17:51Caleb Ulku · Tutorial
TRAIN Any AI To Recommend You (This Study Proves How)
How an Anthropic study on 250 documents becoming part of AI memory became a local-business content strategy.
June 12thThe argument in one line.
Vibe-coded local SEO works right now in low-competition niches against stale competitors, but the same moves fail in real metro markets because the fundamentals — entity alignment, GBP structure, rank-grid geo targeting — can't be prompted away.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You're considering building or ranking a local service business website using AI tools and want an honest ceiling check.
- You run or are evaluating a local SEO agency and want to know where Claude-assisted workflows actually save time vs. where they fall short.
- You're a solo founder who heard the 'rank in 24 hours' claim on X and wants to understand what it actually takes before betting real money on it.
- You're curious how Google Business Profile entity alignment differs from keyword-stuffed city pages — and why that gap matters.
SKIP IF…
- You're trying to rank a competitive niche (plumber, HVAC, personal injury attorney) in a major metro — this case study won't translate.
- You already understand local SEO entity theory and GBP optimization at a professional level; the guest's tutorial will feel basic.
The full version, fast.
A viral weekend project — vibe-coding a diesel mechanic site with Claude Code and ranking it in 24 hours — is real, but the host (a 10-year local SEO agency owner) spends the episode explaining why it worked: the niche is nearly uncontested. The fundamentals that actually drive Google Maps rank are entity alignment, GBP category and service structure, and hyper-local geo relevance built from rank-grid gap analysis — none of which Claude can fully substitute for in a competitive market. The takeaway is that right now, pre-AI-adoption local businesses are sitting ducks, and any savvy operator who applies even partial AI-assisted SEO has a narrow but real window to capture them.
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00:00 – 02:00
01 · The viral claim
Caleb introduces the YouTube video — guy builds diesel mechanic site with Claude Code in 4 hours, phone rings same day, thousands in revenue. Caleb teases his three-point fact-check.
02:00 – 07:00
02 · Podcast intro: boring businesses thesis
Guest James (the boring marketer) joins. He pitches local service businesses as a multibillion-dollar AI arbitrage: boring niches are defensible against AGI disruption and the competition still hasn't touched AI.
07:00 – 13:00
03 · The diesel dudes website tour
James screen-shares the site: homepage, service pages, 50+ location pages with local landmarks. Caleb flags that location pages with landmarks is an outdated tactic — post-August-2025 Google update, many are now treated as spam.
13:00 – 20:00
04 · Keyword research and intent mapping
James explains using ChatGPT/Claude to generate 25–50 keywords, then categorizing by intent (emergency, service, problem, local). Caleb clarifies the right approach: GBP categories and services are the real keyword universe, not AI-generated keyword lists.
20:00 – 28:00
05 · Technical SEO audit with Claude
James used Claude Code to do a deep technical audit (robots.txt, sitemap, schema, speed). Caleb notes this is the right move but cautions: Claude misses ~20-30% of issues in competitive niches and WordPress + Yoast does it automatically for free.
28:00 – 35:00
06 · Content and internal linking strategy
James explains deep location content (NASCAR references in Charlotte, local landmarks) and Claude-generated internal links. Caleb agrees on hyper-local content but explains the internal link critique: Claude links 'relevant' pages randomly instead of mirroring GBP service hierarchy.
35:00 – 40:00
07 · The results and the reality check
James shows a single Google Maps result for 'mobile diesel mechanic Charlotte' — he's in top 3. Caleb shows a real rank grid and explains why a single-pin result proves nothing. The market has 5 competitors across a huge region.
40:00 – 44:15
08 · SEO vs AI systems and the CTA
Both agree that good local SEO = good GEO. Traffic from AI referrals converts higher. Caleb closes with his honest summary: this works now in low-competition niches; the window is open but not permanent. CTA for his own 30-AI-agent walkthrough video.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- The competition for 'mobile diesel mechanic Charlotte' is so thin that almost any functional website would have ranked — the AI didn't win, the vacuum did.
- Google Maps rank is driven by proximity-weighted entity signals, not keyword density — 'keywords' as a concept is a decade out of date for local search.
- City pages stuffed with local landmarks no longer create geo relevance; Google's August 2025 update now flags many as spam.
- The right unit for geo targeting is a rank-grid cell, not a city name — you write content about landmarks near the cells where you're ranking 4–7, not about the city at large.
- Every AI system that recommends local businesses — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — is downstream of the same GBP entity data that powers Maps rank.
- Claude gets GBP category selection wrong because categories are a closed dropdown; asking AI to name categories produces fabricated options you can't actually select.
- Internal linking should mirror your GBP service hierarchy exactly — randomly linking 'relevant' pages as Claude does by default actively undermines your entity structure.
- The right local SEO keyword research tool is GMB Everywhere — not search volume tools, because local search volume data is garbage and should be ignored.
- SEO agencies have become deflationary: costs to serve are down because AI does the content and audit work, so $8–10k/month retainers are increasingly hard to justify.
- Traffic from ChatGPT and AI referral sources converts at a significantly higher rate than direct Google traffic — the intent is pre-filtered.
- A WordPress install with Yoast handles 90% of technical SEO automatically; vibe-coded custom sites require you to know to ask Claude for robots.txt, sitemaps, and schema — most people don't.
