Category: AI in Business
Tags: AI ToolsClaude CodeDigital MarketingLocal BusinessSEO Optimization
Entities: AnimaBrexClaude CodeFigmaJamesVerscellvibearketer community
00:00
Everyone wants to build GPT rappers, micro SAS. I get it.
It'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
00:16
in less than 24 hours, he ranked one of his boring businesses on Google in the top three spots for multiple target keywords and made thousands of dollars. and Claude Code did 100% of the work.
And this is an exact tutorial with how
00:33
to make money for boring businesses with AI. And he shares why he thinks that's where the money is.
Enjoy the episode. [Music]
00:52
>> We got the boring marketer on the pod, James. by the end of this podcast, what are people going to learn?
>> So, I kind of had a a revelation that, you know, everyone's building like agents and workflows and rappers and SAS tools, but I feel like everyone's
01:08
ignoring like businesses in their backyard. So, I want to talk about what I think is like a multi-billion dollar arbitrage opportunity uh to build a local service business.
>> Okay. So, boring businesses in the AJI.
>> That's right. That's right.
>> Okay. And then tactically what are
01:24
people going to learn here? >> Yeah.
So, uh, we were having a couple discussions on X and some people chimed in with some replies. Uh, one of the things that I'm astounded by is people still want to learn how to set up like their development environment with Cloud
01:40
Code. So, we're going to briefly go through that.
Just some questions and some things to do in terms of prompting to make sure you're set up the right way. Then we're going to talk about how I was able to build this website in just a couple hours and perfectly match up my
01:55
Figma design files. A lot of people struggle with, you know, getting nice designs uh with their AI tools that don't feel like AI made it.
So, we're going to go through that process. And then most importantly, we're going to talk about how I optimized this website
02:11
uh for local search and actually started generating revenue within 24 hours of making updates to the site itself. >> Within 24 hours, making thousands of dollars of revenue, which is insane.
>> Yeah. >> So, I can't wait to to just see how you
02:27
did it. Let's uh let's let's get into it.
>> Cool. So, uh, the story here, um, I have a lot of friends that have boring businesses, you know, things that are outside of tech and startups and AI and stuff like that.
And one of my friends
02:43
has a small trucking company. So, he just ships goods from like, you know, Charleston to Charlotte and and back and forth and all that.
And his truck uh, is used. It was breaking down and he kept running into these like mechanical problems.
So, he found a local mechanic,
03:00
started kind of 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, uh, 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
03:16
don't really know how to like get a website going, get the marketing going for it. Would 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. One reason being all right like
03:33
this might sound a little bit crazy, but what if like we have like an AGI takeoff by 2030 or something like that, you know, and digital services and SAS and all this stuff is like super super disrupted, you know. Um that that is a
03:50
real possibility. So I was like, okay, there might be a barbell strategy here to where you can kind of like hedge against that as like a multireneur 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 SAS tools, I've got
04:07
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. So, I don't think in the next 5 years there's going to be robots going
04:22
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 and that's going to be a continued need for some time.
So, I got thinking about that and I was like super interested to to get
04:38
into it. >> Cool.
Yeah. Let's let's let's let's see what uh what you did.
>> All right. Cool.
So, I'll I'll do a quick tour around the website real quick and just kind of show you the structure and what I was able to do. So, you know, you have kind of like your basic homepage.
Uh we've got some nice little
04:54
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.
Uh we've got all these different location pages and uh you know, we have some other like SEO optimizations on the
05:10
website. uh like all these handy internal links and stuff like that.
So, if you look at uh some of these pages, uh I have like a huge amount of detail on all of these about each individual location. I've got like landmarks and
05:26
you know, unique information about these locations that uh we can service and and things along those lines. Um, now 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
05:42
plus pages, optimize the entire thing so that it'll rank for uh the keywords that are relevant to your company. Uh, using Claude Code, I 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
06:00
live, to do months worth of SEO work and push it live. And as you mentioned at the beginning, uh you know, this actually started generating thousands of dollars of revenue yesterday.
