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Amol Ghemud Published: October 16, 2025
Summary
What: Failory’s programmatic SEO strategy, generating over 103,000 monthly organic visitors by focusing on long-tail keywords related to startup failures. Who: Entrepreneurs, startup enthusiasts, and SEO professionals looking to attract niche audiences through specialized, data-driven content. Why: The strategy demonstrates how targeting specific queries like “What happened to [startup name]” can effectively capture engaged audiences interested in real-world startup insights. How: By automating content creation for failure case studies and tailoring pages to niche search intents, Failory efficiently scales relevant content and strengthens its organic visibility.
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Failory programmatic SEO strategy effectively generates a wealth of niche content, driving significant organic traffic and establishing the platform as a valuable resource for entrepreneurs and startups.
Overview of Failory
Failory empowers entrepreneurs and startups by providing a comprehensive knowledge base of entrepreneurial ventures.
Their content portfolio encompasses insightful interviews with founders who navigated unsuccessful ventures, in-depth case studies dissecting business failures, and informative articles that address common pitfalls encountered by startups, along with strategies to mitigate them.
Additionally, Failory programmatic seo offers a robust startup failure database, enabling users to conduct targeted searches based on industry, location, and other relevant criteria.
A brief overview of Failory’s programmatic SEO strategy
Failory’s programmatic SEO strategy hinges on generating a large volume of content targeting long-tail keywords. Here’s a breakdown:
Head Term Selection: They identify a relevant head term, like “pitch deck.”
Long-Tail Keyword Generation: They create variations of the head term by combining it with specific industries or categories (e.g., “pitch deck + Big Food Startups”).
Data Automation: They leverage automation to gather relevant data for each long-tail keyword (e.g., startup names, brief descriptions).
Content Creation at Scale: They utilize automation to build targeted landing pages for each long-tail keyword variation, populated with the collected data.
This approach allows Failory to capture organic traffic from users searching for niche information within a broader topic. It’s important to note that while effective, programmatic SEO requires ongoing maintenance and quality control to ensure content remains relevant and valuable to users.
Segregation of traffic numbers behind Failory’s programmatic SEO strategy
Direct: 20.45% (78k)
Organic Search: 76.35% (291.2k)
A high percentage (76.35%) of organic search traffic signifies Failory’s success in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Here’s why:
Organic traffic is typically considered high-quality traffic: These visitors are actively searching for information Failory provides, indicating a strong interest in the content.
It demonstrates strong brand awareness: A significant portion of users directly typing the URL suggests Failory has established a strong brand in the startup and entrepreneur space. People know Failory is a valuable resource.
It signifies long-term value: Organic traffic is often sustainable and can grow over time with continued SEO efforts.
Combined, this traffic distribution shows Failory attracts a large audience interested in their content, both through established brand awareness and strong search engine presence.
A Deep Dive into the Structure of Failory Pages/Section
Here is a deep dive into Failory Programmatic SEO. Failory leverages programmatic SEO techniques to achieve significant organic traffic. Let’s delve into their case study to explore how they’ve implemented this strategy.
Startup cemetery Pages
Failory curates an informative section dedicated to defunct startups often called the “startup cemetery.” This section leverages programmatic content generation understanding of SEO strategy to create informational blog-style pages for each defunct startup.
To illustrate the effectiveness of this approach, let’s explore some examples and analyze their estimated monthly organic traffic:
Example page
Monthly organic traffic
What happened to Justin.tv
1.4k
What happened to Vine
2.7k
What happened to Toys R Us
6.5k
Data Points
A few data points that Failory uses on these programmatically generated pages are:
The name and a short description of the startup
Some general information about the startup
Some details about founders and employees
Detailed information about what the app is and how it shut down
Some more startpus that got closed
More Cemetery Posts
Startups Directory Pages
Failory employs a targeted content strategy by leveraging programmatic generation for their startup directory. This section focuses on informative content categorized by {category}, with each entry resembling a blog post format.
Let’s delve into some specific examples within this directory and explore their associated monthly organic traffic figures
Example page
Monthly organic traffic
Sports startups
135
Software startups
175
Food and beverage startups
295
Data Points
Failory’s programmatically generated pages incorporate various data points, such as…:
CTA
A descriptive title of the topic
A list of all the startups in the category
A short description of all startups
A screenshot of all their websites
Some general details about all startups
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Key Takeaways
Failory focuses on generating content that targets long-tail keywords by combining head terms with specific industries or categories, capturing niche search queries effectively.