- The 'boring business barbell' thesis: hedge against AI disruption by owning a stake in a physical-service business (trucking, diesel repair) that robots won't replace in the next five years.
What actually moves the needle in local search.
THE REAL PLAYBOOK
The 'rank overnight' story is real but narrow — it works because the competition is absent, not because the method is advanced.
01The viral claim
- Viral 'rank in 24 hours' stories are usually true — but the niche and competition level are the real variable, not the AI tool used.
02Podcast intro: boring businesses thesis
- Physical service businesses (diesel repair, HVAC, plumbing) have a structural moat: local proximity and hands-on labor that automation can't replace in the near term.
- The barbell strategy — one foot in digital products, one foot in a boring local business — hedges against AI disruption of either side.
03The diesel dudes website tour
- Location pages with local landmarks add genuine geo relevance only when the landmarks are real, Google Maps-verified, and tied to rank-grid gaps — not when they're generated en masse.
- Google's August 2025 update treats templated city gate pages as spam; the tactic of scaling location pages by swapping city names no longer works in any competitive space.
04Keyword research and intent mapping
- Google Maps rank is driven by entity categories and service attributes, not keyword research — local search volume data is unreliable and should be ignored.
- The practical keyword research tool for local SEO is GMB Everywhere: compare GBP categories and services across competitors, then add all relevant ones to your own profile.
- Asking Claude to generate a keyword list is reasonable for brainstorming service pages, but it will fabricate GBP category names that don't exist in Google's actual dropdown.
05Technical SEO audit with Claude
- Vibe-coded custom sites require explicitly prompting for robots.txt, XML sitemaps, schema markup, and speed optimization — none of these happen by default.
- WordPress with Yoast handles 90% of technical SEO automatically and for free; the vibe-coding path creates overhead that most builders underestimate.
06Content and internal linking strategy
- Hyper-local content that references specific neighborhood landmarks, roads, and eccentricities (like lead water mains in older Boston neighborhoods) signals geographic expertise to Google and AI systems.
- Internal links must follow the GBP category-and-service hierarchy exactly — cross-linking pages from different service categories undermines the entity structure you're building.
- Claude's default behavior when asked to 'add internal links' is to link pages it deems semantically related, not to mirror your GBP hierarchy — the result actively hurts entity clarity.
07The results and the reality check
- A single Google Maps screenshot showing top-3 rank is not proof of performance — a rank grid showing position at dozens of geographic coordinates is.
- Five total competitors spread across a large metro is almost no competition; any functional website with a verified GBP would likely rank in that environment.
08SEO vs AI systems and the CTA
- Good local SEO and good GEO (generative engine optimization) are nearly identical — ranking on Google Maps and getting recommended by ChatGPT require the same underlying entity work.
- Traffic from AI systems converts at a higher rate than direct Google search traffic because the intent is more refined before the user ever reaches your site.
Terms worth knowing.
- GBP (Google Business Profile)
- The free listing that appears on Google Maps and in local search results. It's the central entity record Google and AI systems use to understand what a business does, where it serves, and how trustworthy it is.
- Rank grid / rank map
- A geographic grid of dots showing your Google Maps rank position at different physical locations within a service area. Each dot is a simulated search from that lat/lon. Used to find rank gaps where targeted local content can push you into the top 3.
- Entity alignment
- The practice of making sure your GBP categories, services, website structure, internal links, and content all describe the same business entity in the same terms — so Google's AI can confidently match you to the right searches.
- GMB Everywhere
- A browser extension that reveals the primary and secondary GBP categories and services of any listed business, used for competitive research in local SEO without relying on keyword volume tools.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
- The emerging practice of optimizing content to be cited or recommended by AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) — largely overlaps with good local SEO but with a few additional signals.
- Schema markup
- Structured data embedded in a webpage's HTML that tells search engines exactly what type of business, service, or content is on the page. LocalBusiness schema is foundational for local SEO.
- EEAT
- Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness — Google's quality framework. For local sites, this means real photos, verified business info, authentic reviews, and content that demonstrates actual service knowledge.
- City / location pages (gate pages)
- Dedicated pages targeting a keyword + city name combination. Effective when built around real local context; treated as spam by Google's August 2025 update when they're templated with only a city name swapped in.
Things they pointed at.
10:20toolGMB Everywhere
18:20toolYoast SEO (WordPress plugin)
18:30toolWP Rocket (speed plugin)
43:40linkCaleb's 30 AI agent local SEO walkthrough
Lines you could clip.
00:45
“Google doesn't use keywords anymore. It matches entities — not keywords. It hasn't matched keywords for years.”
43:00
“The honest version of this: vibe coded sites can 100% absolutely work in noncompetitive niches against old slow competitor sites. But this approach will hit a ceiling the moment you try it in a real metro against real competitors.”
31:40
“Claude is going to link together pages that Claude thinks are potentially relevant to each other. That's not what you actually want.”
10:30
“If you ask Claude or any AI for help choosing a Google category, they'll get it wrong. They make up categories. Google categories are a dropdown box.”
Word for word.
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metaphoranalogystory
00:00So I just watched this YouTube video where this guy spent four hours of Claude code over a weekend. He used that to build a website for his friend's diesel mechanic business. Now twenty four hours later, the phone started ringing.
