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Amol Ghemud Published: October 16, 2025
Summary
What: An in-depth case study on how 99acres utilizes programmatic SEO (pSEO) to scale its organic traffic and strengthen brand visibility. Who: SEO professionals, digital marketers, and businesses seeking to understand scalable content strategies for large websites. Why: 99acres’ success showcases how automation and structured SEO techniques can drive millions of organic visitors and enhance search dominance. How: By dynamically generating localized pages, implementing structured data and rich snippets, and optimizing on-page elements for targeted real estate keywords.
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99acres programmatic SEO strategy focuses on dynamically generating highly optimized pages for search engines, allowing it to rank well for relevant real estate-related keywords and attract substantial organic traffic.
Overview of 99acres
99acres is a popular online real estate platform with 17.9 million monthly organic visitors. Their innovative programmatic SEO strategy primarily fuels this impressive traffic volume. With the help of a comprehensive property database and content optimised for search engines, 99acres has established itself as a reliable source for both real estate professionals and individual buyers/sellers.
A brief overview of 99acres’s programmatic SEO strategy
99acres’s programmatic SEO strategy focuses on dynamically generating highly optimised pages for search engines. This involves creating specific landing pages for different localities and property types, each designed to rank well for relevant keywords and attract organic traffic. Key components of their approach include:
Dynamically Generated Locality Pages: 99 acres creates dedicated pages for specific localities, neighbourhoods, and cities. These pages are dynamically generated and optimised with relevant keywords, such as “{Locality} Map, Property Rates, Projects, Reviews, Photos & Videos”.
Location-Specific Real Estate Pages: 99acres generates pages for real estate in specific locations, targeting queries like “Property in {Location}- Real Estate in {Location}”.
Structured Data and Rich Snippets: 99acres extensively utilise structured data markup to provide search engines with detailed information about properties, localities, and real estate-related data.
Comprehensive On-Page Optimization: Each dynamically generated page is optimized with relevant titles, meta descriptions, headings, and content to align with user search intent.
Segregation of traffic numbers behind 99acres’s programmatic SEO strategy
Direct: 73.3% (14M)
Organic Search: 24.01% (4.6M)
Direct Traffic: 73.3% (14M): The high percentage of direct traffic, at 73.3%, indicates strong brand recognition and loyalty among 99acres’ users. This suggests that users are familiar with the 99acres platform and tend to navigate directly to the site, rather than discovering it through search engines.
Organic Search Traffic: 24.01% (4.6M): Despite the dominant direct traffic, 99acres still manages to capture a significant portion of its traffic, 24.01%, from organic search. This demonstrates that the company’s programmatic SEO strategy is effective in helping the website rank for relevant real estate-related keywords, allowing it to attract new users through search engine results.
A Deep Dive into the Structure of 99acres Pages/Section
Locality Pages
Name of the Locality with Key Features
About the locality
Societies in the Location
Recommended Properties
Explore Nearby Landmarks Section with Navigational Map
Price section
Reviews and Recommendations
Similar Properties
New & Insights
FAQs
Location Real Estate Pages
List of the properties in the area with CTA and key details
Explore Section for the overall location
Menu with all helpful filters
FAQs
99acres’ Programmatic SEO Strategy Breakdown
Targeted Keyword Expansion: By implementing programmatic SEO, 99acres scales its content to capture long-tail and hyper-local keywords, ensuring broad search visibility across numerous property-related queries.
Advanced Structured Data: Structured data is employed strategically to enable rich snippets, enhancing their SERP presence and attracting more qualified clicks.
User-Centric Experience: Pages are designed with usability in mind, using detailed property descriptions, neighborhood insights, and interactive features to guide visitors toward conversions.
Scalability and Efficiency: Unlike traditional SEO, 99acres’ approach is highly scalable, enabling rapid content deployment across new and emerging locations.
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Watch Now: How 99acres Programmatic SEO Delivers 17.9M+ Monthly Organic Traffic
Key Takeaways
Dynamically Generated Locality Pages: 99acres creates pages for specific localities, neighborhoods, and cities, optimized with relevant keywords to attract organic traffic.
Location-Specific Real Estate Pages: Pages targeting specific locations help capture queries like “Property in {Location} – Real Estate in {Location}” effectively.
Structured Data and Rich Snippets: Extensive use of structured data markup provides detailed information to search engines, improving the visibility of property listings.
High Direct Traffic: 99acres benefits from strong brand recognition, with 73.3% of its traffic coming from direct visits, indicating user familiarity with the platform.
The 4 Pillars of Programmatic SEO
How giants like upGrowth.in and 99acres achieve massive scale.