This phone started blowing up and now the mechanics basically fully booked up for the next
06:16
few days. So that's like real vibe marketing ROI.
Uh you know, just using Claude code, which I think is kind of mind-blowing and Real quick, I need to tell you about something that's helping me sleep better at night as an
06:33
entrepreneur. I was running multiple companies with money scattered everywhere.
Zero spending visibility and making growth decisions pretty blind. I knew there had to be a better way.
And my friend told me about Bracks. So, I
06:48
switched and now I have mission control for every dollar. spend management and visibility, virtual cards for my team, and earning cash from the sameday Treasury product.
I was leaving so much money on the table, but not anymore. I
07:06
have a financial operating system for our businesses to make decisions so I can spend smarter and move faster. And it's been a total game changer.
I'm loving Brex so much. I reached out to them and asked them to sponsor the pod.
07:23
If you're building something real, you need a complete financial operating system like Brex. It'll help you sleep better, too.
And you can't be mad at that. The devil's advocate to that is James, just cuz I've known you for 15 years, you are one of the best search
07:39
marketers I know. You know, you've you've you've been there and done that.
someone who's who knows that there's value in SEO but doesn't know how to do that. How how can they actually >> you know implement this and see similar
07:54
results? >> Yeah, let's uh let's dig in.
Um so I've got like a whole process here that we can talk about. So, um I'm going to walk you through sort of the exact process that I did, uh for getting your website like discovered and then we're going to
08:10
cut back and talk about like the design stuff and the development environment stuff and and all of that afterwards. All right.
So, um why another reason why I think like local is so interesting um is because the competition is not very
08:27
sophisticated. You know, like if you find kind of a boring niche in a local market, you're going up against people who haven't updated their website in 10 or 15 years, perhaps.
They're still operating off, you know, uh, notepads and spreadsheets and stuff like that.
08:43
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. So the first thing that I did was I took the diesel dude's
08:59
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. I think everyone knows that despite what uh you know X might have you believe SEO is not dead by any
09:14
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 highway, he's not opening up Chat GPT and saying, "Hey, like, you know, how do I fix my truck and like what local mechanics should I call up?"
09:30
And sitting there and letting it do research. He's opening up Google.
He's finding a review. He's clicking on the call button and 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. No,
09:45
he's he doesn't have he's not popping open his development environment uh with cursor calling perplexity MCP and then using cloud code to build a plan to find the optimal mechanic for his making model.
10:01
>> Okay, understood. >> Yeah, just to clarify.
So, but think about it like you know if you need your air conditioner repaired or like you know uh 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
10:18
stuff works right so um I wanted to find like what are those search terms that these folks are looking for so um you know keyword research people can over complicate it they're like do I need this tool and that tool and like you know what variations and volume and all
10:35
this stuff do I need to uh discover and oftentimes to get like analysis paralysis you know so here's a way that you can like bypass all of that and this is the vibe marketing way so open up chatpt 03 or claude or whatever and just
10:51
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 like you know for a local market especially, you don't need to worry about like all this different like
11:07
volume and uh you know keyword metrics and competition level and and stuff like that. I think a lot of people get hung up on it.
So just want to clarify that all you have to do is ask AI what keywords you should focus on for your website. All right.
So um I had to kind
11:24
of analyze the keywords for uh search intent and buying stage. And what I mean by that is um are these folks like looking for repairs and service like right now?
You know, I wanted to find out what keywords are are that type
11:39
where somebody's willing to like pick up their phone and and give this company a call and which ones are just kind of like looking for information and stuff like that. So, when you get started, especially for like a boring business, you want to tap into uh those search terms where people are ready to like pull out their credit card or ready to
11:56
have you come out to their site or or wherever the work is happening. So, that's what I kind of dialed in on.