00:11Thousands of dollars in real jobs. The video has a lot of views, and the comments are full of people saying that local SEO agencies are basically dead, and AI in a weekend is all you really need. Now I've been running a local SEO agency for ten years.
00:27I built an AI tool that does pretty much exactly what he's showing. So when I watched this video, I saw three things that he got right and at least three things that are going to catch up with him the moment he tries this in a real market that's actually competitive.
00:42Let's go ahead and dive in. Everyone wants to build GPT rappers, micro SaaS. I get it.
00:48It's super, super sexy. But there's a huge opportunity right now to be using AI for boring businesses. I brought on the boring marketer, and he shares the story of how in less than twenty four hours, he ranked one of his boring businesses on Google in the top three spots for multiple target keywords and made thousands of dollars.
01:11And Claude Code did 100% of the work. And this is an exact tutorial with how to make money for boring businesses with AI, and he shares why he thinks that's where the money is.
01:26Enjoy the episode. We got the boring marketer on the pod.
01:30James, by the end of this podcast, what are people going to learn? So I kinda had a a revelation that, you know, everyone's building, like, agents and workflows and wrappers and SaaS tools, but I feel like everyone's ignoring, like, businesses in their backyard. So I wanna talk about what I think is, a multibillion dollar arbitrage opportunity, uh, to build a local service business.
01:53Okay. So boring businesses in the age AI. That's right.
01:56That's right. Okay.
01:58And then tactically, what are people gonna
02:01learn here? Yeah. So we were having a couple discussions on x, and some people chimed in with some replies.
02:08One of the things that I'm astounded by is people still wanna learn how to set up, like, their development environment with Cloud Code. So Yeah. So I know setting up Cloud Code, especially for the first time, can be intimidating because it uses a terminal window.
02:21Now the way I set it up the very first time was and this is kind of silly, but I basically went to Claude, and I told Claude that I wanted to use Claude code, and it walked me through exactly what to do, exactly what to click, exactly what to type in until I had Claude code up and running. So don't be afraid of it.
02:41Use Claude and the Claude code window. You'll be able to get what you need. You can talk to Claude.
02:46It can help you with prompting. It can help you solve any issues that you're seeing on Claude code on the terminal window.
02:53Don't be afraid of it. I know it's intimidating. Just dive in.
02:55The prompting to make sure you're set up the right way.
02:58Then we're gonna talk about how I was able to build this website in just a couple hours and perfectly match up my Figma design files. A lot of people struggle with, you know, getting nice designs.
03:10It's interesting here that he mentions Figma. Claude has actually re released its own Claude design. So potentially, this could even be easier now if you use Claude's design tool instead of Figma.
03:20As a side note, when Claude released its own design tool, the stock price for Figma dropped significantly.
03:26Uh, with their AI tools that don't feel like AI made it. So we're gonna go through that process. And then most importantly, we're gonna talk about how I optimize this website for local search and actually started generating revenue within twenty four hours of making updates to the site itself.
03:46Within twenty four hours making thousands of dollars of revenue, which is insane. Yeah. So I can't wait to to just see how you did it.
03:54Let's let's let's get into it. Cool. So the story here,
04:00I have a lot of friends that have boring businesses, know, things that are outside of tech and startups and AI and stuff like that. And one of my friends has a small trucking company.
04:11So he just ships goods from, like, you know, Charleston to Charlotte and and back and forth and all that. And his truck is used, it was breaking down, and he kept running into these, like, mechanical problems.
04:24So he found a local mechanic, started kinda building a relationship with him, and he thought, hey, maybe we should start a service that, you know, helps trucks get back on the road. And he came to me and he was like, hey, like, you know, I'm really good at operating and I've got, you know, the mechanic and I know this business, but I don't really know how to, like, get a website going, get the marketing going for it.
04:47Would you like to partner up on this? And I was like, you know, that sounds pretty interesting. And it rang a couple, like, bells in my mind for a few reasons.
04:57One reason being
04:58So one thing to keep in mind, the space that he's talking about, uh, diesel engine repair or similar keyword, this is not a very competitive space. Now it's not ranking for snow removal Miami levels of low competition, but it's not trying to rank for plumber or air conditioning repair or personal injury attorney or any of the higher competitive spaces
05:20that actually do take a lot more effort to rank. But I am interested to hear what he's actually going to do. Alright.
05:27Like, this might sound a little bit crazy, but what if, like, we have, like, an AGI takeoff by twenty thirty or something like that? You know, and digital services and SaaS and all this stuff is like super, super disrupted, you know, that that is a real possibility.
05:45So I was like, okay, there might be a barbell strategy here to where you can kind of like hedge against that as like a multi preneur as as you kind of coined the term. Right? So maybe on one side of the barbell, I've got, you know, my service businesses online, I've got my SaaS tools, I've got my community, And on the other side, I'm a partner in some, like, boring businesses that have a high degree of defensibility against being completely disrupted by AI.
06:12So I don't think in the next five years, there's gonna be robots
06:16going down major highways coming to fix, like, you know, heavy duty tractor trailers and and stuff like that. So I think that has some staying power. It is interesting.
