with nearby states Typical costs for major expenses
like property, food, and healthcare Article about the cost of living in South Carolina These data points give us an idea of the type of information required to meet the searcher’s intent. Searchers want a way to quickly compare cost of living between states, and beyond that, to see how those costs break out across core categories. For your programmatic content, you should probably include these data points on every page. 3. Find relevant data Next, you need to source that data. There are three types of data you have at our disposal: Proprietary data: original data that is unique to you, your company, or your product. This is the most desirable data type: you can provide information no one else has. Public data: publicly
available data that is licensed for commercial use
. , but that means that other companies may be using it in a similar context. Scraped data: data extracted from websites using web scraping tools. This can be useful but may introduce issues with copyright. Looking at the search results for these keywords, many of the top-ranking articles contain data from the same public data source: the Cost of Living Index published by the Council for Community and Economic Research. It’s likely that you’ll be able to use this same data in your programmatic content. article published by the Council for Community and Economic Research If you want to go a step further, you could consider adding new data that other top-ranking articles don’t
have. Sites like Kaggle provide data sets for use in
training AI and machine learning models, but they can also provide extra data points for your content. Run a quick search for “cost of living” on Kaggle, and several useful data sets appear. You can order by age to find new data that other companies are unlikely to be using: search results on Kaggle Armed with your data sources, you can combine all of your desired data points together in a single place. 4. Build your pages Next, you need to map your data sources to relevant parts of your page. At this point, it would be helpful to enlist a web developer—but we’ll show a simplified example using Google Sheets as a basic
database. TIP Make a copy of our example
Google Sheets database here. In the Micronesia Email List first tab of the spreadsheet, we have our keyword data, which you can use to build page titles and URLs. In the next tab, we have our cost of living data. Ahrefs Programmatic Content Example Based on our intent analysis, we want each page to include three “buckets” of information: Cost of living score Comparison with other US states Breakdown of costs across key categories So in the third tab, we’ve created a formula that pulls relevant data from our
different sheets into a simple page template
. page formula SIDENOTE. If you aren’t very familiar with Google Sheets formulas, in the fourth tab we’ve included a ChatGPT prompt that can do this for you. This body copy correctly references data from the cost of living sheet, showing the cost of living score, ranking it relative to the other 49 states, determining whether a state is cheap, mid-priced, or expensive, and sharing cost indices across six major categories. If you add additional states to the list by dragging down the formula in column A, new URLs,
page titles, and body copy are automatically
generated. By combining your data sources with a single page template, you can create 50 different pages with the drag of a mouse. List of states Crucially, the content we’ve generated here is the definition of “thin”, containing lots of duplicated text and non-original data. But if you were to add unique data, create helpful data visualizations, and provide unique written context, then these pages might stand a fighting chance at helping readers and ranking for their target keywords. 5. Publish content to your website The final step is to publish your newly created content to your website. Depending on the content management system you use, there are a few no-code tools that can
