Programmatic SEO Strategy That Increased Organic Traffic 60%
The Outbound Collective had thousands of trip reports but was missing massive organic traffic for location-based searches like "best hikes near Denver" or "backpacking Colorado." Content was organized by individual trips, not by destination, so there was nothing for Google to rank.
I designed and built a programmatic SEO system that generated thousands of destination hub pages with structured data, curated content, and a hierarchical internal linking structure.
+60% organic traffic within nine months of launch
3,000+ new keywords ranked for location-based outdoor search terms
Problems
Missing Long-Tail Keywords
SEMRush analysis showed we were losing to competitors for thousands of location-based searches like "hiking trails in Moab" or "backpacking Colorado." These searches had high intent but we weren't ranking.
Structured Data Gap
Adventures lacked proper schema markup for rich snippets. Google couldn't understand our content structure well enough to show enhanced results with ratings, difficulty, or location details.
Manual Scaling Impossible
Creating and maintaining destination pages manually for thousands of locations, activities, and combinations was infeasible. We needed a system that generated pages programmatically.
Approach
I started with keyword research using SEMRush to identify high-volume outdoor search terms by location. The patterns were clear: "best hikes near Denver," "camping in Rocky Mountain National Park," "backpacking Colorado." We weren't ranking for any of them despite having dozens of relevant trip reports. I built a taxonomy of destinations (cities, national parks, regions), and activities we already had in the system.
Solution
The programmatic SEO system automatically generated thousands of optimized destination hub pages for every major outdoor destination: national parks, cities, and regions, filtered by activity type. URLs followed clean patterns like /hiking/colorado/denver, making both the structure and purpose immediately clear.
Country
The top of the hierarchy. A country page aggregates all states and regions below it, capturing broad searches like 'hiking in the United States.'
I partnered with our lead engineer to build a programmatic system that automatically generated optimized destination pages if they met content thresholds. The state and city landing page templates pulled relevant adventures based on geolocation and activity types. Each page featured curated hero imagery and unique, contextual information about the destination.
The Schema markup enabled rich snippets showing ratings, difficulty, and trail stats directly in Google search results. Seeing "4.5 stars · Hard · 12 miles" right in search results improved click-through rates compared to plain text listings.
The entire system created a web of internal links connecting related destinations, activities, and trip reports. This semantic link network improved both user discovery (finding related hikes after viewing one) and search engine crawling depth.
Impacts
60% Organic Traffic Increase
Organic search traffic increased 60% within nine months of launching the destination hub system. Long-tail keywords drove the majority of growth.
Thousands of New Keywords
Gained rankings for 3,000+ location-based outdoor keywords we previously didn't rank for. Many reached top 3 positions for competitive terms.
Reflections
This project showed me that SEO isn't just about keywords. It's about information architecture. Building the right structures to surface existing content can have more impact than creating new content.
The hardest part was balancing programmatic efficiency with quality. We had to resist the temptation to generate pages for every possible combination. Setting quality thresholds protected us from thin content penalties while still scaling effectively.
If I could do it again, I'd invest more in monitoring individual page performance and automatically pruning underperforming combinations. Some generated pages never gained traction and could have been removed to focus link equity elsewhere.