06:25I recently saw an interview with Dario Amadai, the CEO of Anthropic, and he said, not five years, but probably ten, a big enabler of robotics are advanced AI models that make it easier for the robots to learn how to move, how to do things, how to interact with actual real physical objects.
06:43Uh, so that's a side. Power, and that's gonna be a continued need for some time. So I got thinking about that, and I was, like, super interested to to get into it.
06:53Cool. Yeah. Let's let's let's let's see what, uh, what you did.
06:57Alright. Cool. So I'll I'll do a quick tour around the website real quick and just kinda show you the structure and what I was able to do.
07:04So, you know, you have kind of like your basic homepage. We've got some nice little, like, illustrations and things like that. We've got, like, you know, a bunch of clickable items that take you into, like, individual services and all of that stuff.
07:18We've got all these different location pages, and, you know, we have some other, like, SEO optimizations on the website, like all these handy internal links and stuff like that.
07:29So if you look at some of these pages, I have, like, a huge amount of detail on all of these about each individual location.
07:39I've got, like, landmarks and, you know, unique information about these locations that, uh, we can service and and things along those lines.
07:48Um, now an SEO agency or a digital So essentially, what he's showing is a more a slightly more advanced version of what we used to call city pages, where you basically just write your target keyword in city name, and then you spam over and over and over and over again.
08:08Now back in the pre AI days, right, 2022 or or earlier, the easiest way to do this would be to create all these city pages and then find or place the city name.
08:18Google typically doesn't view it as duplicate content with a city name being different, so you could get away with that. Today, not only does this city gate page strategy not really work anymore in more competitive spaces, uh, Google rolled out an update in August '25 that actually considers a lot of these city gate type pages to be spam.
08:41Uh, a lot of websites that were relying on this saw their traffic essentially evaporate overnight. Location pages do matter.
08:49Right? We generate them at my agency all the time. But what he's talking about, you know, generating 50 city pages with local landmarks, that doesn't serve geo relevance.
09:00It basically serves, I don't know what to call it, like, trivia. Uh, so instead, the approach that we take is we're going to look at a local rank map.
09:10So this is an example of what I mean by a local rank map. So the reason this is so important is each one of these dots represents what your rank position is on Google Maps when someone searches for your target keyword in that location. Right?
09:24So somebody searches right here, you're in position one. Somebody searches over here, you're in position seven. Now this is very important because a major rank factor for Google Maps is proximity.
09:35So when we're looking at this, when we're trying to build geo relevance, we wanna make sure we're building geographical relevance for the locations that are actually important. So for this case, what we would do is we see a couple of fives near North Mountain Park. So we would write content about how we do elder law attorney near North Mountain Park, and we talk about North Mountain Park.
09:57Then we find some other spots to do the same, Saddle Rock Hills, Iron Ironwood Place, Villa De La Montana, Sure, Upshad Desert, Mount Village.
10:08And we're looking for landmarks that are listed on Google Maps. Landmarks, parks, rivers, roads, neighborhoods. The reason it's important for them to be on Google Maps is because we wanna make sure Google recognizes them.
10:21So we look at Google Maps to make sure it's aligned with what Google sees. In that way, we are actually building geographical relevance. Now I know what people watching this might say, Well, hey.
10:32He showed he's ranking well. Isn't that what counts? Again, this is not a competitive search word.
10:38Okay? This is not a competitive search entity. He almost certainly would have ranked had he not done any of these geo pages.
10:45I strongly believe these geo pages are not helping him rank even a little bit. An SEO agency or a digital marketing agency would charge you an arm and a leg to go and, like, build out a website, create 50 plus pages,
11:00optimize the entire thing so that it'll rank for, uh, the keywords that are relevant to your company. He's some of them will, and I'm not gonna deny that. Some agencies will charge a huge amount of money for this work.
11:12But a lot of the better agencies, my agencies, some other agencies, uh, from friends of mine, our prices have actually gone down.
11:20It's deflationary. And the reason that they've gone down is because it just costs us so much less to serve clients. It costs us so much less to build the websites, to build the content, to optimize the content.
11:32We're doing it in a much more advanced way than letting Cloud Code do everything, but we are seeing a lot of deflationary pressure on SEO agencies. So if you're still sitting there paying, like, $810,000 a month for SEO, uh, maybe evaluate your agency.
11:47Using ClaudeCode,
11:48I was able to do all of this in a matter of hours. So, actually, I did it over the weekend. It took me around four hours or so to get the site live, to do months worth of SEO work,
12:00and push it live. And as you mentioned And again, I don't know what SEO work he's talking about as of yet because so far, I haven't actually seen any SEO work that he's done. He's basically built a website with a long list of landmarks in different cities.
12:15You mentioned at the beginning, uh, you know, this actually started generating thousands of dollars of revenue yesterday.
12:21This phone started blowing up, and now the mechanics basically fully booked up for the next few days. So that's like real vibe marketing ROI, uh, you know, just using Claude code, which I think is kinda mind blowing.
12:34That is 100%
12:35correct. Like, a lot of the competition, especially in the local space, especially in non major cities, and again, especially in noncompetitive keywords, the competition just isn't there.
12:46Right? And even if you're trying to rank a plumber, you're only competing with the other plumbers directly around you. You're not trying to compete with Amazon for SEO.
