We compute this similarity programmatically using a simple formula that uses tag-based matching.
All the other 51 products will have their own page.
URL structure = remote.tools/Flexiple/alternatives
So, finally, for a single category, we get the count:
Product = 52 pages
Category = 1 page
Alternatives = 52 pages
Now, you have a basic idea of how we used programmatic SEO.
Next, let’s understand what exactly is programmatic SEO in general. And, how you can create the blueprint of your own strategy!
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That's it for today! We will be back with more interesting articles!
Stay tuned and keep buildd-ing 🚀
Cheers!
Hrishikesh