How programmatic SEO rebuilt a national city-page engine

Poplin's growth depends on a programmatic set of city pages, one for each city it serves. When we came in, that engine was stalling. Organic traffic from the city pages was declining, and the underlying reasons were technical rather than editorial.

On top of the indexing problems, most of roughly 70,000 crawl requests over 90 days were being spent on subdomains, including non-production and staging environments, instead of the pages that actually needed to rank. A compromised install on one subdomain was even serving spam content under the brand's domain. There was also no tracking in place, so nobody could measure city page traffic, CTA clicks, or the orders those pages were generating.

The city page system is now live at scale. More than 1,500 city pages are published and indexed, and because the pipeline is fully dynamic, new pages get indexed as they ship. Across those pages, Search Console and Looker Studio show 43,004 distinct query to landing page combinations, with many city pages ranking in the top positions for high-intent local searches.

Before this engagement nobody could see what the city pages were doing. With GA4, smartlink attribution and Looker Studio in place, the funnel is now measured end to end. The CTA click trend tells the clearest story: city page clicks grew from close to zero when tracking began in late April to a steady 80 to 100 per day by July, which shows the recovered pages are not just indexed but actively sending intent-driven users toward the app.