12:56Right? So the more businesses that aren't doing anything but are ranking anyway, those become very easy to beat as you just basically start doing the bare essentials.
13:08But as more and more businesses start to use AI, as more marketers start to use AI, and start to be able to offer compelling SEO solutions that actually work for a few $100 a month, you very quickly end up in a in an arms race where these simple things just won't work anymore, but we're not there yet.
13:27That's why I honestly think this is one of the best times to get into SEO because not all local businesses are using AI yet, which makes it easy to rank if you do use AI. But you have to use AI in the right way.
13:41If you find kind of a boring niche in a local market,
13:44you're going up against people who haven't updated their website in ten or fifteen years perhaps. They're still operating off, you know, notepads and spreadsheets and stuff like that. So there's a real opportunity for somebody that's AI savvy to use this playbook to partner with other businesses or other operators and, you know, develop something that makes real money pretty quickly.
14:07So the first thing that I did was I took the Diesel Dudes website and I gave it to AI, and I was like, hey. Find me some keywords. And keywords are just like what people are searching for.
14:19I think everyone knows that. This is kind of a problem that he's talking about keywords here. Google doesn't use keywords anymore.
14:26Right? So when he says, just ask AI what keywords to focus on, that's not how Google works. Google matches entities,
14:34not keywords. It hasn't matched keywords for years. Uh, Google is looking at business type, service offerings, attributes, proximity mapped against GBP categories.
14:44Keywords are downstream artifacts. They're what people are typing into Google. That's not how Google works anymore.
14:51Again, an uncompetitive diesel repair niche in Charlotte, sure.
14:56This can work. But a plumber in Gary, Indiana, uh, HVAC system in South Florida, you're gonna get buried.
15:04This won't work. Is that despite what,
15:07uh, you know, x might have you believe, SEO is not dead by any means on a local level. Actually, it's a huge opportunity right now. Um, you know, if a trucker is broken down on the side of the I definitely agree with that.
15:19Local SEO is a massive opportunity. He's not opening up ChatGPT and saying, hey. Like, you know, how do I fix my truck and, like, what local mechanics should I call up and sitting there and letting it do research.
15:31He's opening up Google. He's finding a review. He's clicking on the call button, and he's trying to get somebody that So, yes, agreed.
15:39But even if that trucker is opening ChatGPT, good local SEO will often result in you being found by AI systems and ChatGPT as well as Google Maps. Getting recommended by Google Ask or ChatGPT or Claude is a lot of the same things that you need to do to rank on maps.
16:00So it's not that we're trying to pit them against each other. You have to focus on maps or you have to focus on ChatGPT. If you do the quality SEO work that will get you ranked on Google Maps, you're also likely going to get ranked on a lot of the AI systems with just a few additional things that the AI systems are specifically looking for that Google Maps might not be.
16:21And he's trying to get somebody there right away so he can get back on the road. You know? James, so he's not in cursor, you know, tapping into the Perplexity MCP?
16:29No. He's he doesn't have he's not popping open his development environment with cursor, calling Perplexity MCP, and then using Claude code to build a plan to find the optimal mechanic for his make and model.
16:46Okay. Understood. Yeah.
16:47Just to clarify. So but think about it, like, you know, if you need your air conditioner repaired or, like, you know, you have a broken window or something like that, like, you're opening up Google, you're finding someone with good reviews, and you're giving them a call. Like, that's how, like, 99.9% of this stuff works.
17:04Right? So I wanted to find, like, what are those search terms that these folks are looking for? So, you know, keyword research, people can overcomplicate it.
17:15They're like, oh, do I need this tool and that tool and, like, you know, what variations and volume and all this stuff do I need to discover and oftentimes to get, like, analysis paralysis, you know?
17:27So here's a way that you can like bypass all of that and this is the vibe marketing way. So open up chat GPT o three or Claude or whatever and just say, hey, here's my website, here's what I'm trying to do, Give me a list of, like, 25 to 50 keywords that I can optimize my website around. That's all you need to do really.
17:47Like, you know, for a local market especially, you don't need to worry about, like, all this different, like, volume and,
17:54you know, keyword metrics and competition level. Yeah. So he's absolutely right here.
17:58We really don't use any keyword research tools at my agency because you really just don't need them for local SEO. The search volume is wrong. It's garbage.
18:07It's trash. It should be fully ignored on local SEO. And even beyond search volume, the primary keyword we're almost always going to target is the primary category of the Google business profile.
18:19Beyond that, we're looking at secondary categories and core services that we really, really care about. The one tool that we use for keyword research is called GMB Everywhere, but, really, all that tool is doing is comparing primary categories, secondary categories, and services so that we can just pull all of that data, look through a list of what other businesses are using, what other secondary categories and services, and decide which ones make sense for that business, for this client, for your business, and add those to your GBP.
18:51Okay? 100% asking Claude or some other AI can help, but the challenge is, what I found is if you ask Claude or any AI for help choosing a Google category, they'll get it wrong.
19:05They make up categories. Google categories are a drop down box. It's not a free box where you can type anything you want in.
19:12So often, it's going to give you categories that you can't actually select, which is very clearly problematic. Now all of your target services, target service entities should be on your GBP.
19:24Okay? If it's not on your GBP, then it doesn't need to be on your website. So you don't really need to do keyword research like this.
