SEO Nightmare: From 700k Visitors to Zero

Happy Sunday,

I've seen websites shoot up to 700k+ visits/mo using pSEO…

Only to have it all evaporate in a span of days.

Programmatic SEO can be a boon for your traffic and conversions, but there are pitfalls that can completely tank your traffic.

Here are some key pSEO lessons:

1. Page quality matters

If you're scaling out hundreds or thousands of pages, you're inevitably going to run into quality control issues.

Quick backstory: pSEO is about programmatically generating pages at scale, mostly based on high-intent keywords. This was something that large sites previously did but is now available to everyone because of OpenAI's API.

For instance, OpenAI offers an API that businesses can use to generate content:

Let's say you pump out 10,000 pages.

Odds are that 50-70% of the pages are going to be thin content.

Simply delete those pages and remove them from the index.

Better yet, sharpen your criteria for pages that you allow to be published.

Focus on:

- Readability
- Pagespeed
- Page design
- Google's quality guidelines

2. Internal linking at scale

Internal links help search spiders find the pages around your site.

If you're not helping the search engines help you, you're doing a disservice to yourself.

You can even upload a CSV of your most important pages to ChatGPT and ask it to find the best spots to add internal links for your content.

Add this to your content workflow and have your editors take it from there.

3. Content updating is a challenge

How are you supposed to update so many pages at once?

For us, it's simple: we try to pull the context from the page and then based on that context, display short summaries of recent content that we have released on our YouTube/pod as it relates to that page.

For example, check out how we added a recent podcast episode to our pSEO agency page:

That way, the pages are dynamically updated with new content.

We also do this with company logos to help from a CRO perspective.

We'll also manually have a human editor update our top pages.

4. Take it slow

It might sound more exciting to release a bunch of pages at once, but I recommend a more methodical approach.

Instead of going for 5,000 keywords, maybe go for 250 high-intent keywords.

Don't go too long tail because that ends up creating a ton of thin content.

Then as you see it working, you can scale up.

Most websites don't need 5,000 keywords to start with.

What did I miss?

Let me know with a reply to this email.

Talk tomorrow,
Eric Siu

P.S. Want to avoid the pSEO pitfalls that can tank your traffic?

My agency can help you generate results quickly and effectively.

We have a team of experts who can help you create high-quality pages, scale your internal linking, and update your content.