3 Scalable Programmatic SEO Examples and How to Apply Them (2025 Update)
Programmatic SEO has risen to prominence in recent years, offering an efficient SEO strategy that still delivers on performance. With programmatic SEO providing the best of both worlds, it’s not surprising that businesses are eager to understand and utilize this new digital marketing tactic.
As an agency with firsthand programmatic SEO experience, we’ve built this article to help guide you through the process, how it works, what makes it different from traditional SEO, and examples to help you start applying it.
How Does Programmatic SEO Work?
When utilized correctly, programmatic SEO allows for quick and repeatable content generation that consistently drives traffic from diverse demographics. Typically, it begins with a simple title template, for example: 10 [Food, Activity, etc.] to visit in [Travel Destination]. The title must contain at least one or more variables to work effectively. In our example, the variables are [Food, Activity, etc.] and [Travel Destination]. From this simple template, thousands of SEO content pieces can be created. Here are just some examples:
10 Restaurants to Visit in Berlin, Germany
10 Casinos to Visit in Las Vegas, Nevada
10 Museums to Visit in Rome, Italy
What Makes Programmatic SEO Effective?
The key to ensuring your programmatic SEO is effective every time is two things: intent and value. Each piece of content needs to be hyper-niche, targeting a specific audience (in our example, these would be travelers planning to vacation in Berlin, Las Vegas, or Rome). Additionally, the content must match the intent of the search. When someone searches “Museums in Rome, Italy,” would a page like “10 Museums to Visit in Rome, Italy” be what they’re looking for? Absolutely. However, if they were searching for “Oldest Museum in Rome,” that intent wouldn’t be as clear. This could be an educational or informational search, rather than a search from someone planning to visit. When value and intent are maximized, programmatic SEO becomes a secret weapon to bolster your website’s SEO quickly and easily.
What Is the Difference Between Programmatic SEO and Normal SEO?
In simple terms, programmatic SEO is like a streamlined version of traditional SEO. Programmatic SEO depends on an easily repeatable template, making content easy to create without sacrificing effectiveness. Normal SEO involves more unique ideas that are found using keyword research and targeting high-volume or low-competition keywords. In normal SEO, no two articles generally use the same or similar titles as is practiced with programmatic SEO. The title, value, and even intent differ drastically from article to article, while programmatic SEO focuses consistently on a specific title, intent, and value.
Industries Where Programmatic SEO Works Well
Programmatic SEO is not for every industry. For some, especially hyper-niche businesses, programmatic SEO just won’t apply due to a lack of workable variables. Here are some of the industries that utilize programmatic SEO the best.
Tourism: Tourism encompasses diverse locations across the globe, with various methods of travel and tourist activities in each location. This makes for multiple variables that easily support repeatable programmatic SEO content. This programmatic SEO content will cater to travel planners from various demographics.
Software as a Service (SaaS): Software companies typically serve diverse customer bases, creating technology with various use cases. When applicable, they can target each demographic or geographic location using each use case for their software.
Education/E-Learning: Education and e-learning companies offer courses in dozens of different subjects. From general subjects like math (Online Math Courses for High School Students) and English (Online English Courses for High School Students) to more niche learning opportunities like first aid training (First Aid Training Courses in Saskatoon). Finding variables that work is incredibly simple.
Real Estate: In Canada alone, thousands of people search for houses to buy or rent every day. Whether it’s a national or international real estate website, they benefit greatly when using programmatic SEO. The best part is it’s as easy as making content pages titled “Houses for Sale in Waterloo” and “Apartments for Rent in Montreal.” Just like that, you’re getting traffic from renters in Montreal and future homeowners in Waterloo. The geographic variation alone is expansive.
We’ll identify if your business can take advantage of Programmatic SEO in less than 10 minutes. The question we are looking to answer: Do you have a scalable variable that will net valuable content?