With 76.35% of traffic coming from organic search, Failory’s programmatic SEO strategy demonstrates strong SEO performance, attracting users actively seeking information about startups and entrepreneurial ventures.
Failory leverages automation to gather relevant data and create a large volume of targeted landing pages, ensuring comprehensive coverage of various topics related to startup failures and entrepreneurial insights.
The mix of direct (20.45%) and organic search traffic indicates strong brand recognition and a successful understanding of SEO strategy, showing that Failory attracts both returning visitors and new users through search engines.
Failory’s Lesson to Success Pipeline SEO
Failory’s traffic is generated by programmatically turning documented startup failures into actionable lessons for a broad audience of founders.
1. FAILURE CASE STUDY PAGES
Targeting specific startup names and industries that failed, with long-tail keywords (e.g., ‘Why Did [Startup Name] Fail’).
2. FAILURE REASON CATEGORIZATION
Programmatically grouping stories by theme or cause of failure (e.g., ‘Startups that Failed due to Marketing’).
3. LESSONS LEARNED & ADVICE PAGES
High-value content pages extracting advice based on the aggregated data (e.g., ‘Top 10 Growth Lessons from Failed SaaS’).
1. What types of pages does Failory create using programmatic SEO?
Failory creates pages targeting long-tail keywords related to startup failures and lessons learned. These include detailed case studies, “Startup Cemetery” pages, and specific queries like “What happened to [startup name].” These pages are designed to attract niche audiences seeking insights into failed startups.
2. How do ‘Startup Cemetery’ pages contribute to Failory’s traffic?
Startup Cemetery’ pages are a significant traffic driver for Failory, as they provide detailed post-mortems of failed startups. These pages attract users interested in understanding the reasons behind startup failures and learning from those experiences. Their in-depth content helps capture high-intent organic search traffic.
3. What demonstrates the effectiveness of Failory’s programmatic SEO efforts?
The effectiveness of Failory’s programmatic SEO efforts is demonstrated by their impressive 103k monthly organic traffic. High rankings for niche keywords related to startup failures indicate successful SEO strategies. This organic traffic reflects the site’s ability to attract and engage a dedicated readership.
4.How does Failory balance direct and organic traffic sources?
Failory balances direct and organic traffic sources by maintaining strong brand recognition while optimising for search engines. Their well-researched and regularly updated content draws new visitors through organic search, while loyal users return directly for valuable insights on startup failures. This dual approach ensures a steady flow of both new and returning users.
5. What specific examples of successful SEO pages does Failory have, and what traffic do they generate?
Specific examples of successful SEO pages on Failory include detailed case studies of failed startups and “Startup Cemetery” entries. These pages generate substantial organic traffic by targeting long-tail keywords and providing valuable, niche content. Each successful page can attract thousands of visitors monthly, showcasing the effectiveness of its programmatic SEO strategy.
Programmatic SEO is a method of creating targeted landing pages at scale by using data and automation, allowing a platform to efficiently answer thousands of specific user queries. For a site like Failory, this strategy is powerful because it directly addresses the long-tail searches common among entrepreneurs looking for highly specific case studies or examples that a traditional content strategy would miss.
The model's effectiveness stems from its systematic approach to content generation. Instead of manually writing a few broad articles, programmatic SEO creates a vast library of focused content pages. This is achieved through a repeatable process:
Identify Head Terms: Begin with a broad, high-interest topic relevant to your audience, such as "startup failure" or "pitch deck."
Generate Keyword Variations: Combine the head term with specific modifiers from a database. This creates thousands of long-tail keywords like "{industry} startups" or "what happened to {startup name}."
Automate Page Creation: Use a template to automatically generate a unique page for each keyword variation, populating it with structured data. This is how Failory has managed to get 4.9k pages indexed.
By targeting these specific, lower-competition keywords, you attract a highly motivated audience whose needs are precisely met. The strategy's success is reflected in their impressive 76.35% organic search traffic. To see how this granular approach builds a powerful content moat, explore the full analysis.