1. DATA
Data Structuring 📊
**Crucial First Step:** Organize large datasets (location, price, features) into a database ready to power a million different query permutations.
2. DESIGN
Template Creation 📐
Design one high-quality, conversion-optimized page template with dynamic content slots ready for data injection.
3. BUILD
Page Generation ⚡
Automate the process: programmatically map structured data onto the template to instantly deploy thousands of unique, relevant pages.
4. SCALE
Scaling & Traffic 🚀
The result: Capture massive search volume from long-tail keywords, leading to exponential, sustained organic traffic growth.
99acres, a popular online real estate platform, utilizes a programmatic SEO (pSEO) strategy to drive significant organic traffic to its website. This strategy centers around dynamically generating optimized pages for specific localities and property types. By targeting relevant keywords related to real estate searches, 99acres effectively attracts a large volume of organic visitors interested in buying, selling, or researching properties.12
2. What are the Key Components of 99acres’s pSEO Approach?
99acres’s approach can be broken down into these key components:
Dynamically Generated Locality Pages: 99acres creates dedicated pages for specific localities, neighborhoods, and cities. These pages are dynamically generated and optimized with relevant keywords, such as “{Locality} Map, Property Rates, Projects, Reviews, Photos & Videos”. This allows users searching for information on a specific location to easily find detailed and relevant content on 99acres.34
Location-Specific Real Estate Pages: Targeting broader real estate searches, 99acres generates pages focusing on properties in specific locations. These pages are optimized for queries like “Property in {Location}- Real Estate in {Location}”, effectively capturing users looking for properties in a particular city or region.45
Structured Data and Rich Snippets: 99acres utilizes structured data markup to provide search engines with detailed information about properties, localities, and real estate-related data. This helps search engines understand the context of the content and present it more effectively in search results, potentially leading to higher click-through rates.5
Comprehensive On-Page Optimization: Each dynamically generated page is optimized with relevant titles, meta descriptions, headings, and content. This ensures that the page content aligns with user search intent and provides a good user experience, both of which are important for search engine rankings.5
3.How Effective is 99acres’s pSEO Strategy?
99acres’s strategic use of pSEO has resulted in impressive traffic numbers:
17.9M+ Monthly Organic Visitors: This demonstrates the effectiveness of their strategy in attracting a large volume of organic traffic.14
46M+ Pages Indexed on Google: This highlights the vast scale of 99acres’s content operation, with millions of pages indexed by Google, indicating a wide reach and coverage of real estate-related keywords.4
Organic Search Traffic (24.01%): Although direct traffic dominates, a significant portion of 99acres’s traffic comes from organic search, indicating that their pSEO strategy is successful in attracting new users through search engine results pages (SERPs).6
4. What is the Role of Direct Traffic for 99acres?
Direct Traffic (73.3%): The majority of traffic to 99acres comes directly, suggesting strong brand recognition and user loyalty. This means users are familiar with the platform and often choose to navigate directly to the website, rather than relying on search engines.6
5. What is the Structure of 99acres’s Locality and Real Estate Pages?
Locality Pages typically include:
Name of the Locality with Key Features
About the Locality
Societies in the Location
Recommended Properties
Explore Nearby Landmarks Section with Navigational Map
Price section
Reviews and Recommendations
Similar Properties
New & Insights
Glossary of Key Terms
Programmatic SEO (pSEO): An SEO strategy that leverages automation and large-scale data analysis to generate and optimize website pages, often targeting a vast number of keywords.
Dynamically Generated Pages: Web pages created and updated automatically based on pre-defined templates and data sets, allowing for efficient scaling of content and SEO efforts.
Locality Pages: Website pages specifically designed to target users searching for information related to a specific location, often including local keywords, maps, and relevant content.
Structured Data: Standardized data markup added to website code to provide search engines with clear and concise information about the content on the page, improving visibility and understanding.
Rich Snippets: Enhanced search results that display additional information extracted from structured data, such as ratings, reviews, and pricing, making listings more visually appealing and informative.
Direct Traffic: Website traffic generated when users directly enter the website address or click on a bookmark, indicating brand awareness and user loyalty.
Organic Search Traffic: Website traffic originating from users clicking on unpaid search engine results, highlighting the effectiveness of SEO efforts in driving relevant visitors.
Keyword: Words or phrases that users enter into search engines when looking for information online. Effective keyword research and targeting are crucial for successful SEO.
On-page Optimization: The practice of optimizing individual web pages to improve their search engine ranking and user experience, involving elements like title tags, headings, content, and internal linking.
Call to Action (CTA): A marketing term referring to any element on a webpage that encourages users to take a specific action, such as “Learn More,” “Contact Us,” or “Sign Up.”