19:30Just make sure that your GBP has all the categories, all the services that you could possibly care about, then make sure your website matches the structure that your GBP has. And stuff like that. I think a lot of people get hung up on it.
19:42So just wanna clarify that all you have to do is ask AI what keywords you should focus on for your website.
19:49Alright? So I had to kind of analyze the keywords for search intent and buying stage.
19:57And what I mean by that is,
19:59are these folks, like, looking for repairs and service, like, right now? You know, I wanted to find out what keywords are are that type where somebody's willing to, like, pick up their phone and and give this company a call and which ones are just kinda, like, looking for information and stuff like Again, using the basic philosophy with entity research where, hey.
20:18I'm just gonna make sure that my GBP has the right services and the right categories, and then I'm going to create pages around those services and categories. We're also matching user intent. If somebody is searching for a very specific service, they often need that very specific service.
20:33So we're not talking about building informational type content on a local business website. Same as what he's saying, we're just a little bit simpler than relying on AI to get this. So when you get started, especially for, like, a boring business, you wanna tap into,
20:48uh, those search terms where people are ready to, like, pull out their credit card or ready to have you come out to their site or or wherever the work is happening. So that's what I kinda dialed in on. Okay?
20:58So you can see that here, like, we we have a few different categories of search terms that AI gave us. We have emergency keywords, service keywords, problem keywords, and local keywords.
21:10So I found that all of these were pretty high intent, and they seem to be good ones to focus on. So the other thing that you need to think about is SEO is all about really demand and supply.
21:24I mean, that's really one simple way to think about it. So demand is what people are searching for, and you can think of supply as like landing pages on your website. Alright?
21:36So for each one of these search terms that related to a specific service that the company can do and any of the location oriented terms, I ended up building out dedicated pages for each and every one of those.
21:49We'll we'll talk about that in a bit when we get into
21:52the, uh, the vibe coding. Absolutely agree. That's exactly what we do.
21:55We find we make sure that Google Business Profile has the right categories, the right services, and then we build a page for every one of them, then and we internally link them so that they exactly match the structure that GBP has. So
22:06find your keywords, map them to the intent, and make sure that, you know, they just kind of make sense and don't overthink it. Alright?
22:15So the next step is, you know, I already have this website built out. We'll talk about how I built that, but then I went into a SEO audit.
22:25So I asked Claude Code, where I built the site, hey, go through this website in extreme detail, ultra think about this.
22:34You can use the ultra think command so it'll spend extra time, use Opus, really go deep, and do sort of some deep research,
22:42and find all the technical and on page SEO issues and opportunities that we can fix together so that I can dominate the local market. So this is a major weakness with vibe coding your website for SEO purposes. It's good that he's talking about this.
22:59Most people who vibe code websites don't do this step of this, hey. Go look at this website from a detailed SEO perspective and help me.
23:07If you have a WordPress installation and you install Yoast, 90% of these are going to be taken care of, no problem, just by default, for free, out of the gate. If you're vibe coding a website from scratch, you need to make sure that the AI that's coding it understands that you care about these things and it needs to implement them.
23:27So this technical foundation, it's a really good step to do. I'm glad he did it. Uh, otherwise, he wouldn't have had the robots TXT, the sitemap, etcetera etcetera.
23:37Those things would not have been implemented had he not known to ask AI to do them. Another good option for this is just to use a very simple automated, uh, SEO audit tool.
23:47It's going to look for a lot of these same things. In my experience, Claude is 70 to 80% when it's doing, uh, SEO audit.
23:57Uh, generally, you have to be incredibly specific at what you want it to look at and focus on. If you just say, go do a detailed SEO audit, there's likely a lot of things it's going to miss. Again, this is working so well in this situation because of how low the competition in this space is.
24:14If you try to build something in HVAC Dallas and rely on Claude to do a technical SEO audit and find all of your mistakes, it's not gonna work. You're not gonna get ranked.
24:24So it went through.
24:26It found out, hey. You don't have these files that help Google understand what the site is all about. It's slow to load.
24:34Uh, you can optimize the speed. You can make it snappier.
24:38You need to include schema markup and Again, schema markup, you'll still include that for free. Make it faster. WP Rocket is a plugin that does this for free.
24:47There's just a lot of advantages to using something like WordPress that takes care of so much of this without you having to know to ask AI to do it for you. And then trust that the AI can do it and can do it well. Markup and some of these other technical things so that Google knows exactly what your website does.
25:05And then, uh, once you find them, you can just say, fix them. So, like, you know, when you work with like an agency or something like that, that can take a long time. They have to get access to your code base or whatever.
25:17And now there's this beautiful sort of like power that someone has who can build the website and go and fix all this stuff on their own really quickly and and make sure it's optimized. So we identified those technical issues.
25:30We fixed them. So we did like, you know, robots. T x c, XML sitemap, URL fixes.
25:37You don't even have to know what all of it is, to be honest with you. Just that Claude will find it and Claude will do it. So you just have to have that initial initial prompt.
25:47Okay. So we did that, and then we started to dig into content. So like I said, for each of the locations and each of the services, I asked it to go super, super deep into mapping out how we can outrank all the competition on these individual search terms.
