How to choose a head term
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Hi, welcome to the third lesson of our programmatic SEO course!
At this stage, you should already know what you want to achieve with your programmatic content collection, both for your users and for your company. You should also have a list of potential concepts for your content collection.
So now we’ll get a bit technical.
A head term is a keyword structure that all your programmatic pages will have in common. The keyword that each piece of programmatic content targets will consist of:
Your head term
A modifier
For instance, “Best restaurants in {City/Country/County}”.
But your modifier doesn’t have to be at the end of your keyword. For instance, here’s our head term for TheWPList:
Wondering what are the signs that you've found the right head term? Here’s what you should be looking for:
If you’re not reinventing the wheel, look at other companies for inspiration. For example, Calendly’s integrations directory uses the head term “Scheduling integration for {tool}”. If you run an invoicing platform and you’re planning to create an integrations directory, a good head term could be “Payments integration for {tool}”.
Make a list of potential head terms, and run them through your SEO tool of choice.
In our case, we’ll use SEMRush.
Ahrefs is a great SEO tool - and programmatic SEO experts love it. But we prefer SEMRush because it has more detailed insights at a global scale.
Go to the Keyword Magic tool
Search for your head term
Choose to see terms with Broad Match
Explore your collection and take note of keywords with the “Head term + modifier” structure
Compile these keywords into a Keyword List
Export the list and use ChatGPT to separate modifiers from your head term
As you explore your keywords, don’t hesitate to exclude results containing certain words. Remember that all the content in your programmatic collection should have the same structure. So ignore keywords with extra modifiers that diverge from your collection’s core purpose. But you don’t have to completely discard these keywords either! Save them on a different list, they could be great for complementary content.
You don’t need 200 modifiers to get started with programmatic SEO. Run a proof of concept to get a test of your project’s:
Potential
Effort level
There are several ways to create a list of modifiers.
You can:
Select results from your keyword research
Export the keywords to a CSV file
Use ChatGPT to separate the head term from the modifiers
Start preparing your collection data
We’ll make particular emphasis on the last two steps.
Go on chat.openai.com and write the following prompt:
I'll give you a list of keywords. You'll remove "{head term}" and just give me the modifiers. {list of keywords}
Here’s our example:
And the answer’s just what we were looking for:
Access the Google Sheets file we’ll use in this course through this link.
You can use any software of your choice to manage your programmatic collection’s data. But, for the sake of simplicity, in this course, we’ll use Google Sheets.
Open a new Google Sheets file and create 2 headings:
Modifier
Slug
Of course, we’ll include more data in this spreadsheet in the next lesson. But we’ll need to create our content template first.
On the “Modifier” column, I’ll add the modifiers that I extracted through ChatGPT 🦾.
If your modifiers include acronyms, make sure that they don’t include clarification, as that’s often an attribution that ChatGPT takes. These clarifications are rarely present in the original keywords and could make your content a bit stuffier than you’d like it to be.
With the exception of acronyms, we’ve ensured my modifiers aren’t capitalized, so we can include them in my slug and most slots in my content template without worrying about capitalization. We’ll just make sure they’re uppercase on my H1 and meta title.
Here’s how our spreadsheet looks at this stage:
Now, let’s create our slugs. We’ll create them by concatenating our modifiers with our head term.
Here they are:
Done!