The "startup cemetery" is a content hub where Failory programmatically creates an informational page for each notable startup that has failed. This approach transforms a database of defunct companies into a massive library of SEO-optimized content, systematically targeting thousands of long-tail search queries that individuals research when studying business history or market trends.
This strategy is built on a simple yet effective programmatic formula. It deconstructs a user's query into a repeatable page structure that can be generated at scale. For example, the page for "What happened to Justin.tv" which attracts 1.4k monthly visits, likely follows a consistent template used for all other failed startups. Key components include:
A unique page for each specific query (e.g., "what happened to {startup}").
Automated population of key data points like founding date, funding, and reasons for failure.
Internal linking to related startups or industries to build topical authority.
This method allows Failory to rank for thousands of highly specific searches, contributing significantly to its overall 291.2k monthly organic visitors. The full case study reveals how this structured data approach is a cornerstone of their traffic acquisition model.
The primary trade-off is between scale and depth; programmatic SEO excels at covering thousands of topics with good-enough content, while a traditional blog focuses on creating deep, authoritative articles on a few topics. A publisher must weigh the need for broad, long-tail keyword coverage against the desire for thought leadership on core subjects. Failory chose scale to build a comprehensive resource, evidenced by its 4.9k indexed pages.
Choosing the right model depends on your specific goals and resources. A programmatic approach is ideal for data-rich niches, whereas a traditional blog suits expertise-driven fields. Consider these factors:
Content Scalability: Programmatic SEO allows for exponential content growth with minimal human effort per page. A traditional blog is resource-intensive and scales linearly.
Keyword Targeting:Failory's method captures immense long-tail traffic (76.35% of visitors come from organic search), while a blog typically targets higher-volume head and body terms.
Initial Investment: Programmatic requires a significant upfront investment in data sourcing and development. A blog requires sustained investment in expert writers and editors.
Content Quality Control: Maintaining quality is a key challenge in programmatic SEO, requiring ongoing technical oversight. Traditional blogs offer easier quality control but at a much smaller scale.
Your decision should align with your market's search behavior and your capacity for technical implementation versus expert content creation. The full article provides more detail on how to assess this strategic choice.
A 76.35% share of traffic from organic search is a clear indicator that Failory's programmatic SEO model is exceptionally effective at meeting user intent at scale. It demonstrates that the platform is not reliant on paid channels or fleeting social media trends, but has built a sustainable engine for attracting a highly relevant audience actively seeking information on startup failures and business strategy.
This high organic percentage validates their strategy in several ways. It proves that search engines view their thousands of automated pages as valuable resources for specific, long-tail queries. This success can be attributed to:
Market-Wide Coverage: By creating pages for countless defunct startups like Justin.tv, they blanket a niche with useful, structured information, leaving few gaps for competitors.
High-Quality Audience: These 291.2k monthly organic visitors are not casual browsers; they are actively researching, indicating a higher potential for engagement and brand loyalty.
Compounding Value: Unlike paid campaigns, this organic footprint grows over time as pages gain authority and new pages are added, creating a formidable competitive moat.
This traffic distribution is a testament to a well-executed strategy where automated content generation successfully translates into tangible brand authority and market presence. Discover more about the metrics behind their growth in the complete case study.
These templated pages are the engine of Failory's programmatic SEO strategy, enabling them to create thousands of unique, keyword-targeted assets from a single, structured design. By using a consistent format for each defunct startup, they can automate the content creation process, ensuring each page is optimized for search engines and provides clear value to users looking for specific information.
This approach works because it perfectly aligns content structure with user search intent. Each page acts as a direct answer to a very specific question, boosting its relevance for long-tail search queries. The contribution of this templated model to their growth is multifaceted:
Rapid Indexation: A consistent structure helps Google crawl and understand the content on their 4.9k pages efficiently, leading to faster and more complete indexation.
Targeted Traffic: A page like "What happened to Justin.tv" attracts users with high intent, which is more valuable than general traffic. It's a key reason why their organic traffic totals 291.2k visitors.
Internal Linking Opportunities: The template can systematically include links to related categories (e.g., "software startups") or other failed companies, strengthening the site's overall topical authority.
This repeatable structure is the key to scaling content production without sacrificing SEO performance or user experience. The full article breaks down the anatomy of these pages to show how they are constructed for maximum impact.