3 Scalable Programmatic SEO Examples
Example 1: Local Leads
We made Local Leads as a local business lead generation tool to help B2B companies find prospects across the world quickly and easily. We’ve created a streamlined programmatic SEO strategy through content pages like these:
Recruiters in San Jose, CA
Marketing Agencies in Kitchener, ON
Manufacturing Companies in New York City, NY
We achieved this using this simple template: [Industry] Leads in [Local Area]. The possibilities for variation are endless, and this variation allows us to deliver unique, non-identical content easily. What makes it so effective is Local Leads’ large library of use cases. Our tool is workable for any industry imaginable on an international scale, meaning we'll basically never run out of programmatic SEO titles to use.
Example 2: TripAdvisor
TripAdvisor is a travel platform that provides travelers with information on hotels, restaurants, attractions, and destinations, all on a global scale. Users can use TripAdvisor to plan trips, compare prices, book accommodations, and find activities based on community feedback and insights.
TripAdvisor has mastered the use of programmatic SEO in the tourism industry, utilizing the searches from travel planners to create dozens of high traffic pages. Similar to our example before, their strategy depends on the variables of destination and activity. They’ve used this strategy to create unique content pages like these:
THE BEST Restaurants in Spain
THE 10 BEST Restaurants in Paris Updated December 2024
THE 15 BEST Things to Do in Niagara Falls (2024)
THE 15 BEST Things to Do in New York City (2024)
THE BEST Sushi in Tokyo (Updated 2024)
They even use eye-catching phrases like "top 10" or "15" and include the year (2024) to lend more variation to their titles. With a programmatic SEO strategy like this, TripAdvisor receives thousands of visitors per day on their programmatic SEO pages, capturing visitors from across the world.
Example 3: Canva
Canva is a digital graphic design platform that allows users to create presentations, social media graphics, posters, and more for free. Its selling point is its simplicity. It’s easier than other mainstream design platforms like Adobe Suite, using primarily drag-and-drop for designing. Canva offers free templates, images, and design tools for both professional and amateur design projects.
Canva utilizes programmatic SEO in a way that scales it beyond just a design platform, optimizing SEO for different niche design capabilities as seen with these content pages:
Free Business Card Maker
Free Resume Templates
Free Online Poster Maker
Searches like these target Canva’s core user base, non-designers who want their business cards, resumes, posters, and many other projects to be simplified.
Best Practices for Programmatic SEO Content Scalability
Understand Your Programmatic Variables
Start by mapping out the core variables that your programmatic articles/pages will rely on. These are the data points that change from page to page (location, time, industry, service .etc). Come up with a consistent title structure (example: Free [Service] in [City] for [Industry] Businesses) and list ideas with all the variations that can be applied (example: Free Tax Auditing in Waterloo for Construction Businesses). If you struggle to come up with any, programmatic SEO may not be the right fit for your business type. Don’t be afraid to book a free consultation with us for professional SEO advice. We can help you figure out if programmatic SEO is right for you.
Have a Strong Data Foundation
Build clean, structured datasets that clearly define your variables (e.g., service details, pricing, locations, reviews, or key differentiators). The more complete and accurate your data sets are, the easier it will be to generate meaningful, unique content ideas that scale cleanly and maintain quality. For example, a property management company would maintain a spreadsheet that contains various cities, property types, rental ranges, and amenities. This data can be used to create unique, evergreen content ideas such as: “2-Bedroom Apartments (property type) in Ottawa (city) Under $2,000 (rental range) with Free Parking (amenity).”
Continue to Focus on Uniqueness and Value
Programmatic doesn’t mean “copy and paste.” Programmatic SEO strategies fall apart when you start overlooking the uniqueness and value of your ideas, sections, and written content. Let’s use an example to illustrate what this failure could look like:
Let’s go back to the previous idea we came up with “Free Tax Auditing in Waterloo for Construction Businesses”
Let’s say we’ve decided to continue making more location-based service pages for our free tax auditing service:
“Free Tax Auditing in Guelph for Construction Businesses”
“Free Tax Auditing in Cambridge for Construction Businesses”
“Free Tax Auditing in London for Construction Businesses”
While it’s normal for your SEO titles to follow a similar structure, it’s the on-page content that determines whether each of these pages offers something unique or gets flagged by search engines as duplicate.