26:05So I don't have a location page that's like diesel services in Charlotte. I have a page that goes into local landmarks, things around Charlotte, common issues that might affect your truck, frequently asked questions about, you know, the industry or whatever.
26:23Like, it was able to reference, like, oh, there's probably a lot of, like, NASCAR type stuff happening in Charlotte with trucks and and shipping because that's where it's based or whatever, and it included that
26:35in, uh, in this individual location page. So I guess I would say, like Yeah. I talked about this briefly before.
26:41I completely agree with this. Right? Real location context is going to beat generic city pages every day of the week.
26:47Adding in landmarks, things like that, absolutely. The only thing he's missing, I showed you the rank map and how we wanna talk about very hyper local landmarks and have specific pages about those landmarks based on where the rank map has gaps.
27:00We also wanna talk about a couple of other signals that we're missing. The EEAT signals real photos, schema beyond the local business schema, GBP alignment, and that internal linking structure.
27:12All of that is also very important as the competition goes up, but, uh, he's definitely got the basics where we want this to content to be hyper local about this specific area. Right?
27:24If I'm writing content for a plumber in Mauldin, Mauldin is a suburb of Boston, I'm going to be talking about all of the issues that a plumber in that area is going to face. Right? One of them being something like lead main drain lines.
27:38If I'm writing about a plumber in OC, California, I don't need to talk about lead main drain lines because the houses in California are newer and don't have them.
27:47But in Boston, houses are older, they have lead main drain lines. Local eccentricities like that really help Google and AI systems to identify your business entity with the right attributes so that when someone is searching for those specific things, your business is going to rank and your business is going to get recommended.
28:06Like, you know, typically,
28:08um, if you're in a boring market, the competitors are not going super deep and getting all this information integrated into their site. It's your opportunity to use AI to do additional research and, you know, build out more information that, you know, search engines or even LLMs will prefer, you know, to to crawl and to to serve you up.
28:30Right? So here's a little thing, like a lot of people you you actually posted about this yesterday, Greg, about sub agents in Cloud Code.
28:38So here's a good use case for spinning up additional agents. So, um, you know, let's say that I wanted to keep working on the website.
28:47I wanted to, you know, start working on a blog or something like that, but there was still, you know, some SEO or whatever stuff to fix in the background. At least he admits it now. Alright.
28:58Um, so that was a nice little hack, uh, that I that I worked on and that I found. Um, and, uh, you know, the other thing that I did, uh, you know, I set up a Google business profile. I had Claude code, uh, kinda go back and forth between, uh, that and between the website to make sure it was, like, consistent and there weren't any, like, you know, uh, kind of information that didn't match up and, uh, and things of that nature.
29:23So it's not just the information.
29:25Yes. Obviously, the name, address, phone number needs to be consistent. But beyond that, the internal linking structure of the website should exactly match how the GBP is set up for services and secondary categories.
29:38All of the AI systems basically use your GBP as the center, as the core entity for your business.
29:46Any errors on your GBP is going to affect what all of those systems think your business is. Your GBP is incredibly important.
29:55And if you don't have a GBP, you're not likely going to get recommended by any AI tools, and obviously, you won't rank on Google.
30:03ClaudeCode went in and it made a bunch of, like, internal links on the website. So it's it linked up, like, relevant, uh, location pages.
30:13It linked up, uh, you know, relevant,
30:16uh, services with, uh, related services and stuff like that, and these internal links are are good. So this is not good. What Claude is going to do, if you ask it to do this, is exactly as he's showing.
30:28It's going to link together pages that are that Claude thinks are potentially relevant to each other. That's not what you actually want. You want pages to be linked together that follow the same structure as your Google business profile.
30:42Right? Google, the AI systems, they're going to build an idea of what your website looks like based on your internal linking. They are not using your website URLs or your URL structure to build the picture of your website hierarchy.
30:56They're looking at your internal links. So your internal links need to be very specific, and they need to exactly match what your GBP is doing. If you have service one if you have category one and service a under category one and then you have category two and service b under category two, you do not want to link service a to service b because those are different hierarchies that live under different categories.
31:21Okay? So we don't want to just randomly link a bunch of pages together that feel like they might be relevant to one another. We want to very methodically make sure that we match your GBP structure exactly.
31:33And, this is this page worked for him because this is a low competition
31:38space. For your SEO as well. ClaudeCode knew what to do.
31:42It discovered it on its own. I didn't need to tell it to go and, you know, create internal linking on the website.
31:49So what was the result of all this? I mean, like I said, like, if you now if you go to Google and you say mobile diesel mechanic Charlotte,
32:00and, uh, you look here, like, we're showing up, uh, in the maps, like Okay. So this isn't a rank map. Right?
32:07He's not showing us a rank map here. This is one data point at one location. This essentially tells us nothing about how he ranks three miles away, five miles away, six miles away.
32:18That's where the actual work happens. I shared with you what a real rank grid looks like. It's this.
32:23I talked to you about how you target specific cells where you're ranking four, five, six, seven with the goal of pushing to the top three. Showing this and demonstrating it as results, frankly, it's very amateur. This is not proof of ranking.
32:37Again, he's getting the calls. He's he's making the money. But look at this Google map.
32:43Okay? There's one, two, three, four, five businesses over this massive region.