This traffic distribution indicates a powerful synergy between excellent search visibility and strong brand recognition. The high organic search percentage (76.35%) shows that Failory effectively captures new users through search engines, while the significant direct traffic (20.45% or 78k visitors) proves that a large portion of its audience is returning directly to the site, viewing it as a trusted, go-to resource.
The balance between these two channels signals a mature and sustainable content model. It suggests that users initially discover Failory through a specific search query and, finding the content valuable, later return by typing the URL directly. This creates a virtuous cycle:
Organic Search as an Acquisition Engine: The programmatic SEO strategy continuously feeds the top of the funnel with new, relevant users.
Direct Traffic as a Loyalty Indicator: The high volume of direct visits confirms that the content delivers on its promise, fostering brand recall and establishing authority.
Reduced Marketing Dependency: With nearly 97% of its traffic coming from these two unpaid channels, Failory demonstrates a highly efficient and defensible market position.
This blend is the hallmark of a successful content-driven brand that has not only mastered SEO but also built a loyal community. A deeper look into their journey shows how these two traffic sources reinforce one another.
To replicate Failory's success, a new media company must adopt a systematic, data-first approach to content creation. The process begins with identifying a niche where a large volume of structured data is available and user search queries follow predictable patterns, which is the foundation for scaling content programmatically.
Implementing this strategy requires careful planning and technical execution. The goal is to build a repeatable system that can turn a database into thousands of search-optimized pages with minimal manual intervention. The essential first steps are:
Identify a Core 'Head Term' and Modifiers: Choose a broad topic central to your niche, just as Failory uses terms like "startups." Then, identify categories or modifiers you can combine with it, like industries, locations, or years.
Source and Structure Your Data: Gather the data needed to populate your pages. This could be from public APIs, web scraping, or internal databases. The key is to have clean, structured information for each page variation.
Design a Page Template: Create a flexible but consistent template for your programmatic pages. This should include placeholders for your structured data, such as titles, descriptions, and key facts.
Develop the Automation Engine: Build or use software to programmatically generate a unique URL and HTML page for every combination of your head term and modifiers, populating the template with the corresponding data. This is how Failory grew to 4.9k indexed pages.
Starting with a small, manageable dataset allows you to test and refine your process before scaling up to cover your entire niche. The detailed guide explains the technical considerations at each stage of this implementation.
A platform can build its own "startup cemetery" by systematically identifying a data source of failed startups and creating a repeatable template to display that information. The strategy's success hinges on the quality of the data and the thoughtful design of the page template to ensure each generated page is genuinely useful to a researcher.
This project is more about data management and templating than traditional writing. The core task is to transform raw data about failed companies into a structured, user-friendly, and SEO-optimized format. Here is a step-by-step plan:
Acquire a Dataset of Failed Startups: Identify reliable sources for this information. This could be databases like Crunchbase, news archives, or public business registries. The goal is to collect names, industries, founding dates, funding amounts, and reasons for failure.
Define Your Keyword Modifiers: Decide on the long-tail variations you will target. Like Failory, you could use formats such as "What happened to {Startup Name}" or "{Industry} startup failures."
Structure the Data in a Database: Organize the collected information with clear fields (e.g., `company_name`, `industry`, `failure_reason`). This structured data is the fuel for your automation.
Create a Master Page Template: Design a single page layout that will be used for all entries. It should include dynamic fields that pull from your database to populate the title, headings, and body content for each specific startup.
Automate Page Generation: Use scripts to generate a unique webpage for each entry in your database, ensuring that each has a clean URL and is included in your sitemap for indexation. This scalable approach can help you quickly grow beyond 4.9k pages.
Begin with a small batch of companies to validate the process and user engagement before expanding. The full guide offers technical advice on choosing the right tools for this type of project.
The primary long-term risk of a heavily programmatic SEO strategy is a potential vulnerability to Google's algorithm updates, particularly those targeting content quality and user experience. If search engines perceive the automated pages as thin or formulaic, a site like Failory could face penalties or a significant drop in its 291.2k monthly organic visitors.
To mitigate this, the strategy must evolve from pure scale to 'scale with quality.' The focus must shift from simply generating pages to programmatically creating the best possible answer for each long-tail query. Future adjustments should include:
Enhancing Data Uniqueness: Instead of just displaying basic data, they could incorporate unique analysis, user-generated content, or proprietary data visualizations to make each page more valuable than competitors'.
