Allison Seboldt is the founder of PageFactory, a service which helps websites grow their content and reach with programmatic SEO. She also has an excellent free course on how to scale content with programmatic SEO. Read her exclusive interview packed with SEO tips for founders.
First off, what is programmatic SEO?
In short, programmatic SEO is a strategy to automate creating content for SEO (aka, Search Engine Optimization).
For the most part, getting traffic from search engines is pretty great because once you get it working, they’ll send tons of traffic to your website. But in order to get there, you have to spend a lot of time researching and writing long-form content. It’s really tedious and takes a long time to see any results. A lot of people just don’t have enough free time to dedicate towards building a robust and meaningful SEO strategy.
Programmatic SEO is amazing because it automates the tedious parts of traditional, long-form SEO. So you can reap all the rewards of SEO with a lot less effort. This is done by taking data and applying it to a template. Using software, you can generate hundreds or even thousands of landing pages at once using this method.
Some programmatic examples I like to refer to include nutritional information, stock prices, and location based searches (ex: “hotels in Nashville”). Searching for any of this information will bring up programmatic pages in the search results.
Often when I bring up this strategy, people get nervous because they think I’m referring to AI content or worse, spam. But this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Programmatic SEO has been around for a good 20 years now, and many are surprised to learn they consume programmatic content all the time.
I also published a free course on programmatic SEO, for anyone interested in learning more about this strategy and how it works.
Can you tell us about what PageFactory is and your achievements so far?
PageFactory is a no-code tool I created to make programmatic SEO available to non-technical folks.
For a long time, the only way to implement programmatic SEO was to build custom page templates for your website. This required people to hire software developers, or learn to code themselves, which was a huge barrier to entry.
I created PageFactory as a point-and-click tool that allows people to create templates, generate content, and publish it in bulk to their websites. No coding required!
PageFactory reached $1k MRR within four months of its launch. It’s helped about 250 users so far, and I just passed the six month mark of running it! Users have started sending me updates about their results, and it’s incredible to see how much my little tool is making an impact.
What have been your biggest wins from programmatic SEO?
Before I started PageFactory, I was building and implementing programmatic SEO for clients. I had one client who worked in a very old, heavily regulated industry with big incumbents. They had been working hard at getting traffic from search for a long time, but their content just couldn’t compete with the big players in their space.
I implemented a programmatic strategy for their website, and in 4 - 5 months traffic to their site had increased by 300%. It felt really cool to know I made such a big, positive effect on the life of a fellow small business owner.
Why did you create PageFactory?
The biggest inspiration was seeing how much of a positive impact programmatic SEO could have on small businesses.
Many of my original programmatic SEO clients were non-technical, small business owners. And for one reason or another, traditional SEO just wasn’t working for them. I wanted to make programmatic SEO a strategy anyone can use, not just software developers.
What have been the best marketing channels for growing PageFactory?
For me, building an audience on Twitter has been really helpful. There’s just nothing quite like Twitter. It really is the “public square.”
Can you talk about what your stack is?
I used Cory Zue’s SaaS boilerplate called SaaS Pegasus to build PageFactory. It helped speed up my development workflow a ton.
Other than that, my stack is pretty basic. The application is built on Django, hosted on Heroku, and I use AWS for pretty much everything else.
How do you think AI will affect programmatic SEO?
I don’t think AI will have any special effect on programmatic SEO per se. The real question is “what will the impact of AI be on SEO overall?” People forget that programmatic SEO is still just…SEO.
This probably isn’t a popular take, but I don’t think AI will have a massive impact on search. People will always want, and seek out, the opinions of other humans. Plus, there’s no way to ensure that the information AI gives you is factual. It doesn’t have critical thinking skills.
Someone somewhere is going to get burned big time relying solely on AI for information, and it’s going to make people think twice about it. I think the real power of AI is in its ability to automate grunt work, like re-writing a twitter thread into a LinkedIn post or creating outlines for articles.
What’s your top tip for people running a programmatic SEO experiment?
Do keyword research! So many people skip this small step and then wonder why programmatic SEO isn’t giving them big results. If you do it right, it only takes a few minutes to validate which programmatic keywords you need to target. There’s really no reason to skip it.
I talk about a couple of keyword research strategies in my free programmatic SEO course if you want to learn more!
Who are your favorite underrated founders that inspire you?
I’ve always been inspired by Michael Lynch. His blog and monthly retrospectives were a big inspiration for my own. I always loved how honest and public he is in his posts.
Where can people find out more about you and PageFactory?
I share tons of information about programmatic SEO, being a solo-prenuer, and building PageFactory on my Twitter. I also “build in public” and write monthly recaps about my indie-hacking progress on my personal blog.