For Curious Minds
99acres employs programmatic SEO to transform its vast property database into millions of highly specific, machine-generated landing pages. This strategy allows them to achieve massive scale and target niche, long-tail keywords that would be impossible to address manually, ensuring visibility for hyper-local searches. The core of this approach is creating structured page templates that dynamically pull in data. For example, a template like “{Locality} Map, Property Rates, Projects, Reviews” is automatically populated for thousands of different neighborhoods. This results in highly relevant pages for user queries, contributing to their 4.6M monthly organic search visitors. By systematically generating content for every locality and property type combination, they build a comprehensive search footprint that captures users at every stage of their property search journey. To see how these templates are structured for maximum impact, explore the full breakdown of their page elements.
The strategy's foundation is the automated creation of unique pages at scale, driven by structured data and predefined templates. For a listings platform like 99acres, where inventory is vast and location-specific, this model is ideal because it systematically covers a massive keyword landscape without manual content creation for each listing or area. This approach turns a database into a powerful SEO asset. The key principles include:
Keyword-Driven Templates: Creating page shells for queries like “Property in {Location}” and “{Locality} Reviews”.
Dynamic Data Integration: Populating these templates with specific data points like property rates, maps, and photos.
Internal Linking: Building a strong site architecture that connects related locality and property pages.
This system is what allows them to manage over 46M+ indexed pages effectively, turning each data point into a potential search entry point. Understanding these principles is the first step to applying them to your own large-scale content challenges.
A manual strategy offers deep, high-quality content but fails at scale, while programmatic SEO excels at covering a vast number of specific, long-tail keywords automatically. The primary trade-off is between bespoke quality and massive reach; 99acres chooses reach to capture a market of millions of specific searches. You must weigh the value of a few high-traffic articles against thousands of hyper-targeted landing pages. Consider these factors:
Scalability: Manual is linear and slow; programmatic is exponential, allowing for the creation of 46M+ pages.
Keyword Targeting: Manual focuses on broad head terms; programmatic targets hyper-local and long-tail queries like “Property in Jaipur” with precision.
Resources: Manual requires a large team of writers; programmatic requires engineers and SEO strategists to build and maintain the system.
For platforms with large, structured datasets, the programmatic approach delivers a far greater return on investment by meeting specific user intent at an unmatched scale. Discover how 99acres structures its data to make this a winning formula.
The success of 99acres is clearly demonstrated by its highly structured and repeatable page templates that directly answer specific user queries. These templates are not just placeholders; they are carefully designed ecosystems of information that serve distinct search needs, attracting a significant portion of their 4.6M monthly organic visitors. The evidence lies in how these pages are built to satisfy intent immediately. Two prime examples are:
The Locality Template: Pages titled “{Locality} Map, Property Rates, Projects, Reviews, Photos & Videos” cater to users in the research phase, providing a comprehensive overview of a neighborhood.
The Property Search Template: Pages like “Property in {Location} - Real Estate in {Location}” target users with higher purchase intent who are ready to browse listings.
By creating these distinct page types programmatically, 99acres effectively segments and serves its audience, proving that a templated approach can be both scalable and user-centric. A closer look at their page anatomy reveals more about this strategic design.
While high direct traffic shows strong brand loyalty, the programmatic SEO strategy is the engine for sustainable growth and new audience capture. The 24.01% of traffic from organic search, amounting to 4.6 million monthly visitors, represents users who did not know 99acres by name but found it by searching for specific needs like “real estate in Mumbai.” This channel is crucial for filling the top of the funnel and building future brand recall. Organic search serves as the primary discovery mechanism, introducing the brand to potential customers who then convert into loyal, direct-traffic users over time. Without this programmatic reach, 99acres' growth would stagnate, relying only on its existing user base. The strategy ensures a constant inflow of new prospects, making it a critical pillar for long-term market dominance. Delve deeper to see how this symbiotic relationship between direct and organic traffic is engineered.
The multi-section layout of a 99acres locality page is a masterclass in on-page SEO and satisfying user intent completely. Each section, from the “About the locality” description to the “Explore Nearby Landmarks” map, is designed not only to help the user but also to provide search engines with rich, structured context about that specific location. This deep content structure signals expertise and authority to Google. The structured data markup behind these sections helps generate rich snippets in search results, boosting click-through rates. For example, embedding reviews and property rates directly on the page provides specific data points that search engines can verify and display. This comprehensive approach, repeated across millions of pages, is a key driver of their 17.9 million total monthly visitors and demonstrates a strategy built on depth, not just breadth.
