6 Common Programmatic SEO Challenges & Solutions

We hear from a lot of people who are excited about the potential of programmatic SEO (pSEO) but who complain about it being too complicated or who are worried that it’s going to somehow harm their website authority. After all, isn’t it just repeating a bunch of pages? What would Google say?

Well, in short, no it’s not, and no it won’t—as long as you have a solid SEO strategy in place, and the right content creation team to turn that strategy into a reality, you can meet your pSEO challenges head on.

And addressing those challenges is well worth your time since pSEO offers such an enormous opportunity in traffic and conversion rates.

With that in mind, here we look at the six most common challenges you’ll face with pSEO and provide you with solutions for each one.

Along the way, you’ll learn detailed recommendations on: 

• Best practices
• What Google developer tools and keyword research resources to use
• How to leverage AI-generated content
• Tips we’ve discovered based on our experience working on pSEO projects

Plus you’ll hear from two of our in-house experts, Usman (Head of SEO) and Varya (Client Account Manager).

Here are the challenges we discuss:

1. Low crawl rate and slow Google indexing
2. Website loading speed
3. Cannibalization
4. Low-quality content
5. Creating a database with 1000s of variables
6. Internal communication, processes, and buy-in

Challenge # 1: Low crawl rate and slow Google indexing

If your site has relatively low domain authority (say, 20-30 or lower), it could suddenly have a big upturn in its number of URLs thanks to content generated via pSEO. That means it might take Google some time to crawl your new pages.

This is because Google allocates a certain crawl budget to every site—and it might not immediately recognize that your site requires a larger crawl limit. This results in your pages taking longer to index, which directly affects their SEO ranking, and therefore your ability to see fast ROI.

Solution: Direct Google’s crawlers toward your programmatic pages

The idea is to make the crawl rate increase for the pages you want to rank most. 

So, one tactic we use at Flying Cat is to put your pSEO pages up close to the homepage, which helps Google prioritize them.

To do this, we create hub pages for every single set of programmatic content we create, then we link them from either the navigation bar or the footer.

Besides our approach to minimizing page depth, there are other actions you can take that help Googlebot, Google’s crawling program, to crawl and then index the pages you want it to. For example:

• Tactic 1: Prevent wasted crawls by using your robots.txt file to disallow content you don’t want indexed
• Tactic 2: Resolve all your 404 errors, which you can identify with Google Search Console
• Tactic 3: Improve page speed (see our recommendations, below)

Challenge # 2: Website loading speed

Website loading speed is a factor in the success of any SEO strategy—while it may no longer be one of Google’s direct ranking factors, a website that loads faster means a lower bounce rate, sending signals to the search engine that the site should be rewarded. 

Not just that, it also plays an important role in the user experience, meaning loading speed can directly impact your conversion rates.

So, if you’re adding hundreds or thousands of new pages to your site over a period of just a few weeks, you’ll need a way to maintain high page loading speed.

Solution: Use Google’s developer tools and follow best practices

To fix this, we recommend our clients to use Google’s very own PageSpeed Insights.

Just enter a URL to receive an instant report on and diagnoses of performance issues, as well as a list of opportunities on how to improve loading speed.

Alongside any specific recommendations made by a tool like PageSpeed Insights, you can apply these best practices to your pSEO templates to help improve page speed, the user experience, your crawl rate, and your SERP rankings:

• Best practice 1: Minimize animation, embed video in place of gifs, and set up lazy loading
• Best practice 2: Reduce the use of, resize, and compress images
• Best practice 3: Remove redundant data and optimize your HTML code 
• Best practice 4: Regularly review and update your CMS, including your installed plugins

Challenge # 3: Cannibalization

Content cannibalization is when different pages of your website start competing with each other for the same space in the SERPs. As a result, you could see an overall drop in ranking performance. 

Since with pSEO you’re publishing pages at scale, you may worry there could be overlap that affects your results. But, as Usman explains below, there are common misconceptions about what cannibalization really is.

Solution: Focus on search intent and topical integrity

“People get easily confused with the idea of cannibalization,” Usman says. “It’s a  big myth of programmatic SEO that, since one page or set of pages are targeting similar keywords, Google won’t know which page to rank for what keyword.”

So what is the issue with cannibalization?

Well, firstly there’s no such thing as keyword cannibalization. 

But what actually is a thing is search intent cannibalization.

A classic example would be the keywords: 

• Email marketing software
• Email marketing tool
• Email marketing platform.

They’re three totally different words, but they mean the same thing—so they share the same search intent. In this case, these keywords are relevant to one single page, because the search intent is the same.

On the other hand, compare these keywords: 

• Online collaboration tools for universities
• Online collaboration tools for designers
• Online collaboration tools for project managers

Just by adding that qualifier at the end of the keyword, you’ve changed the entire search intent—because each use case requires a different kind of solution. So here, you’d need to create unique content for each one.

Challenge # 4: Low-quality content

A perception lots of CEOs and marketing VPs share is that pSEO will dump tons of duplicate content on your website—itself a potentially damaging factor in SEO performance—and that content created programmatically is inherently bad, basically because it’s created so fast. 

