Programmatic SEO: Integrating Blog Content With Programmatic

Every website tackling SEO is running a blog.

Blogs & SEO go hand-in-hand.

For programmatic SEO, blog posts enable the ability to target specific keyword sets that you just can’t efficiently target in bulk.

They help fill the gap.

How can you best leverage this content though?

How blog content works for most sites

The majority of websites with a blog will throw all their content under /blog/ or just single folders for each content type.

So you might see /advice/, /guides/ and /news/ commonly floating about.

All the blog content sits within these folders, and only in these folders.

You’ll find links to the posts around the site, but all readers once they click will be sent to that static blog folder.

These posts will then link out throughout the site, when it suits, mostly via manual contextual links.

How to improve blog content handling

Having blog posts set up like every other site still holds significant value, and is by no means wrong.

It’s the easiest method of getting gap-filling content live, so you can begin ranking for and driving traffic from additional keywords.

However, you can squeeze a bit more value out of this blog content.

Not by modifying the content itself, but by where the content is used on the website.

By relocating your content to sit within your programmatic directories, you can improve its effectiveness at passing value into those directories.

Rather than just a couple of links from the post into your programmatic setup, you’re shifting the entire value into the setup.

All value your content then generates, is directly passed into the directories where it matters, rather than to your domain, and then back down.

Not only improving the strength within these directories, but also helping aggregate all related content together for Google in the hope of being seen as covering the topic more thoroughly.

How this can be achieved

There are a few ways to integrate this, and you don’t have to give up all those lovely WordPress features either!

Definitely don’t need a full custom blog set up to make this happen/

Headless CMS via WordPress API or similar

WordPress offers an API that allows you to de-couple it from itself.

You can have the admin work as per normal, and then the front end be built however you like it, without all the WordPress bloat!

The developers need to build off the WP API, and can essentially leverage the blog content however they like.

It would work exactly like any other content type you have, so they get full access to it all.

No funky tricks to make things work.

Built it how you want it.

Sometimes devs will request something in the URL to be able to determine the content requested is blog content.

It’s the easiest way to integrate this, but it shouldn’t be necessary.

There are ways to make something like this work, even if it’s maintaining a list of all possible blog posts that are available, and thus then knowing all their slugs and not needing a key anymore.

You could ensure blog posts only get included in these category setups once a week, and then every week you recreate the list of all posts available.

Another possible way is it you know what variable values you’ll have within the programmatic structure, anything left could be deemed to be a blog post, and if not, it could then 404.

You might just need to heavily cache the blog content as it could be a bit of a load on the server on the initial load. But hey, it’s blog content. Not exactly requiring live updates here or anything.

There’s always a way if ideas are bounced around with the team enough.

Reverse proxies with Nginx

This is the only way that I know, that allows for integration between CMS platforms.

Essentially the setup just says that say /buy/ points at one system, and /buy/guides/ points at another.

It requires a unique key in the URL to be able to distinguish the two systems though.

Something like /blog/, /advice/ or /guides/ in the URL of every piece of content, whether it be categories or blog content.

Examples of content integration

Airtasker

Airtasker has now fully integrated their blog content into their structure, by using a

They have their main categories of landing pages like Cleaning, like this;

airtasker.com/cleaning/

But then they’ve managed to pull in their related blog content, under the main /cleaning/ structure like this;

airtasker.com/cleaning/guides/how-to-clean-home-after-flood/

They’re using the /guides/ as a key, to then be able to distinguish it as blog content.

They even go another layer deeper, and sit content behind their sub-categories too;

airtasker.com/tradesman/awning/guides/how-to-diy-awning/

Gets a bit deep into the structure, but that’s purely because of the deadweight of /guides/ being included.

Other examples coming soon…

Is it worth the work?

It’s really hard to say.

Comes down to how hard this is actually going to be to integrate for you, so somewhat the skill of your development teams.

If they can efficiently build this, then most definitely.

If it would be a prolonged build-out, and be deemed as not “simple” to maintain, then no, it probably wouldn’t be worth it.

I’d also try and get a second opinion if someone says it’s too hard.

Personally, if I can get this through I will certainly try. I know it will help.