Okay. So, uh you can see that here like uh we we have a few different categories of search terms that AI gave us.
We have emergency keywords, service keywords,
12:12
problem keywords, and local keywords. So I found that all of these were pretty high intent and they seem to be good ones to focus on.
Um so the other thing that you need to think about is uh SEO is all about really demand and supply. I
12:28
mean that's really one simple way to think about it. Um so demand is what people are searching for and you can think of supply as like landing pages on your website.
All right. So for each one of these search terms that related to a specific service that the company can do
12:46
and any of the locationoriented terms, I ended up building out dedicated pages for each and every one of those. We'll we'll talk about that in a bit when we get into the uh the vibe coding aspect of this.
So find your keywords, map them to the intent, and make sure that you
13:03
know they just kind of make sense and don't overthink it. All right.
Um, so the next step is, uh, you know, I already had this website built out. We'll talk about how I built that.
But then, uh, I went into a SEO audit. So, I asked Claude Code, uh, where I built the
13:20
site, hey, go through this website in extreme detail. Ultra think about this.
You can use the ultra think command. So, it'll spend extra time.
use Opus, really go deep and do sort of some deep research and find all the technical and
13:36
onpage SEO issues and opportunities that we can fix together so that I can dominate the local market. So, it went through it found out, hey, you don't have these files that help Google understand what the site is all about.
13:51
It's slow to load. uh you can optimize the speed, you can make it snappier, you need to include schema markup and some of these other technical things so that Google knows exactly what your website does and then uh once you find them you can just say fix them.
14:09
Um 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 codebase or whatever.
And now there's this beautiful sort of like power that someone has who can build the website uh and go and fix all this stuff on their own uh really
14:25
quickly and and make sure it's optimized. So we identified those technical issues, we fixed them.
So we did like, you know, robots txt XML sitemap URL fixes. You don't even have to know what all of it is to be honest with you.
Just that Claude will find it
14:40
and Claude will do it. So you just have to have that initial initial prompt.
Um, okay. So we did that and then uh we started to dig into content.
So like I said for each of the locations and each of the services uh I asked it to go
14:56
super super deep into mapping out how we can outrank all the competition uh on these individual search terms. So I don't have a location page that's like diesel services in Charlotte.
I have a page that goes into local landmarks,
15:13
things around Charlotte, common issues that might affect your truck, uh, frequently asked questions about, you know, uh, the industry or whatever. Like, it was able to reference like, ooh, there's probably a lot of like NASCAR type stuff happening in Charlotte, uh, with trucks and and
15:30
shipping because that's where it's based or whatever. And it included that in, uh, in this individual location page.
So, I guess I would say like, you know, typically um if you're in a boring market, the competitors are not going super deep and getting all this
15:46
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 uh, you know, to to crawl and to to serve you up versus uh the other other
16:03
boring local ones. All right.
So um here's a little thing like a lot of people you you actually posted about this yesterday uh Greg about sub agents in cloud code. So here's a good uh use case for uh spinning up additional agents.
So um you know let's say that I
16:21
wanted to keep working on the website. I 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.
So I can just tell cloud code, hey uh launch three agents, find, you know, missing
16:37
alt text or identify pages under uh certain amount or audit for metad descriptions. Or you can just say, "Hey Claude, launch uh launch three different sub aents.
One to, you know, find content opportunities, one to analyze my competitors, and one to identify all the
16:54
other fixes I should be doing on my website." So it's as easy as that. And as you are, you know, working in that main chat window, Claude will have these multiple other agents kind of working on the background to identify uh the other opportunities and things that you should
17:10
update and fix. >> I'm with you.
>> All right. You with me?
>> I'm with you. I'm I don't get shocked easily with but like I'm not I I'm kind of shocked like at at how simple you're making this
17:28
seem. >> Yes.
Yes. >> Yeah.
