How to do programmatic SEO and technical SEO without losing your mind?

I recently wrapped up a complex technical SEO and programmatic SEO project.

The site has hundreds of thousands of pages.

After about 9 months of iteration, we've started to see incredible wins.

Every time you hit a new traffic milestone, Google sends an email. These emails are like a drug.

You can see the quick succession in which we hit them. Sometimes, they aren’t even a full week apart.

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When to bring external help?

For months, I tried to DIY this level of growth on my own but it wasn't close to where we are today.

I enrolled in Traffic Think Tank and hired some SEO experts too.

Some of them weren't great either. Once, we even received an Ahrefs report export. 😆

I finally messaged my good friend Hal, who creates enterprise-level Webflow sites.

Having expert talent reduces feedback rounds, so the high hourly rate often isn't as expensive as it seems.

I worked with him for months and never had to give feedback or context on the same task more than once.

I enjoyed working with him so much that I eventually said this to Hal.

If you're looking for an SEO consultant, send me a message and I'd love to make an intro :)

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Lessons from programmatic SEO and working with experts

Technical SEO is better left to experts

You can drown in tasks and you need someone to filter out the good-to-have vs the must-have tasks. Reading Google's wordy documentation and having the expertise to skip through the irrelevant stuff isn't easy.

SEO is iterative

When I brought on the consultant, I shared with him and the team that I see SEO as an iterative process.

It’s okay to try something, see how it performs, and even recall it if we learn something new later.

I’ve said the same to developers and designers. In many cases, B+ work is actually better than aiming for A+. It gets us moving faster, and avoids spending too much time perfecting something that might need to change anyway.

Setting that expectation early helps. At the same time, if quick wins are the priority, this might not be the right kind of project. That usually signals a modest expected return, and to make the ROI look reasonable, you’ll probably try to keep the investment low. But big wins usually require big swings. If the upside isn’t meaningful to begin with, it might be better not to invest at all.

You should own the strategy and insights

For the strategy bit, which involves a business and competitor understanding, it's best to bring those insights from the internal team. You typically don't want to delegate this to external technical SEO partners. The intuition muscle isn't there yet and it's not a good use of their specialized skillset.

I only gave access to Google Search Console and that was sufficient to drive the wins. No customer research calls, no Mixpanel, nothing.

Own the project management

I understood technical SEO deeply enough to steer the ship if we ever started working on the wrong things. I am not an expert but curiosity helps.

We set up a Slack channel. Typically, I had one meeting a month with the consultant and zero meetings with developers/designers.

I would first share the context of the project I wanted to pick up, on the call.

The SEO expert would then estimate and come up with a list of things we need to do to achieve the goal.

I would then be asked to double check if the list made sense and if there's anything we could remove or add.

Once it was approved, I'd then hand off to our devs and designers to build.

I'd take up any questions my team had. If it got too technical, I'd move it back to the expert. I'd get some sort of rough estimates from devs on how long each task would take.

Eg, this task will take 3 hours with high confidence

or, this task will take 2 days with low confidence

This helped the team move way faster.

We want the expert to share his expertise, not drown in project management or QA work.

I wanted to ensure there was no scope creep and minimize surprises in the business.

In fact, developers/designers were not recommended to directly communicate with the consultant even though they were all in the channel.

We had a private internal channel and a shared channel.

After devs shipped all the tasks in the sprint, they'd mark it in review. I'd typically review first and then hand off to the expert to review.

I did not review each task individually otherwise it would distract me from all the other projects I was deployed at.

Our developers were senior enough that they typically did not require a lot of feedback rounds or QA once tasks were shipped. We usually got them right on the first try.

P.S Bugs do creep up. They deindexed the entire site and I only caught it a week later! But the quality of work was always high. So, having a small senior team helps.

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What works and doesn't work with programmatic SEO?

Technical SEO is different from programmatic SEO

It's more task-based and requires deep, specialized skills.

Programmatic SEO can be handled internally, but a technical SEO review will require external help if you're creating hundreds of thousands of pages.

A spiky point of view

For PSEO to work, you need a point of view, a specialized competitive advantage. If you don't have a competitive advantage, there's no defensibility.

I like building things that companies can get benefit from even if I'm no longer working there. Their growth shouldn't stop if I'm not around.

So, be extremely defensive on the projects you work on with programmatic SEO. A no is typically better than a maybe.

That means, no to —

• Content that ChatGPT can generate (now or in the future)

• Content that is generic enough for competitors to generate too

• Content that relies on piggybacking off a partner. If the partner already dominates the search query, you'd end up competing with them. The only time this works is if you use a multi-pronged approach that targets LLMs, forums, and layers on paid ads.

• Content that is costly to serve for free. Anything more than a couple cents per user is costly for most products. It should also never generate customer support tickets unless that fits into your growth loops.

• Content that brings traffic but is unlikely to bring customers. The cost to serve should be low so that you're not forced to monetize free users just to cover expenses. Serving these pages is expensive. We've had our AWS or Vercel bill explode because it's not just Google crawling them. A bunch of LLM crawlers do too (even TikTok has one), and they all weigh your site down. You can block some of them but you'll still want to allow the majority of them since LLMs search is the future.

Thanks for reading! Always happy to hear questions, stories, or ideas.

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