If every page ends up looking like this: “We offer tax auditing services in [City]. Our team helps construction companies identify financial opportunities and remain compliant. Contact us today for a free consultation in [City],” with the only differences being the city name, then we’re doing something wrong. To a search engine (and a actual human), these pages are essentially duplicates—providing no new value or insight.
Every time you come up with a new page or article, ask yourself:
Is the idea different enough from our previous pages/articles?
Would the page/article bring real value to the reader?
Does the page/article match the user intent? (give the reader exactly what they’re looking for/expecting)
Does the page contain unique content that differentiates it from similar pages?
Keep prioritizing this, as the success of your programmatic SEO strategy depends on how you maintain uniqueness and value.
Scale Gradually — Not Immediately
It’s tempting to launch hundreds of pages at once, but doing so can overwhelm crawlers and make it difficult to identify early mistakes. Instead, roll out your content in batches.
Start with 10–20 programmatic pages, monitor performance, and adjust your templates or data structure based on results. Once you see pages indexing properly and generating traffic, scale up. This approach ensures long-term SEO stability rather than a quick spike followed by penalties or crawl issues. It gives you the ability to identify issues, adapt, and solve problems as you go.
Connect Pages with Internal Linking
Use automated internal linking logic to help users and search engines move naturally between related pages. For example, if you create programmatic content around courses, link each city-specific course page to related ones:
Red Cross Babysitting Course in Toronto → Red Cross Babysitting Course in Ottawa → Red Cross Babysitting Course in Vancouver
Internal linking distributes link equity and improves the discoverability of programmatic pages/articles for site crawlers.
Continually Audit Programmatic SEO Content
Regularly audit your programmatic pages to catch issues like duplicate content, missing meta tags, low-performing pages, or broken links. It’s not uncommon for pages that were previously high-performing to lose traction, so staying on top of it is really important.
Track metrics such as organic impressions, bounce rate, and indexed page count to gauge performance. If a set of pages isn’t ranking or getting engagement, use additional queries to enhance on-page content, improve your variable combinations, and/or consolidate underperforming URLs.
Ongoing auditing keeps your site healthy, prevents bloat, and ensures your programmatic content continues delivering measurable SEO results over time
When Programmatic SEO Goes Wrong: How to Prevent It
When used incorrectly or in industries where it’s not applicable, programmatic SEO will end up hurting your overall SEO strategy.
As previously mentioned, programmatic SEO relies on a consistent and repeatable content strategy. When your content doesn’t offer enough variation, Google’s algorithm could consider your pages to be duplicate content, preventing them from being indexed (appearing on search results).
More issues arise with industries that struggle to create programmatic SEO opportunities. When you try to force a programmatic SEO strategy when not applicable, the value and intent are the first things to be impacted. When your content loses its value and intent, it is no longer effective or able to drive relevant traffic.
Delivering High-Value Programmatic SEO Examples: Tactycs Does It For You
Is programmatic SEO an option for you? If you believe it is, or even if you are unsure, Tactycs is the all-in-one programmatic SEO solution for you. Our agency specializes in creating customizable programmatic SEO bundles to fit every business’s needs. With our expertise, we cultivate practical programmatic SEO strategies that grow website traffic and increase domain authority and search engine rankings. We’ll equip you with the programmatic SEO strategy you need for consistent, long-term business growth.
If you’ve ever wanted to try programmatic SEO but were too confused or overwhelmed to start implementing it, fill out the form below!
Top SEO Platforms for Scalable Programmatic SEO (2025 Update)
SEMrush: SEMrush can be used to find clusters of long-tail keywords (e.g., “free tax auditing [city] for construction businesses”), check keyword difficulty, analyze how existing pages are performing (so you can decide what to scale).
Surfer SEO: When you build template pages (e.g., location + service) you can use Surfer to standardize content quality across each page.
Writesonic: Can be used with SEMrush to combine the data + template logic + AI generation to produce initial drafts which you still refine for uniqueness and value.