32:49Okay? So, yes, he's getting calls, but this is not much more impressive than ranking a new business for snow removal Miami.
32:58Uh, in the maps, like, right away,
33:01and, uh, you know, we're in the top three organic results. And these some of these competitive web Nobody cares about organic ranking if you are ranking in the maps, if you have a local business. Organic ranking just isn't important.
33:12You get a small, small fraction of the calls. At my agency, we literally don't even track organic ranking. It just doesn't have a significant impact.
33:20Everything is based around ranking the GBP, establishing the GBP, and establishing your business entity
33:26with Google's AI and the other AI systems. But these competitive websites and businesses have been around for, you know, twenty years or something like that.
33:35Yep. So This is crazy, dude. Yeah.
33:38Like, you know how crazy this is. This is nuts. I mean, this typically
33:41takes people months and months to go and climb up the rankings and start showing up for these, like, high intent keywords.
33:51Yeah. And this is this is basically like , owning owning that space.
33:59Right? Because, you know, while you're sleeping at night or on autopilot and I know people are gonna, you you know, they're gonna comment and be like, yes.
34:08You know, SEO isn't dead now, but in, like, a few years, we're gonna be on our AI powered browsers, and we're just, you know, just gonna be asking perplexity and chattypetty questions. And the reality is and and let me know if you disagree with me, James.
34:23But the reality is if you do good SEO, the LLMs are going to just take some of the top SEO results and just plug it as answers.
34:34Yeah. Like, you know, LLM or GEO or whatever the the name of the week is, I think it is a a big opportunity.
34:46Like, I I think that we trust the recommendations that, you know, these LLMs are are giving us, and I think the traffic that people are getting from those recommendations
34:57is very high intent and and very primed to take an You don't need to think. A lot of studies have shown that traffic that comes from ChatGPT and AI systems, uh, is much more likely to convert than traffic that comes straight from Google. Absolutely correct here.
35:10Very primed to take an action or whatever.
35:13Um, but, yeah, like, how do you show up in in ChatGPT or whatever? The way you show up in ChatGPT is by doing good SEO.
35:21100% agree. Uh, good GEO or as he said, whatever the acronym of the week is, getting recommended by ChatGPT is basically doing good SEO, then maybe there's a couple of additional things that, uh, ChatGPT is specifically looking for or that Google's, uh, AskMaps feature is specifically looking for.
35:39But, yes, it all is going to start with doing good SEO. So SEO is not dead. It's just changed, and SEO changes every couple of years.
35:47So this isn't a, uh, significant learning. But I just think it's funny that they're sitting here saying, oh, what we did was good SEO.
35:55It's over for SEO agencies. And they even admitted that the that the competitiveness of the niche he ranked in was surprisingly low.
36:05So the the honest version of this, vibe coded sites can 100% absolutely work in noncompetitive niches against old slow competitor sites. Admittedly, that's what he said, and I agree with him.
36:17But this approach will hit a ceiling the moment you try it in a real metro against real competitors. The fundamentals, entity alignment, GDP structure, real geo relevance via rank grid, programmatic content that actually differentiates, those aren't things that you can prompt your way into.
36:34They're systematic. So I built a tool that does this work properly. It's the one that we use at my agency.
36:41So if you wanna see what a production grade version of what he just demoed actually looks like, I have a full walkthrough of my core 30 AI agent on this channel. Link is at this video. Watch it next, and you'll see exactly what he missed.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
A mechanic's phone starts ringing within 24 hours of a weekend Claude Code build — and an SEO agency veteran who's seen every shortcut cycle watches the whole thing, noting exactly where the luck ends and the fundamentals begin.
Named ideas worth stealing.
04:40concept
The boring business barbell
Split your bets: one side is digital services/SaaS (high upside, AI-disruption risk); the other side is physical boring businesses (defensible, robots won't replace them in 5 years). Hedge against AGI disruption by owning a stake in both.
Steal forpositioning for a business that straddles tech and physical services
15:00model
GBP-first content architecture
Start with your Google Business Profile — get every category and service right. Then build one page per service and per category. Internal links must mirror the GBP hierarchy exactly. Website content is downstream of GBP structure, not the other way around.
Steal forany local business SEO buildout
17:30model
Rank-grid geo targeting
- Pull a rank grid for your target keyword
- Find cells ranking 4-7 (not 8+)
- Identify Google Maps landmarks near those cells
- Write content specifically mentioning those landmarks
- Re-check the grid in 30 days
Instead of generic city pages, target specific geographic cells where you're in positions 4-7 and write about the specific landmarks Google Maps recognizes in those cells.
Steal forlocal SEO content strategy for any service business
43:00concept
The vibe-coded SEO ceiling
Vibe-coded sites + Claude SEO audit work in low-competition niches against competitors who haven't touched their sites in 10+ years. The ceiling hits when you enter a real metro with real competitors who are also using AI.
Steal forevaluating whether an AI-first local SEO approach is viable for a specific niche
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
43:40next-video
“I have a full walkthrough of my core 30 AI agent on this channel. Link is at this video. Watch it next.”
Soft close — positioned as 'the production-grade version of what he just demoed' rather than a hard sell. Effective credibility play after spending the whole video as the expert corrector.
Visual structure at a glance.
