Someone somewhere just read a case study about a SaaS company that built 13,000 pages and got six times more traffic in a month. They’re now very excited. They’ve sent the link to their marketing manager. There might be a spreadsheet involved. Everyone is excited about Programmatic SEO.
I get it.
Those numbers are genuinely impressive. The problem is they have almost nothing to do with your business.
What programmatic SEO really is
Programmatic SEO is the practice of building large numbers of pages automatically, usually from a structured data template. Instead of writing each page individually, you create a framework and let the AI system generate variations at scale.
It works brilliantly for certain types of websites:
- A tool that generates pages for every city in the UK crossed with every service type.
- A directory with thousands of listings.
- A SaaS product with use cases across hundreds of industries.
These sites have genuine, distinct content to put on each page. The variation is real, the pages serve different users, and the scale makes sense.That’s the key bit everyone glosses over. The variation is real.
Why it falls apart for B2B service businesses
Let’s say you’re an HR consultancy in Sheffield. You offer employment law advice, HR strategy, and people management support. You serve small and medium businesses.
Someone convinces you that programmatic SEO is the answer. So you build pages. HR consultancy Sheffield. HR consultancy Leeds. HR consultancy York. HR consultancy Harrogate. HR consultancy Wakefield. Each page has slightly different location words dropped in. The rest is essentially identical.
You now have forty pages that all say the same thing about slightly different places you may or may not actually serve. None of them has any genuine local content. None of them answers a specific question a business in that location would actually ask. They exist purely to hoover up location-based searches.
Google has seen this before. Many, many times. And Google is not impressed.
Meet James
James runs a management consultancy. Smart bloke. He came to me after spending four months and a not-insignificant amount of money on a programmatic SEO project.
His agency had built him 200 pages. Service pages crossed with industries, crossed with business sizes, crossed with regions. Management consulting for manufacturing companies in the East Midlands. Management consulting for retail businesses in the South East. You get the picture.
Initially, a handful of them picked up some impressions in Google Search Console. The agency sent excited reports. Then Google’s helpful content systems caught up with the site, decided it was mostly thin, repetitive content created for search engines rather than humans, and quietly buried the lot of it.
Worse, the pages dragged down the perfectly good content James already had. His homepage. His service pages. His case studies. All of it affected because Google now viewed the site as a whole and didn’t like what it saw.
We spent seven months cleaning it up.
The sites where it works
To be fair to the concept, programmatic SEO isn’t inherently wrong. It’s just frequently sold to the wrong people.
If you run a tool that helps people write meta descriptions, building a page for every industry that uses meta descriptions makes sense. Each page genuinely has different context to offer. A page about meta descriptions for estate agents is meaningfully different from one about meta descriptions for accountants.
If you have a directory with real, distinct entries – each with their own address, reviews, opening hours, and unique information – building pages at scale makes complete sense. The content varies because the underlying data varies.
The test is simple. Would a real person find each page actually useful, or would they notice it’s the same page with different words swapped in? If it’s the latter, don’t build it.
What B2B service businesses should do instead
Fewer pages. Better pages. It’s honestly that straightforward.
One strong service page that clearly explains what you do, who you do it for, and what happens when someone works with you will outperform twenty thin variations every single time. A handful of well-written case studies showing real results for real clients builds more authority than a hundred location pages nobody asked for.
Google wants to send people to websites that will actually help them. Your job is to be one of those websites. That’s not something programmatic SEO can solve.
If your SEO isn’t working and someone’s suggesting you need more pages, that’s worth questioning. Usually what you need is better pages.
That’s exactly what I help with.