Improving Page Experience: Investing in site speed, mobile usability, and interactive elements on the template pages will be crucial as these become stronger ranking factors.
Incorporating Manual Curation: A hybrid approach, where the most important programmatic pages (like the one for Justin.tv) are manually reviewed and enriched with deeper insights, could protect and boost their rankings.
Sustained success will depend on their ability to continuously add layers of value on top of their automated foundation, ensuring the content remains genuinely helpful. The full analysis explores how to future-proof a programmatic SEO strategy against these risks.
Failory's success implies that for data-rich niches, the future of content creation lies in treating information as a structured asset to be deployed at scale, rather than just a series of artisanal articles. Their model demonstrates that a publisher can achieve market dominance not by writing the single best article on a topic, but by programmatically providing a good answer for every conceivable variation of a user's query.
This signals a strategic shift from content creation to content engineering. Publishers in fields like finance, e-commerce, or local services should view their databases as the core of their content strategy. The implications are significant:
The Rise of the Content Engineer: Roles that blend SEO, data analysis, and development skills will become more critical for publishers aiming for scalable growth.
Databases as Content Moats: A proprietary or well-curated database, like Failory's list of defunct startups, becomes a key competitive advantage that is difficult for others to replicate.
A Focus on User Intent Granularity: Success will depend on the ability to understand and match content to thousands of specific long-tail intents, a task where automation far surpasses manual efforts. For instance, their 4.9k indexed pages cover a vast range of specific queries.
For publishers in the right niches, this approach offers a path to build authoritative, high-traffic sites with an efficiency traditional content models cannot match. The full article explores which industries are best suited for this strategic shift.
Failory avoids the 'thin content' pitfall by ensuring each programmatically generated page is more than just a keyword-stuffed stub; it's a well-structured and informative resource. Their pages succeed by transforming raw data into a useful summary that directly answers the user's specific query, which is a key principle for maintaining quality in automated content.
They achieve this by focusing on utility and structure rather than lengthy prose. The value is delivered through clarity and data organization, not narrative storytelling. To ensure their content is perceived as valuable, their templates likely include:
Structured Data Presentation: Key facts such as founding year, industry, and reason for failure are presented clearly, making the information easy to digest. This is crucial for pages like the one on Justin.tv.
Contextual Internal Linking: Pages probably link to broader categories (e.g., "Software startups") or related failed startups, guiding users to more relevant information and building topical authority for the site.
Consistent and Clean User Interface: A professional, predictable layout across all 4.9k pages helps build user trust and ensures a positive page experience, which is a significant quality signal for search engines.
By focusing on delivering specific, well-organized data within a high-quality user experience, Failory's programmatic pages successfully serve user intent. The full case study examines their page layout in more detail to highlight these quality elements.
Failory's method of combining broad head terms with specific modifiers is a smart solution to the keyword selection problem because it systematically targets long-tail queries with clear user intent. Instead of guessing which keywords might work, this approach builds a comprehensive map of relevant search terms, ensuring they capture traffic from users at various stages of their research.
This strategy is effective because it is based on predictable search patterns. It acknowledges that users often refine broad searches with specific details, and it programmatically creates a page to meet that refined need. Here's how this solves the keyword targeting issue:
Built-in Relevance: Combining "pitch deck" with "Big Food Startups" creates a highly relevant long-tail keyword. Anyone searching for this is a high-intent user, making the traffic more valuable.
Scalable Keyword Coverage: This method allows them to target thousands of keyword variations automatically, far more than could be researched and targeted manually. This scale contributes to their 291.2k monthly organic visitors.
Reduced Competition: Long-tail keywords generally have lower search volume but also face far less competition, making it easier for a platform like Failory to rank and win traffic.
By systematically generating these keyword combinations, they create a content strategy that is both comprehensive and precise. Explore the full breakdown to learn how to identify the right head terms and modifiers for your own niche.
Amol has helped catalyse business growth with his strategic & data-driven methodologies. With a decade of experience in the field of marketing, he has donned multiple hats, from channel optimization, data analytics and creative brand positioning to growth engineering and sales.
Growth Strategy and Planning
