SEO & AI search

Every answer 12 answers

• Can SEO bring leads to a bare-bones local website?

  Yes, especially in local niches with almost no competition. My rough AI training site brought in two multi-thousand-dollar leads in about two days purely from search, and an apartment-locator site I never optimized grew to about one lead a day. Ranking in a city where nobody else ranks beats a pretty site.

• How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT?

  Make the AI confident in you. Be seen everywhere as a real expert (YouTube, social, Reddit, a public newsletter), get trusted third parties like local media and chambers talking about you, and keep the same facts about you everywhere. Nobody can guarantee a mention, but those are the parts you control.

• How do I run an automated SEO article system for local sites without publishing AI slop?

  Go slow and make every article specific. I cap automated output at about one article a day per brand, often every other or third day, with detailed prompts per brand. Research tools feed the writer real local details, every location article names real neighborhoods and cities, and a final pass strips out AI tells.

• How do you build a local directory that AI search will cite?

  Build it for AI first: store each business's data as answers to the questions people ask, give every business a page with real photos, real reviews and the owner's own words, keep it on one domain, and use free listings to start conversations. WilCo Guide got about two submissions a day in its first month with zero promotion.

• Is WordPress still the best choice for SEO?

  Not anymore, in my view. "WordPress is best for SEO" is a 2024-and-earlier belief. I build local sites on Next.js with a headless CMS: faster, better looking, cheaper, and better for SEO. With AI doing the coding, the old reason to pick WordPress is gone, and managed news hosting can start at $750 a month.

• Should a newsletter's SEO content live on a subdomain or the root domain?

  The root domain. Subdomains are bad for SEO. Put articles at yoursite.com/article-name, not blog.yoursite.com, and keep all your local brands on one domain so every page you publish builds the same site's authority instead of splitting it.

• Should you publish your newsletter issues on your own website?

  Yes. Copy every past issue to your own domain as a real web page that looks like the issue. Link your stories to your own site, not someone else's. Treat your email platform as sending infrastructure, and cross-post elsewhere only for discovery.

• What is an AI visibility audit?

  An AI visibility audit checks what ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini say about a business right now, and why. When I audited myself I scored 30 out of 100, mostly because my facts conflicted across the internet. The first fix is usually boring: make your name, location and numbers match everywhere.

• What is the 10-80-10 rule for AI content?

  The 10-80-10 rule says a person supplies the first 10% (the real insight, story or expertise), AI does the middle 80% (drafting, formatting, repurposing), and a person does the last 10% (editing, fact-checking, deciding what ships). Cut either human end and you get slop.

• What should founder-led content be about?

  What actually happened: what you're building, what broke, what worked, what a customer did this week, and what you learned. Founder-led content is your real thinking turned into good writing. It doubles as dated proof of work, which is exactly what search engines, AI assistants and future customers trust.

• Which businesses benefit most from showing up in AI search?

  Person-based professional services that people already ask AI about: insurance agents, estate planners, attorneys, public adjusters, and to a degree roofers. The more often people ask an AI for that kind of help, and the more one client is worth, the more it pays to be the expert the AI trusts.

• Will anyone actually see a business's listing on a local media directory?

  Some people will, because the newsletters push readers to it. It won't get Yelp's traffic, and it doesn't need to. The bigger goal is getting the business cited when someone asks ChatGPT for the best roofer in town. At about $50 a month the downside is small and the upside is large, though nobody can guarantee an AI citation.