2023 has been a year of experiments in our marketing department so far. Programmatic SEO, Content Translations, Image Passive Link Building, AI videos, LinkedIn Articles – this is what we’ve planned. The idea behind all these experiments was to pick some “low hanging fruit” – activities with a low effort score, that would allow us to milk more conversions from our existing, top-converting content.

So far, we’ve implemented two of the above: 1) ProgrammaticSEO –we created and published 194 posts programmatically from 2 databases – tools database, and use case database) and 2) Content translations: we translated our 45 top-converting posts into 14 languages (German, French, Swedish, Dutch, Finnish, Spanish, Portugese, Norsk, Dannish, Italian, Polish, Serbian, Russian, Mandarin) – based on a) the number of high-ticket conversations into paid we got from the first 5 countries; the popularity of the language group (potential volume of traffic.)

The rest of the experiments are still in the pipeline (adding AI-generated video summaries to top-converting / underperforming blogs for good KWs – to attract; adding stock photos with Creative Common license to stock image banks

So I can’t talk about their results just yet – but we’ve already gotten some preliminary results from programmatic SEO and blog translations – so let’s look at those – how much effort they really cost us, what results they’ve produced so far – and was it worth it.

Programmatic SEO

See the blogs produced programmatically here: https://userpilot.com/blog/category/tools/

Download the templates + linked database templates used in this project here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/72791405

Hypothesis: Generating bottom-of-the-funnel blog posts (e.g. “Best {tool} alternatives” in bulk will be a lot easier, faster, cheaper and even better quality than writing them by hand, and will drive significantly more conversions than the hand-written posts.”

Effort score: 8/10 (expected: 5/10).

We will have easily spent over 120 hours working on programmatic SEO so far. The most challenging aspects of this project were:

– filling in the databases is still very high-effort, expertise-intense, and time consuming: on average, it takes 20-30 minutes to fill in 1 row of the use case database, but it can take 2-4 hours to fill in one row in the tools database = 1 tool entry!

Instruments:

• Two databases: Tools database (with 17 rows of tools filled in so far) and use case database – with 24 rows of data – different use cases – filled so far)
• 5 Templates generating programmatic posts:
• 1) Best tools for {use case}
• 2) {Tool} alternatives
• 3) {Tool} vs {Tool}
• 4)  {Tool} vs {Tool} vs {your tool}
• 5) {Tool} vs {Tool} – which is better for {use case?}

The number of conversions so far: 9 demo button clicks and 7 confirmed demo bookings from programmatic blogs – last-touch conversions.)

Considering our average cost per conversion in Q1 from Google Ads was $981 – this is worth $6867

Conversion rate (+ cf regular content):

The conversion rate from programmatic posts was 0.38% compared to 0.16% of the “regular” content produced in 2023. This means programmatic content has been converting 2.4 x better than regular content.

ROI

Considering the results produced so far are work around $6867, this means $57 per hour. It’s still more than the average hourly rate of the content team (around $25-35 per hour) but considerably less than expected.

Commentary:

Programmatic SEO worked, but was certainly not a silver bullet or a panaceum to the issues we have in content –  it’s still  bloody hard, time-consuming and expertise-intense to produce high quality b2b content. Someone still needs to fill in the databases with quality data on our competitors and use cases, which cannot currently be done only with AI or outsourced to inexpensive freelancers (e.g. VAs or junior content writers) who do not understand the

Yes, I wrote that programmatic content has been converting 2.4 x better than regular content – but so what, if we were able to produce 2 x less than regular content.

Was programmatic SEO cheaper than regular content?

Assuming it took us 120 hours to prepare the databases, templates, do all the fixes, and proofread the content before publishing – this is only 36 minutes per blog post on average!

Assuming the content team members are costing us on average $25 per hour – the programmatic posts cost us $3000 in total, which means only $15 per post! ($3000/ 194 posts = $15).

Considering the high conversion rate and the low cost per post, we would like to continue working on our programmatic SEO project. Since most of the blogs produced this way are optimized for zero-search volume keywords, and get only a handful of visitors, it’s really a numbers game. The posts have been ranking well and we haven’t experienced any crawl issues yet though.

Content Translations

So far, our translations of 45 top converting blogs into 14 languages produced only 5 conversions: 2 from French, 2 from German, and one from Spanish.

Hypothesis:

If we automatically translated our top-performing content into the languages that drive 1) most high-ACV conversions for us (French, German, Finnish, Dutch, Swedish) and most traffic, we will get extra 10 free demos worth around $10,000 every quarter.

Effort score: 2/10 (expected: 1/10).

Except the occasional hiccups with the WPML plugin, and developing an SOP, the project was easy and took only around 25 hours (= $625 worth of labour)

Instruments:

1) WPML plugin – $99 per year

2) list of top-converting posts (from GA)

Conversion rate (+ cf regular content):

0.18% for German, 0.14% for French, and 0.3% for Spanish – so only slightly better on average than regular content produced in 2023 (0.16%).

ROI

Considering these 3 demos would be worth around $2,943 if produced from PPC, and cost only $625 in labour + $99 for the plugin – the project turned positive ROI. It’s not very scalable though and until we have more evidence it can drive more conversions, we will not be translating more blogs for now.

Commentary:

This project was simple, but the results are still underwhelming and it’s not scalable for us since there’s almost no searches (and no terms) for a lot of the KWs we’re covering in languages other than English. We also don’t want to clutter our website with too many pages that are getting zero traffic. The automated translations are decent, but are not of the perfect quality we have on our English blog either.