I mean, you know, like it what what I've realized lately is like it it is actually very simple. Like you could you can just lit just type a question, spin up a few agents.
Like I
17:44
think the biggest gap that I see with AI is people don't know the question to ask you know that's where the vertical expertise comes in. So that's really the gap and it's also the opportunity you know um so finding out what questions
17:59
you should ask is really key and people don't really spend enough time on that I think you know they want to get into the the sexy stuff and start vibe coding and building stuff but like that there is so much alpha in just knowing the questions to ask if I didn't know to ask claude
18:15
code about SEO or whatever I wouldn't have gotten those jobs yesterday and made thousands of dollars you know so simply knowing Knowing the questions is uh is so clutch. Um so yeah once you know that it becomes pretty pretty simple.
Um so another thing that it
18:31
found it was like hey your mobile website's slow. I was like okay fix that.
So it went in it compressed all these images. It made it super snappy.
Um and right now when you like you know search for the site and you pull it up I mean it's it's super fast. Um so it
18:48
shrunk a bunch of files. It converted all the images to a webp format.
It did all these technical optimizations that you know for the most part I don't even know what it is. I have no idea how I would personally do it manually.
And you know I've got cloud code just you know
19:03
building a worldclass machine for me uh on autopilot essentially. So, it did that and uh you know after I started to make some of these changes, I um went over to Google Page Speed Insights and this is a free tool anyone can use and
19:20
if you go to it um you can type in your URL and it will give you performance issues with your website. All right, so I just put in Diesel Dudes right here.
Mobile still has some things I'm working on fixing, but the desktop site has an
19:36
incredible performance score in terms of speed, uh, accessibility, SEO. Basically, this just means it's super fast.
Google knows exactly what this website does. There's minimal technical errors, and it loads in a snap.
Um, so
19:52
here's a little hack for you. Like, everyone's done a little bit of vibe debugging at this point.
you know, they've like built something, they found some errors in the code, they copy and paste it back over to their agent to go fix it. You can do the same thing for this.
You take your URL, you plug it in,
20:08
you find an error, you go down, you find the details, you copy and paste this stuff into cloud code. it knows exactly what to go fix.
Work on getting those scores up on page speed and that's some lowhanging fruit. Um, you know, to get some additional traffic to your website
20:25
and outrank your competition. You can take it a step further.
Um, you can get SEM Rush or whatever. You can do an audit there.
It'll give you a bunch of other like technical optimizations and you don't even need to know what it means. You can just copy and paste it to Claude.
It'll prioritize them. It'll go
20:41
into the codebase. It'll fix them.
Is it worth doing that? >> Um, I think it is here on on this.
So, like especially for like uh for kind of local rankings, like a lot of the websites that I kind of looked at that I was competing against were like old and
20:57
and slow and things. And I think that's one of the reasons why I was able to rank so quickly.
Like this is a pretty like targeted niche. Uh not a lot of like, you know, fast and formative websites.
and just with like technical optimizations, um, I was able to to climb the rankings
21:14
pretty quick. So, it it depends on the market you're in.
It depends on the the the competition and the search terms that you're going after. Like, I think again like in a in a not very competitive market, these types of things can make a big difference.
If you're in a very
21:29
crowded market with, you know, very sophisticated websites, like you're in a a hyperco competitive SAS market, just optimizing your page speed insights probably isn't going to, you know, shoot you to the top. >> Cool.
>> Yeah. All right.
Um, so that was a nice
21:46
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 kind of go back and forth between uh that and between the
22:01
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. Um Cloud Code went in and it made a bunch of like internal links on the website.
So it um
22:18
it linked up like relevant uh location pages. linked up uh you know relevant uh services with uh related services and stuff like that.
And these internal links are are good for your SEO as well. Cloud code knew what to do.
It
22:33
discovered it on its own. I didn't need to tell it to go and you know create internal linking uh on the website.
