How to Do Programmatic SEO in Webflow

TL;DR:

• Webflow allows for creating programmatic pages with code, but it can be challenging for non-technical users
• Create separate CMS collections for each component of your programmatic pages
• Add custom fields for data variables and link collections with multi-reference fields
• Generate thousands of programmatic pages using Webflow's API
• Consider using Letterdrop for a codeless integration for Webflow that pairs proprietary data with AI for programmatic SEO

As well as being an exceptional web builder, Webflow allows you to create templates, store data, and generate programmatic pages with code.

Unfortunately, this can prove a little challenging for folks who aren't that technical.

Luckily, there is a tool out there that integrates directly with Webflow and has a programmatic feature to help you generate thousands of pages — the right way — without code.

How to Create Your Programmatic Pages In Webflow

1. Create Separate CMS Collections for Each Component of Your Programmatic Pages

After you've set up a Webflow blog and paid for a domain, create a CMS collection for each of the components of your programmatic SEO pages in the designer.

For example, if you want to generate programmatic pages about different cities in the US and what to do there, you would create a collection for "Cities" and one for "Things to Do."

2. Add Custom Fields for Data Variables

Go into Settings for that CMS collections you created in the above step and add custom fields for the variables that you want to modify for each programmatic page. For example, Location.

Here's a video demonstration of this setup.

3. Link These Collections with Multi-Reference Fields

‎Using the multi-reference feature links your collections allows each landing page to reference one or more objects from any collection. To use the above example, any cities from the "Cities" collection.

This is found by navigating to Collection Settings → Multi-Reference.

4. Create a Template Page for Your Programmatic Pages

Now, it's time to design your pages with a single template.

Fill in any text or data that will be common across all pages.

Then insert your variables in the relevant spots of your template. Just click on the settings icon next to an element and click on "Get text from" your collection.

5. Collect and Store Your Programmatic Data

If you're savvy with code or have access to a developer, you can use Webflow itself to scrape the internet for raw data and save you the manual effort.

However, this isn't always possible for everyone. There are two alternative ways you can source data for your pages:

1. Scrape publicly available datasets yourself or with web scrapers. This includes Data.gov and r/datasets. You can use no-code scrapers like Octoparse or TexAu to do this, although they do come with their own challenges and risks
2. Use proprietary data. This makes your pages truly unique. Source information from customers, crowdsourcing, your team, and subject matter experts

Once you have your data, it's time to create a database.

The easiest database to use for your Webflow pages would be a spreadsheet, although there are more robust databases out there like Xano.

For this guide, we will assume you will use a spreadsheet.

• Every row should correspond to one new programmatic page
• Every column should correspond with a type of data that you would want to insert dynamically on your template pages

Here's an example of a programmatic SEO page database in Google Sheets:

6. Generate Thousands of Programmatic Pages with Webflow's API

You can learn all about Webflow's API by reading through their API documentation.

You'll find code snippets in there that you can copy-paste over into Webflow itself and modify for your specific needs. Use cases include:

1. Creating new collections in bulk. You can add images by dropping the image URL into the code snippet
2. Multi-referencing collections. All you need to do this is to insert the unique item ID of the collection items you want to reference into the code snippet

Here's an example of new collection code where "Apps" is the name of the collection:

The Challenges of Programmatic SEO in Webflow

As mentioned at the very beginning of this guide, generating your programmatic pages using Webflow poses some challenges.

• Without generative AI, you'll likely get thin content based only on one template and basic variables. This could alert Google to possible spam
• Webflow doesn't have generative AI to help you make your pages more unique, which means you will have to copy-paste descriptions over from ChatGPT for every programmatic page — this will take hours
• You need code to generate programmatic pages, and most marketers and content writers aren't technical. This can add hours to your workflow
• You may need to hire a developer to help you, which costs money

There are plenty of programmatic SEO tools out there that you can outsource to help you. However, most of them rely on AI-generated writing on its own to generate your pages — this will get you nowhere with your users, and Google can flag these pages as spam.

Just look at what happened to Causal, who used byword.ai to generate primarily AI-written pages.

If you want to create genuinely helpful pages, you have to pair AI and templates with proprietary data. Placeholders and keywords alone will only lead to thin and spammy content.

No-Code Webflow Integration that Pairs Proprietary Data with AI for Programmatic SEO

Letterdrop, founded in 2021 by ex-Googlers, acts as a headless CMS and integrates seamlessly with Webflow. It's completely codeless.

Among its suite of smart SEO tooling that lets you optimize for the changing search landscape, Letterdrop offers a programmatic SEO tool that automatically identifies opportunities for programmatic pages on your site, pulling this data from sales calls, Google Search Console, and from top pages on the SERP.

It can then auto-generate these pages for you, pairing proprietary data with AI-generated content to create truly unique and helpful pages.

This is a feature completely unique to Letterdrop.

Related FAQs

What Is Programmatic SEO?

Programmatic SEO is an SEO tactic where you use software to create a large number of keyword-targeted web pages at scale using templates, data, and AI, something that would be cost-prohibitive to do manually. These pages are created programmatically by a computer program.

How Do I Create a Programmatic SEO Page?

Creating a programmatic SEO page involves identifying relevant topics and modifiers, designing a template page with placeholders for dynamic content, collecting data in a spreadsheet format, optionally generating unique AI-written content, and connecting the template with the database through platforms like Webflow or Letterdrop.

Is Webflow Good for SEO?

Yes, Webflow is good for SEO. It prioritizes clean code, making it easier for search engine crawlers to scan and understand the content on Webflow websites. This can help improve the ranking of indexed pages in search results.

However, it does leave gaps, and can be improved by outsourcing more robust SEO tools.

How Do I Optimize for SEO in Webflow?

To make your Webflow site SEO-ready, optimize meta information, add alt tags to images, ensure proper heading structure, create clean URL structures, use and track internal links, optimize core web vitals, optimize for mobile responsiveness, enable auto-generated XML sitemaps, implement structured data markup, and connect to Google Search Console for page monitoring.

Put Webflow Programmatic SEO on Autopilot

You don't want to end up generating thin, placeholder-type programmatic pages that are of no use to your potential buyers.

You need to pair proprietary data with AI in a way that produces pages that can drive business for you at scale.

Let Letterdrop take care of programmatic SEO for your Webflow site from start to finish.