4 SEO Strategies for Programmatic Sites

Planning and implementing SEO strategies for sites with hundreds of millions of pages is not an easy task, but there are strategies to simplify it.

Programmatic pages are pages that are generated automatically on a very large scale. SEO strategies for these pages are used to target multiple keyword variations by automatically creating landing pages at that scale.

You will usually find these pages in major workspaces such as e-commerce, real estate, travel, and informational sites. These verticals are relying on programmatic pages to build their SEO strategy, and they have a dedicated page for each product and category. This can give rise to hundreds of millions of pages to set up - they are efficient, functional and user-friendly, however, they come with other SEO challenges. Brainmine is among the best SEO Companies in Pune offering result oriented SEO services using the latest SEO tools techniques to bring your website at the top of the search engines results

 In my experience, the comprehensive SEO strategy included in this post works best when designed to fit a large site with programmatic pages. Typically many strategies that work for sites with only a few hundred pages will not necessarily yield the same results on larger sites. Smaller site programs rely more on manual and careful content creation than pages, which are the site's main traffic-driving page.

So, let's get down to business! I will explore the four major SEO challenges you will face when dealing with programmatic pages, and unpack how to overcome them.

1.       Keyword research and keyword modifiers

Well-planned keyword research is one of the biggest challenges when operating on a well-planned scale. When working on a large size set of pages and keywords, it is important to choose and find the right keywords to target on all pages.

In order for both to function efficiently and effectively, it is recommended that you split the site pages into a few templates before digging yourself into the research. Some examples of these templates may include:

·         Categories

·         Sub-categories

·         Product pages

·         Static pages

·         Blogs

·         Informational pages

·         Knowledge base/learning

Once you have all the page templates in place, it's time to build keyword buckets and keyword modifiers.

2.       Internal linking

Smart internal linking schemes are important for large sites. They have the ability to significantly increase the number of indexed pages, then pass link equity between pages. When you work on large-scale sites, one of your main priorities should be to ensure that Google will search and index the pages of your site.

So, how should you go about building those internal linking facilities?

When looking at the big picture, the goal is that page A will link to page B and page C, while page B will link to page D and page E, etc. Ideally, each page should be linked to a different index at least. At least one link will be found on the page. For program sites, the challenge here is that new pages emerge on a daily basis. In addition to existing pages, it is mandatory to calculate and project so that you can jumpstart internal linking to new pages. This allows these pages to be quickly searched and indexed in the proper style.

3.       Crawl budget and deindexing rules

The crawl budget is a very important issue that large websites need to consider. When you have millions of programmatic pages, you need to make sure that Google consistently searches and indexes your most valuable pages. The value of your pages should be based on content, revenue, business value, and user satisfaction. First, choose which pages should not be indexed.

·         Use your favorite analytics tool to find which pages have the lowest engagement metrics (high bounce rate, low average time on site, no page views, etc.).

·         Use the Search Console to find which pages have high impressions and low CTRs.

·         Combine these pages into a list.

·         Check to see if they have any incoming links.

·         Analyze the specialty of those pages for revenue and business leads.

·         Once you have all the relevant data and you select the pages that should be removed from the index, add a no-index tag to all of them and exclude them from the Sitemap XML.

4. SEO split testing

Test everything! The advantage when working on a large-scale SEO campaign is that you have access to big data and can use it for your SEO efforts. Unlike regular A / B testing, which tests human behavior, the A / B segmentation test is purely for crawlers.

The partition testing process is usually based on the same or similar templates as pages. Split the page into two or three groups - one group acts as a control, while the other groups are enabled. Test the following criteria:

·         Adding structured data

·         Changing the keyword modifier of SEO tags (title tag, description, H tags, etc.)

·         Image ALT tags

·         Content length

·         Page performance

·         Internal linking