The first step is to treat your database not just as a repository but as a structured content engine. For a real estate platform, this means meticulously organizing data around entities like cities, localities, projects, and property types, as this forms the backbone for page generation, mirroring the approach of 99acres. Your goal is to create a clear hierarchy that can be programmatically assembled into useful pages. A practical implementation plan would look like this:
Audit and Structure Your Data: Ensure every property has clean, associated data for location, price, amenities, and nearby landmarks.
Identify Head and Modifier Keywords: Determine your primary entities (e.g., “property”) and the modifiers users search with (e.g., “in Gurgaon,” “rates,” “reviews”).
Design Core Page Templates: Create templates for key user intents, such as a “Locality Overview” page and a “Property Listings” page, similar to the models used by 99acres to index over 46M+ pages.
This foundational work is critical before any code is written, as it defines the scope and potential of your programmatic SEO efforts. The full article provides more detail on designing these templates for search success.
The principles are universally applicable to any business with a structured database, whether it's for cars, jobs, or products. The core idea is to identify the entities and attributes within your data and use them to create templated pages that answer specific user queries at scale, just as 99acres does for real estate. The key is to think like your user and deconstruct their search patterns into repeatable templates. To adapt the strategy:
Identify Your Core Entities: Instead of “localities,” this might be “car models,” “job titles,” or “product categories.”
Determine Search Modifiers: Users search for “{Car Model} reviews,” “{Job Title} salary in {City},” or “{Product} vs {Competitor}.”
Build Rich Templates: Create pages that combine these elements with unique data like specs, user reviews, pricing, and FAQs.
By applying this framework, you can programmatically generate thousands of high-intent pages, aiming for the kind of growth that brings 99acres4.6M organic visitors monthly.
To stay ahead, programmatic SEO must evolve from simply generating pages to creating rich, dynamic experiences. While the current template-based model of 99acres is effective, future-proofing the strategy involves incorporating more unique data layers and user-generated content to avoid being flagged as thin or repetitive content by advanced algorithms. The focus will shift from page quantity to programmatic quality and utility. Key evolutionary steps include:
Integrating Unique Data Visualizations: Programmatically creating charts for price trends or interactive maps of nearby amenities.
Incorporating User-Generated Content: Dynamically pulling in relevant user reviews and photos for specific localities.
Leveraging AI for Content Snippets: Using generative AI to create unique summaries about neighborhoods based on structured data points.
Even with 4.6M organic visitors, a platform like 99acres must continuously enhance its generated pages to deepen user engagement and signal quality to search engines. Explore the article for more on future-proofing your pSEO strategy.
This traffic distribution suggests a powerful two-stage user journey where programmatic SEO acts as the initial point of discovery, and direct traffic reflects retention and loyalty. Users first find 99acres through a specific, long-tail organic search; once they have a positive experience, they remember the name and return directly for future needs. Essentially, pSEO is the acquisition engine that builds the brand recognition driving direct traffic. The 4.6M organic visitors are not just a one-time metric; they represent a continuous stream of new users being introduced to the 99acres brand. Over time, a successful pSEO strategy does more than just capture traffic; it builds a market-leading brand that becomes the default, go-to destination in its category. Understanding this lifecycle is key to appreciating the full return on a programmatic investment.
The most common mistake is creating vast numbers of low-value, “thin” content pages that are nearly identical, which search engines can penalize. 99acres avoids this by ensuring each programmatically generated page is rich with distinct and useful information, providing genuine value beyond a simple keyword match. Their success comes from layering multiple, unique data types onto each template. Instead of just listing a locality name, they solve the user's problem by including:
Comprehensive locality details and “About” sections.
Lists of societies and recommended properties in that specific area.
An interactive map with nearby landmarks.
Price trends, user reviews, and FAQs.
By enriching each page with this varied content, 99acres ensures their 46M+ indexed pages are seen as valuable resources, not spam. This focus on utility is the key differentiator between successful and failed programmatic SEO campaigns.
Targeted keyword expansion is the process of systematically creating pages to rank for thousands of highly specific, low-volume search queries, also known as long-tail keywords. 99acres achieves this by combining database entries (like “Samaspur, Gurgaon”) with search modifiers (like “property rates” or “reviews”) to automatically generate landing pages that perfectly match these niche queries. This is a strategy of winning by a thousand small cuts rather than one big blow. The real estate market is driven by hyper-specific needs; users are not just searching for “property,” but for “3 BHK flat near metro in Awadhpuri.” By programmatically creating pages for countless combinations, 99acres captures a cumulative traffic of 4.6M organic visitors who have very clear intent, leading to higher conversion rates. The full analysis shows just how granular this targeting can become.
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