So uh 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 and uh you
22:51
look here, like we're showing up uh in the maps like right away and uh you know, we're in the top three organic results and these some of these competitive websites and businesses have been around for you know, 20 years or something like that. >> Um y
23:07
>> this is crazy, dude. >> Yeah.
>> Like you know how crazy this is. >> This is nuts.
I mean, that typically takes people months and months to go and climb up the rankings and start showing up for these like >> high intent keywords. >> Yeah.
And this is
23:25
uh this is basically like real estate on the internet owning owning that space, right? Cuz you know, while you're sleeping at night or on autopilot, you're getting leads.
>> Yeah. Exactly.
Like as I said, like my uh business partner's phone has been,
23:42
you know, blowing up. Um let's see.
Let's just look at I don't know. I'm just kind of seeing.
Yeah, here we are. I77 mobile diesel repair.
So, new website just getting started already ranking for a bunch of terms and
23:58
getting getting phone calls from real companies who, you know, want their uh want their trucks fixed and and back on the road. incredible.
And I know people are going to you, you know, they're going to comment and be like, "Yes, you know, SEO
24:14
isn't dead now, but in like a few years, we're going to be on our AI powered browsers and we're just, you know, just going to be asking perplexity and chat GPT questions." And the reality is, and and let me know if you disagree with me, James, but the reality is if you do good
24:30
SEO, the LLMs are going to just take some of the top SEO results and just plug it as answers. >> Yeah.
Like, uh, you know, LLM or GEO or whatever the the name of the week is.
24:48
Um, I think it is a a big opportunity. Like 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 uh those recommendations is very high
25:03
intent and and very primed to take an action or whatever. Um but yeah like how do you show up in in chat GPT or whatever?
The way you show up in chat GPT is by doing good SEO. There's there's really like I have not seen
25:19
really one uh unique strategy that is different from just doing good foundational SEO to go and show up in LLMs. Um you know like you have to think in terms of all right uh something needs
25:34
to understand what my website's all about you know so you have to have a clean technical foundation. uh you have to have the right like meta tags and descriptions and you have to have your keywords kind of naturally uh integrated into your pages.
You have to develop you
25:50
know topical authority which is like you know having relevant information and signals around the topic that someone's looking for. Um links are important.
So uh you know that's still relevant. Google still likes links.
LLMs like
26:05
links. um they trust websites that other websites look at and link to.
Um so uh reviews also like um getting good Google reviews if you're a local business like that is you you can't really replace that. There's not a hack to go and do
26:22
that's going to replace that kind of trust signal, you know. So there are there are small things like that you can do and have cloud code do your website like add LLM.txt txt or something which is just kind of like essentially like an allow list that's saying let chat GPT
26:39
come and and crawl this website and and stuff like that. But there's not a huge differentiated uh you know strategy out there that that some people know or whatever uh that are that's hiding from everyone else.
It's like the Midwit meme, right? At the top
26:55
of the curve is like >> do you know all the things, right? All the GEO things like uh LM.txt, but like the do just do good SEO, like foundational SEO is the trick to being found in LM.
27:11
>> That's the trick. And I think that, you know, again, some people sort of like, you know, chase a shiny object and then they forget about what actually matters for their own business.
like for this company here like ranking high on Google is way more valuable than going and
27:27
showing up in chatpt you know like it it depends on who the customer is what they're doing how they find things and and stuff like that so are browsers going to change are they going to have AI yeah for sure but again this is such
27:43
an arbitrage opportunity right now that I think people could you know generate tons of revenue by going and using claude code and the latest AI tools to outrank competitors in like boring industries and boring markets. >> Anything else you wanted to cover?
27:58
>> Yeah, real quick. Uh two hacks uh that I just wanted to share.
Uh one is, hey, how were you able to get this site to look good uh with cloud code or whatever. So, I had a few people ask me that on X.
So, I had the Figma design files and I had a designer uh make it
28:16
look good in there. So, I think that's like an important distinction.
