Programmatic SEO (pSEO) promises massive scale and efficiency, yet many startups we’ve spoken with are still apprehensive about diving into pSEO — and for good reason. The sheer volume of content required, the technical complexities, and the uncertainties surrounding ROI cause many startups to hesitate at the starting line. 

After working with dozens of startups over the past year since launching daydream, we can now predict with reasonable accuracy which companies will succeed with pSEO before they actually invest. We’ve developed a five-part checklist that distills the key factors that distinguish those who succeed from those who fail (or never get off the ground). 

1. Your stakeholders are aligned

A lack of internal alignment is the biggest cause of failure. Over the past year since launching daydream, I’ve witnessed firsthand the transformative potential of pSEO through partnerships with visionary companies like Notion, Descript, and Clay. These collaborations have underscored a critical insight: the most significant barrier to success is whether or not there is internal buy-in. 

Like any other critical business function, SEO requires ancillary teams for success. In the case of SEO, these teams span engineering, product, marketing, and design. If these departments are not bought into the SEO strategy or don’t have the bandwidth to support it, projects will not get off the ground or will be blocked at some stage.  Here are a few examples of ways that SEO is set up for failure:

1. Expectations are not appropriately set from the get-go. For example, focusing on a certain number of pages to deploy rather than traffic targets or promising overly short-term time horizons. This might lead to a false conclusion that pSEO is ineffective when, in reality, it hasn’t been given a fair chance to demonstrate its potential. 

2.  Specific dependencies are not factored into the timeline from the beginning. We’ve encountered plenty of situations where our ability to deploy content is blocked because the engineering, brand, or design teams don’t have the time to support the necessary page build. This results in lost time on implementation and slowdowns due to technical back-and-forth.

3. Leadership turnover creates instability. For example, if a head of marketing is let go and another is hired, priorities (including SEO) can shift abruptly.  

Regardless of the exact scenario, it’s critical that supporting teams are fully aware and bought into the pSEO initiative before you invest. 

2. You have substantial long-tail search volume that’s relevant to your business

The core principle of pSEO is to capture search traffic from a vast set of relevant long-tail queries. If your team isn’t interested in capturing long-tail traffic, then pSEO is not the right strategy. If you’re unsure about the value of long-tail traffic, we invite you to read our recent guide on the difference between traditional SEO and pSEO. 

We often encounter potential clients interested in ranking for competitive “head terms” or popular, more general keywords that drive high search volume relevant to their industry. For example, a head term for an insurance company would be “car insurance,” and a head term for a shoe brand would be “stiletto shoes.” Head terms can face stiff competition from established brands, so newer businesses often need to invest significantly to compete. Clients interested in ranking for head terms are not a match for pSEO since ranking for these broad, competitive keywords requires in-depth, bespoke content rather than scalable, programmatic content. 

A great example of this is our partnership with Twingate, a cybersecurity startup that launched in 2020. Twingate had established its product market fit but wanted to expand its visibility among IT professionals looking for security solutions. They realized that competing for prominent security keywords like “VPN alternative” and “zero trust” would be prohibitively expensive since they were up against longstanding software providers with substantially higher marketing budgets and resources. 

Instead of competing for head terms, Twingate recognized the potential of pSEO to capture less competitive long-tail traffic. By leveraging pSEO, Twingate could go after less saturated SEO terms to generate substantial traffic while avoiding the extensive time and resources required with traditional SEO strategies. 

3. Your domain authority relative to the competition is high

Domain authority (DA) is a score that predicts how well your website will rank in search engine results pages (SERPs) on a scale from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating a greater likelihood of ranking higher. Interestingly, DA is not a metric developed by Google. Moz developed the first ranking system (and Ahrefs and SEMRush have their own scores, too), but most SEO practitioners recognize DA and is, therefore, a good proxy to account for site authority among search engines. 

When evaluating your own DA, the ranking doesn’t matter in absolute terms; it only matters in relative terms. In other words, if your DA is 10 and your competitors are around the same, you’re likely not at a disadvantage from a domain-level perspective. However, if you have a DA of 10 while your competition has a DA of 70, you will likely have issues ranking. All told, this is a general principle and not a fixed rule. You’ll sometimes (though very rarely) see companies with a DA of 10 outrank those with a DA of 70. 

If your domain authority relative to the competition is high, pSEO is an excellent strategy for capturing additional traffic. If it's low, you’ll want to consider building a firmer foundation through other growth tactics first (building strong product-market fit is the surest way) before investing in pSEO.  

4. You have proprietary data 

This rule isn’t a prerequisite for pSEO success, but it does create an initial advantage. As we discussed in a previous post, generative AI will create an environment where everyone can easily create “baseline” SEO content (i.e., content generated by AI models using publicly available information.) These content pieces lack human insight or proprietary data since the AI models cannot generate net-new insights or pull information that isn’t available in their training set. 

To go beyond baseline content, you must contribute unique insights and information that foundational AI models don’t have access to. This includes leveraging proprietary datasets, distilling meaning from complicated data sources, or adding human insights to programmatic content. The most straightforward way to do this is to build pSEO content using proprietary datasets. 

G2’s software product pages are a great example of proprietary data fueling programmatic content. These pages use a mix of data (scraped from the software provider’s website + G2’s proprietary customer reviews) to generate robust product overview pages that outrank the competition, accounting for more than 1 million monthly organic visits (per Ahrefs). 

G2 has built a powerful flywheel by leveraging user-generated data (product reviews) to enrich its content. As their user base of product reviewers grows, so does their dataset, creating a virtuous cycle of more rich and valuable content to attract even more viewers. 

5. You want to play to win, not participate

As we’ve said before, SEO is not a play-to-participate game. You can’t dip your toe into SEO and expect meaningful results. If you aren’t ready to commit fully and use SEO as a core acquisition channel, don’t waste your time with small, half-hearted SEO experiments. 

While short-term SEO projects can result in initial traffic spikes, those who continue to invest see even greater long-term gains. For example, Wise built a pSEO strategy that now accounts for 90% of its organic visits (per Ahrefs). The company saw initial gains with its currency conversion pSEO pages. In the first month (between March and April 2021), Wise published about 12,000 currency converter pages on its Great Britain subdomain (wise.com/gb). These pages drew in an impressive 542,000+ monthly organic visits. But Wise didn’t stop there. Between 2021 and 2024, Wise created more than 64,000 currency converter pages on its gb domain that now drive more than 11 million monthly organic visits (per Ahrefs).

Companies like Wise demonstrate that while initial SEO efforts can produce quick wins, the real value lies in sustained, long-term investment. SEO powerhouses achieve lasting success by:

• Regularly creating and optimizing high-quality content

• Continuously improving technical SEO aspects

• Focusing on user experience and intent

By making SEO a cornerstone of their digital strategy rather than a one-time effort, these companies have seen compounding returns on their investment over time. 

Let’s connect!

If you answered “yes” to most of the criteria listed above, let’s connect to discuss how you can partner with daydream to accelerate your pSEO efforts. Our team works with some of the fastest-growing startups like Tome, Notion, and Descript to build high-performing pSEO engines that outpace the competition. If you’re interested in learning more, email me at [email protected].