But just because you’re building a system for mass content production doesn’t mean you’re investing in thin content.

So, keeping in mind that search engines prioritize relevance and insight, how do you bake high-quality content into a programmatic SEO strategy?

Solution: Create people-first content

The key is to always provide value for the search intent.

So, at Flying Cat, just as we do with any other kind of content, we make sure to understand: 

• The target audience
• Their pain points
• Their objectives
• The obstacles they’re facing

With that knowledge, and by utilizing relevant data, expert insights, and social proof, we can create landing page templates that really resonate with the reader.

Then, it’s a question of creating search-specific variables for those templates so you’re providing value for the different audiences your programmatic SEO strategy serves.

So as long as your pSEO strategy has effectively identified a range of different search intents that share the same keyword pattern, you can follow Google’s best practices for people-first content creation, which includes both your templates and variables.

But how can you create those variables at scale with a small content team or limited budget? That’s what we discuss next.

Challenge # 5: Creating a database with 1000s of variables

So far we’ve talked about the common pSEO questions around website performance and how Google responds to templated content. 

But before you can even think about creating that content, you need to identify where there’s keyword potential, understand the user intent behind those long-tail keywords, and create a process that will ultimately lead to publishing programmatic content with quick ROI.

Solution: Enlist SEO expertise and build complexity gradually

A carefully organized strategic process needs SEO expertise to implement it effectively. 

So at Flying Cat, we: 

• Best practice 1: Follow a highly structured SOP for the creation of a programmatic SEO strategy
• Best practice 2: Use a variety of SEO tools to carry out our keyword research
• Best practice 3: Implement automation wherever possible throughout the process
• Best practice 4: Insist on a deep understanding of the product, brand, and target audience

Here’s a snapshot of what that SOP includes:

1. Establish that it makes sense to do programmatic SEO

Here, two conditions must be met:

1. The total addressable market (TAM) that you can capture has to be significant
2. There has to be a repeated keyword pattern, which you can research using Google Autosuggest and Ahrefs keyword explorer
   

2. Create a list of niches

Examples of different niches include: 

• All the different integrations that connect with your software
• Geographic locations where you want to find an audience
• Different types of use cases (for example, different professions that use your software)

3. Create a list of variables

When creating your list of variables, you’ll also need content placeholders for each variable. But subsequently, these will require unique copy at scale. 

Since these variables will be specific to, say, product features or user pain points, at Flying Cat, we’ve begun using AI tools to create them.

Usman explains: “We’ve developed a complex AI prompt template that includes our core objectives, specific product information, a list of customer pain points based on our user research, and all the niches that we’ve identified. That way, we can place the AI-generated variables directly into a spreadsheet that our strategists create, which is reviewed by the editing team.”

Here’s a simplified example of what that AI output might look like:

However, a key consideration at this stage is to, simply put, get publishing fast.

Why? Well, a complicated database might require a lot of time. There are internal discussions, processes, mediation with key stakeholders. And all this time adds up, slowing down your ability to start generating traffic and conversions.

So, what we’ve learned is start simple—done is better than perfect. 

Unless you’re already experienced with pSEO, it’s better to publish pages as soon as you can and get them indexed so you can start seeing a return. Then, over time, you can add complexity to the work.

Challenge # 6: Internal communication, processes, and buy-in

You may struggle to get buy-in from key stakeholders—like your CEO—for a pSEO marketing strategy if they don’t fully understand what pSEO actually is. They might be unconvinced of the potential ROI, and explaining the core principles and processes of pSEO to your team can be complex, time-consuming, and met with resistance.

Solution: Use case studies and expert resources

In our experience, hard evidence of pSEO’s results immediately engages people in what the work actually entails. Then it’s just a question of carefully guiding them through objectives, processes, and reasoning.

So, share with your team our pSEO case study, which describes a pSEO campaign centered on our client’s integrations ( and be sure to point out how it increased conversion rates by 35% in just four months and that done manually, it would’ve taken 17 years!).

Helping your team get past pSEO’s complexities can still be a challenge, though, which is why we’ve spent time developing a solution for this precise issue. 

Varya, take it from here: 

“We’ve created a series of documents and Loom recordings to explain programmatic SEO to our client’s whole team. We explain why we’re doing this project, the fundamental concepts, the goals, and the steps.

“Then, we provide documentation on how to handle the uploading and manage this content if any changes are required in the future—because giving our clients the tools to be independent is important, too.”

Addressing the challenges of pSEO for impressive ROI

Every programmatic SEO project will face unique challenges depending on the nature of your product, your audience, and your CMS. And different members of your team will have to deal with their own individual challenges, too, whether that’s understanding the core principles of pSEO, developing new workflows, or following SOPs.

But, most of the challenges your team will encounter aren’t unique—they’re predictable issues that most projects face. So, you can draw on the experience of others to minimize those hurdles.

And, despite what some sources may claim, you don’t need advanced technical expertise to successfully execute a pSEO strategy.

So our advice? Go ahead, test it yourself, and let us know how it goes! And if things get too complicated, we’re just a call away and more than happy to help 😃