Like design and a good brand is very valuable. Like it's worth, you say this all the time, like it's worth getting a designer to like make it look good and then going and doing a lot of the vibe
28:32
coding work. You'll stand out.
A lot of sites look the same now that are vibe coded. People can kind of tell.
So, I had a designer whip something up in Figma for me. And then I got this plugin called Anima.
Anda allows you to convert Figma designs into React components that
28:50
Cloud Code can use to assemble and build your website uh and essentially get, you know, 95% of the way there with the design. So, it got me there.
I vibed a little bit, made a few updates and fixes. Anima is how I did that.
The quick second thing is like, you know,
29:06
people uh still seem to wonder like how do you set up cloud code? How do you set up your development environment?
Stuff like that. Maybe there's some like boring local businesses that don't have a lot of experience in this thing that you know watch this episode or whatever.
So, uh on your Mac, if you have a Mac,
29:24
you have a terminal. Okay?
Like you can search for terminal and then you can Google or chatbt like you know claude code install command or how do I install cloud code? You'll end up getting like cloud desktop.
Um you you can get a
29:39
subscription. It's like 20 bucks a month or something like that.
And uh you know take that command once you're authenticated on cloud desktop uh throw it into your terminal. Um all the packages and the files will install for cloud code and then you'll just like log
29:54
in. It'll open up like you know cloud or cloud desktop and you'll authorize or authenticate it and you're good to go.
Once you're there's a few things that you should do foundationally. One is uh you should set up GitHub.
So, you want to be able to uh have, you know, control
30:12
over each of the versions of of code that you're pushing and have like a uh a way to like roll back if you need to or share those code files or whatever. Create a repository on GitHub um and ask Claude Code how you can push push the the site there and it'll help you with
30:28
the steps. And then I use Verscell to deploy and to host the website.
So you can go to Verscell, you can create an account, uh you can link up Verscell with your GitHub repository and every time you push code updates to GitHub, it'll automatically update your website
30:44
on Verscell for everyone to see. So that's the process that I used to get my environment set up as like a non-technical person.
>> Appreciate the sauce. >> You got it, man.
Uh anytime. Uh hopefully people find it valuable.
just uh you know uh don't sleep on boring
31:00
businesses I guess is uh is the lesson here >> you know. Well, one thing is uh you have a YouTube channel, you have an X account.
We'll include that in the show notes. Yep.
Uh definitely subscribe and follow. You're just sharing things in real time.
>> Uh yeah, I'm at Boring Marketer on X.
31:16
You can find me on YouTube, the Boring Marketer. Uh number two is we've got this community called the vibearketer community and uh the URL is right here the vibearketer.com and uh I wanted to show something.
We we have this new uh members hub that we
31:32
launched and uh in here we have over 2500 different inadin workflows that you can literally plug and play if you want to automate something in your business. So, we give you the code, you can take it and throw it into NAND.
Uh, you know,
31:47
we've got these broken out for different use cases. It's fully searchable.
If you want to find something for, you know, marketing seed keywords, here's a good example. We talked about seed keywords.
Uh, there's SEO ones, there's social media ones, whatever, like ready to go.
32:02
Um, you can come join the community, get access to this. We've also started building out this partner resources uh for our members where we've got some awesome like deals and discounts for people who want to use uh some of the latest like you know AI workflow tools
32:18
and stuff like that. So really starting to expand the community uh working on some cool classroom updates right now and I I really do believe it's the best place to be for AI and marketing the intersection of those two things.
>> Cool. Yeah, I'll include I'll include the links to all those places.
So people
32:36
can can get deeper and and it's really just like I always say getting your hands dirty um you know and and and testing trying iterating and uh dude I love having you on. You're the best.
32:52
Thanks for sharing the sauce and I'll see you next time. >> Thanks for having me, Greg.
Talk to you soon. Later.