Airtable + Make.com for Programmatic SEO

Published on 06/21/23 by Billy Howell

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I’ve been learning PSEO for 7 days now. If you missed part 1 of this series, I currently have two websites up and running:

These are two topics I know I can generate lots of content ideas about, which is key for this type of website.

Current Stack

Database — Airtable $10/month
Automations — Make.com $10.59/month
Front end + hosting — Softr.io $59/month
Image creation — Midjourney $10/month
Image + text automation — RenderForm $9/month

Under the Hood

Airtable does most of the heavy lifting. This is where all the blog and SEO content is stored. Once the content is generated by OpenAI I just hit publish and it’s beamed to the blog via softr.io.

idea generator dashboar

Airtable is a beast

Using make.com and my OpenAI credentials I watch for new records in the Airtable base (like a row in an excel spreadsheet). Then, if the idea field is empty Make tells OpenAI to generate a blog idea for me to review.

I can also write my own ideas in the idea field. OpenAI then reads the blog idea and writes the full blog, a blog title and can even generate a blog image.

make.com screenshot

Make.com is like Zapier on steroids

I’ve even set up easy to use interfaces in Airtable for quickly reviewing content that’s in different stages of development. If I don’t like an article or want something added, I can leave editor notes and send it back to OpenAI to edit.

What’s neat is that OpenAI has an “edit” function now that’s specifically for editting text, not just regenerating it with new instructions.

10minutecmo editor sceenshot

Custom Airtable editting view

Finally, since OpenAI tends to generate scary hero images, I have another automation set up in Make.com to tell RenderForm to make a titelcard with and image generated from Midjourney.

idea generator dashboar

Midjourney really is amazing

Quick note on Softr

It’s great for 0 to 1 but I’m not sure if the way it does internal linking and slugs is ideal for SEO. AHREFs seems to think Google can’t read any H1s or most of the content.

We will see what Google says. I almost panic switched everything to Webflow but then saw Google Search Began to index pages so, we will see…

I cannot understate how great Softr is for syncing with Airtable. It is truly frustrating trying to sync Airtable with Webflow or Bubble.

Onwards

I will continue to update my SEO and monetization results here (boy I really should set up a personal blog site). I love open-source static generated blogs like Astro and Jekyll so maybe I’ll try to start a PSEO blog with them and compare.

I’m also starting a Pickleball Blog with the same stack since it only costs $13 more per month per website.

And here’s part one of my PSEO journey if you haven’t read it!