🌅What's your purpose?

You won’t get any far without purpose

You could just dive into Programmatic SEO because “it’s what your competitors are doing”. But that’s not good enough to bring you results. You’ll need a strategy. So, before you open your SEO tool and start looking for your head term, ask yourself a simple, three-letter question:

Purposeful - but for whom?

Your programmatic content collection should have a user-centric purpose. It should help your users to move forward in their journey. But it should also have a clear business goal.

Let’s take a look at some examples:

Content collection	Purpose (user-centric)	Goal (business-centric)
Product comparison pages	To help your users compare your product to a competitor	To engage users in the consideration stage
Integrations directory	To help your existing users to make the most out of your tool by integrating it with their current stack	To attract new users by tapping into your integration partners’ userbase

Pro-tip: Use this table as a template to brainstorm ideas for your content collection.

How to find your purpose

Get started by asking yourself (and your team) these questions:

• What impact do you want your programmatic SEO efforts to have? Is it lead acquisition, positioning, or just niche-adjacent organic traffic?

• What role do you want to play in your users' journey? At which stage do you want them to find this content?

• What do you want this content to help your users achieve?

Take action

Brainstorm some content ideas & gather them on a spreadsheet, along with their purpose & goals.

At this stage, you can pre-select your favorite ideas. But the real filtering will take place when you do your keyword research. At that stage, you’ll be able to assess your programmatic strategy’s true viability.

The WPList

For this course, we’ll be working on an imaginary website called TheWPList. This website’s centered around a WordPress plugin directory.

Content collection	Purpose (user-centric)	Goal (business-centric)
WordPress plugin directory	To help creators & entrepreneurs to find the best WordPress plugins for their website, according to their needs and budget	To build a high-traffic, valuable directory where plugin developers will want to advertise