Programmatic SEO is working for us, just not the pages I bet on

I went all in on programmatic SEO and I want to share what happened, because the results were not where I expected them.

First the part I got right. We track viral posts across TikTok, Instagram, X, Facebook, Pinterest, Bluesky, Mastodon, Douyin, Tumblr, Reddit and Hacker News, and every one of those posts has a timestamp, a community, a hashtag set and sometimes a song attached to it. I was sitting on all that and only using it inside the dashboard. So I started turning it into public pages.

Ten pages that answer "when should I post on X platform", built from when the posts that actually went viral were published, refreshed daily, in four languages. Pages for which subreddit performs best for a topic. Same for Bluesky communities. Top TikTok profiles, and here is the part Im proud of, not just the profile list but the hours those accounts publish at, because we can see the pattern across thousands of their posts. Trending hashtags so you know which ones to use this week and not last month. And the songs that are pushing reels and TikToks right now.

Im gonna say something that sounds arrogant and I dont mean it that way. For this specific category, I think our data is better than BuzzSumo. BuzzSumo tells you what got shared. SocialBlade tells you who the big accounts are. Neither one tells you what time those accounts posted, or which community it landed in, and that is the part you can actually act on tomorrow morning. Ive paid for BuzzSumo, Hootsuite, Buffer and SocialBee for years and none of them ever gave me that.

So the pages are working. Traffic is up 1k and the discovery pages, the data ones, are the ones bringing it.

Now the part that is not working. The buyer intent pages, the "best tool for X" type, are barely moving. And those are the ones I built expecting them to convert. Turns out the pages that bring people in are the ones where Im just giving data away, and the ones where Im asking for the sale are dead.

So Im changing the bet. Ive noticed the keywords that convert best for us are comparison ones, stuff like "buzzsumo vs ahrefs", so Im going hard on alternatives and comparison pages instead of buyer intent. If people are already shopping, I want to be in that conversation with real numbers instead of trying to create the intent myself.

Two things Im considering next and Id like input from people who have done it.

Paid ads. Ive never run PPC in a category where Hootsuite and Buffer are bidding. Is it suicide for a bootstrapper at my size, or is there a corner of it that works if you go narrow enough on long tail?

Directories. Im sure I have a good product and almost nobody knows it exists. Which directories are actually worth the effort in 2026 and which ones are just a backlink you pay for? Im looking for the ones that send real signups, not the ones that send a spike and nothing after.

Currently at $84 MRR. Still a long way from the 5K that lets me stop freelancing, but the traffic side finally has a direction.