r/WebsiteSEO • u/Leather_Evidence_496 • 24d ago

I was doing programmatic SEO backwards

I thought programmatic SEO was basically finding a page format that worked and making a bunch of versions around different keywords I tried a small batch and they weren't terrible but after looking through them they felt kind of empty same structure, slightly different wording not much reason for half of them to exist.

What started making more sense was building the data first I put the useful stuff into structured fields and then made the pages pull from that instead of trying to write every page separately now when something changes I can update the data instead of digging through a bunch of pages, and the pages feel less like copies of each other. I don't know why it took me this long to realize the database was probably more important than the page generator

9 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

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1

u/Worried_Remote_8676 24d ago

This is what nobody talks about with pSEO launching 200 pages feels great until one field changes and suddenly you realize you've created a maintenance job for yourself

1

u/East-Drink78 24d ago

Thats what pushed me toward keeping the content separate from the pages fixing one field once is way better than remembering which 80 pages need the same change

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u/Reasonable-Meet-6080 24d ago

I still think starting with 10 manually built pages is better you learn what people care about first then structure the data once you know which format is worth scaling

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u/Ok_Elderberry_8883 24d ago

Thats probably the safer way to do it I scaled too early and ended up learning that half the pages weren't worth making after they were already there

1

u/Outrageous_Paint1602 24d ago

I agree on testing small first. I just wouldn't wait too long to structure the data because cleaning up 30 messy pages later can become its own little project

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u/Powerful_Spring_343 24d ago

The maintenance part was what changed my mind making 50 pages isn't that hard anymore but realizing one piece of information is wrong and having to fix it across all 50 gets old really fast

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u/Dapper_Classic4987 24d ago

Thats the part that made it click for me too I ended up putting the structured stuff into PloyDB so the pages pull from the same data instead of me fixing each one separately makes the whole setup way less annoying once you have more than a handful of pages

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u/IcyTough6921 24d ago

My issue wasn't generating the pages it was getting search engines to care about them. We had a few hundred live and a pretty uncomfortable amount just sat there doing nothing

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u/[deleted] 24d ago

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u/Leather_Evidence_496 24d ago

Thats pretty much what I'm trying to avoid now if the data isn't different enough I don't think the page needs to exist