📐Content templates
Welcome to the fourth lesson in our programmatic SEO course!
In this lesson, we’ll start working on the content that will populate your pSEO pages.
But first, let’s clarify what we mean when we talk about content templates.
What’s a content template for pSEO?
Part of the magic of programmatic SEO is that it gives you the ability to create content at scale without having to rethink and rewrite every page from scratch.
This is partially made possible by your content template.
Your content template is more than an outline, it includes all the content on your programmatic SEO pages that won’t be populated dynamically. And it marks exactly where each piece of unique content will go.
Why are we preparing a content template now?
At this point, you:
Understand how your pSEO collection will provide value to your users and get you closer to your business goals
Know what your head terms and modifiers are
But you’ve yet to decide which data you’ll need or how to source it.
Knowing how your content will be structured is key to getting clarity on that front.
Some companies produce their pSEO content by curating a list of materials that they already have. So the pre-existing data strongly conditions how the content will be structured. But, if you’re not set on data collection, this is a great step to understand what information you’ll need.
How to create a content template, step-by-step
If you’re not a content specialist, this could be a great moment to connect with your content team.
We’ll use Google Docs. But you can go for any writing tool in your stack. The easiest way to get started is by pretending you’re creating one of the pages in your collection. Don’t start with the modifiers.
We’ll produce a landing page showing the Best SEO WordPress Plugins. Here’s our first draft:
Once you’ve written your content, it’s time to detect which portions you’ll fill in dynamically.
Detecting the content fields
At this stage, we recommend you:
Copy your original content to a different file
Highlight those portions of content that will make each piece truly unique
Replace them with placeholders. We usually use
{thisStructure}.
Here’s the result:
Adding the new content fields to your spreadsheet
At this point, we already know which fields we’ll need to populate to create each page.
In the case of our WordPress plugin directory, each page includes a selection from two data bases:
Free WordPress plugins
Premium WordPress plugins
We also dynamically insert:
Our modifier
A list of criteria we use for choosing the best WordPress {modifier} plugins
A list of benefits you’d get from adopting a WordPress {modifier} plugin
So, let’s update our spreadsheet to accommodate this new information.
We’ll create two new sheets:
One for our free plugins
One for our premium plugins
And we’ll also add a couple of columns to our main sheet.
Here’s what these changes look like:
Technical Notes
At this point, it’s important to explain that:
We haven’t included the {number} dynamic field in our spreadsheet because we’ll set up a script to calculate it automatically later on, when developing our site.
We’re dealing with three content collections. The plugin collections are connected to the category collections. In our case, since we’re using Google Sheets, we’ll list the relevant categories on the “Categories” field of every plugin. If you’re using something a bit more complex (such as Airtable), you can create a multi-reference field that connects your categories and your plugins.
If we were using something a bit more complex instead of Google Sheets, we’d be able to directly load our tool logos on our spreadsheet. However, since we’re using Google Sheets, we’ve got three options. We can:
Include a direct link to each logo
Use SVGs and paste our logos’ raw code
Include each logo’s file name, so we can later map it to our website’s assets directory
If we were creating a real directory, we’d probably also work on single-product pages. So, one page for each plugin. That’s out of the scope of this course, but the strategies we’re using would serve just fine for creating those pages too.
So, at this point we know:
What our pages will look like
What data we need to bring our pSEO collection to life.
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