I had a fantasy.
The fantasy was that programmatic SEO would let me skip the part where you write 200 individual articles and trick Google into ranking them. I had a structured dataset (US ZIP codes, cities, states) and a templated page generator. So I shipped 33,620 pages overnight. Then I sat back and waited for the long-tail traffic to roll in.
That's not what happened.
A few months later, I have a more nuanced view. Here are the five lessons I would have paid actual money for at the start.
The numbers, so we're working from data
