Introduction

A top-level overview of how programmatic content works in Byword

Programmatic content allows you to build Byword articles in exactly the way you want them, and connect them to your own data sources. This lets you build content at scale, with unparalleled control and customizability.

Programmatic content works slightly differently to regular Byword articles; it can take a little longer to understand and get set up with, but the reward is worth it. This section of the Byword docs will take you through everything you need to know.

Why is this so important?

With the continued rise of AI SEO article generators, there has been a levelling of the playing field. While all generators are different in their own ways, it’s become increasingly difficult to stand out from the crowd and creating compelling, unique content.

Many of Byword’s features have been built with the aim of letting you build more sophisticated, differentiated content (Internal Linking, CTAs, Custom Styles, the list goes on…). We felt however, that to let you build truly future-proof content, we needed to put as much control as possible in your hands. Your content should be as unique as your brand, and speak to your audience like only you know how to.

The high-level

This is where programmatic content comes in. In short, it allows you to build article templates out of a range of pre-defined (but highly customizable) blocks. You can build as many of these as you like, and experiment with different ways of crafting articles.

When you’re ready, you upload a dataset, connect it to the template, and Byword will begin generating articles in line with your template.

For example…

Let’s say you’re marketing an app that helps users book tables at restaurants, and you operate in every major city in the world. You might choose to build an article template centered around the title:

Best Restaurants in {city}

You’d build out your template, and then might choose to connect it to a simple dataset containing just a list of cities. If your dataset contained 100 rows, each with a different city (London, New York, Milan…), you’d end up with 100 articles, each focusing on the best restaurants in a different city.

At first this might not seem too different from the batch generator, but there are some key differences that we’ll explore in the following sections:

Custom article structures

Programmatic content lets you customize how you want your articles to be written. You can include tables, list sections, finely-tuned body sections. The possibilities are endless.

Custom data

Your dataset can be far more complex than just a list of cities. If you have proprietary data about each city, you can pass this into your template too and have Byword write articles from your data.

Long-form content

Programmatic articles are far more extensible than regular Byword articles, and can handle well over 5,000 words per article.

Ultimately this leaves you with articles that are completely unique, and which will stand the test of time in an ever-evolving SEO landscape.