Scaling Occupation-Specific Career Paths

Teal’s organic growth strategy had been primarily driven by editorial content — manually written blog posts targeting competitive keywords in the career advice space. While effective, this approach was inherently limited by the team’s production capacity.

Meanwhile, a massive opportunity existed in long-tail search: tens of thousands of occupation-specific queries that job seekers were searching for but finding inadequate results. Queries like “how to transition from teaching to UX design” or “data analyst career path and salary progression.”

Matt was brought in to design and build a programmatic content system that could capture this long-tail opportunity at scale.

Programmatic SEO has a well-deserved reputation problem. Too many implementations produce thin, low-quality pages that add noise rather than value to the web. Google’s helpful content updates had made it increasingly risky to pursue programmatic approaches without genuine value differentiation.

The challenge was to build a system that produced pages genuinely more useful than anything existing in search results — pages that combined structured data with narrative context, real salary information with practical transition advice.

There was also a data challenge. Creating thousands of occupation-specific pages required reliable data sources for salaries, skills, job market trends, and career transition pathways that could be programmatically accessed and formatted.

The solution combined multiple data sources with intelligent templating to create pages that felt individually crafted rather than mass-produced. Each career path page included salary ranges from BLS data, required skills mapped from job posting analysis, common career transitions based on actual career trajectory data, and day-in-the-life descriptions synthesized from professional profiles.

The template system was designed with progressive enhancement — a strong structural foundation that could be enriched with additional data as it became available. Pages launched with core information and were automatically updated as new data sources were integrated.

Internal linking was treated as a first-class concern. Each page connected to related occupations, relevant Teal tools, and editorial content, creating a web of interlinked resources that strengthened the entire domain’s authority.

The results were transformative. Organic traffic increased by 312% within six months of launching the career path pages. The pages captured thousands of previously untapped long-tail keywords, many achieving first-page rankings within weeks.

The email subscriber list grew by 89,000 through career path page CTAs, as users signed up to receive personalized career transition guides and salary alerts for their target occupations.

Perhaps most importantly, the pages became Teal’s strongest top-of-funnel asset. Users who entered through career path pages had higher engagement rates and faster time-to-activation than those from traditional blog content.

Programmatic SEO works when you prioritize genuine utility over keyword coverage. Every page needs to answer the question: “Is this more useful than what currently exists?” If the answer is no, the page shouldn’t exist.

The internal linking architecture proved just as important as the pages themselves. Individual pages are commodities; an interconnected information architecture is a moat.

Data quality compounds over time. The initial launch used available data sources; six months later, the pages were significantly richer because the system was designed to incorporate new data without rebuilding existing pages.