I just vibe-coded my first web directory...

YouTube Sparks the Idea

A few months ago, I watched a YouTube video where Greg Isenberg and John Rush talked about building a web directory.

I also learned a lot from Frey Chu's videos because he explains things simply.

They said a web directory is like a source of traffic that can help you make money with your SaaS or any products.

I found this idea really interesting, but I haven’t had time to work on it until now.

SEO Roasts Spark the Plan

One day, while scrolling through my feed on X, I saw that @levelsio was letting @illyism do an "SEO Roast in Public" with his websites, Nomads.com and RemoteOK.com.

They discussed how pSEO (programmatic SEO) has made a huge impact on his sites.

If you’re not familiar, pSEO is when you create a lot of pages that have the same structure but target different keywords.

For example, take a look at Nomads.com. It shows things like living costs, air quality, and internet speed.

If you search for it on Google, you'll notice that the titles and descriptions are similar, but they target different cities.

Here are some pages to check out:

• https://nomads.com/mendoza

• https://nomads.com/vadodara

• https://nomads.com/buffalo

• https://nomads.com/ljubljana

They have the same structure, but each page offers different information for specific locations.

RemoteOK.com does the same thing. Many pages share a structure, but the content inside is different.

This lets his websites rank for different location-based keywords automatically.

After learning more about the SEO Roast and watching videos from Greg, John, and Frey, I got inspired to create my first directory for one of my Shopify stores.

I've been making money selling print-on-demand products in my store for years using Facebook Ads.

If you're in the paid traffic game like me, you know that ad costs keep rising every year.

I figured it’s time to focus on building organic traffic for my store.

When I saw how others were generating tons of traffic from web directories and pSEO, I decided to jump in.

I picked a niche that relates to my Shopify products, and luckily, it can use location-based keywords. (Sorry, I can’t share my niche 🤐)

Coding Vibes and AI Sidekicks

I went to Grok to design the pages and style for my web directory.

I let Grok write the prompt for Cursor to build the directory for me.

And then, let the hacking begin!

(cue the Social Network movie sound as I crack my fingers and start coding)

I started vibe-coding my directory.

First, I created the frontend UI and spent a few hours to get it just right.

Then, I built the backend to scrape data from Google Maps. It was fun watching Claude (in Cursor) create functions for me.

Finally, I connected the frontend with the backend.

Boom! The basic directory was done, starting with around 300 locations.

It took me about 4-5 days, working just 2-3 hours each day.

Letting Visitors Build My Empire

But I wasn’t satisfied yet. I didn’t want my directory to be too static.

I realized that scraping data can get expensive if I wanted 1,000-10,000 locations.

Plus, I didn’t want to scrape data for cities that no one searches for.

Since I’m all about automation, I adapted the search function on my website to let visitors do the work for me.

When someone searches for something, my bot checks if there’s data in the database or not.

If yes » it shows the results.

If not » it checks whether the search is nonsense or spam.

If it’s good, scrapes new data and creates a new page automatically.

Cool, right? 

I don’t need to spend more on data scraping or research which cities to target.

Let the visitors decide.

From SEO Zero to Launch

Before launching my web directory, I asked Claude to add important SEO meta tags for me.

I’m still a bit of a novice when it comes to SEO, so I let Claude add anything that could boost my code’s SEO.

I also had it create a sitemap that auto-updates and submits to Google Search Console.

Then, I launched my first web directory.

Here are the stats on day #3.

I was a bit surprised to see this because I didn’t expect traffic to come so fast.

When I wrote my first blog post years ago, it took time to get organic traffic.

But now, with my directory and pSEO technique, traffic is coming in quickly.

I found out that Google indexed just 6 pages of my site initially, so I submitted my URLs to be indexed manually in Google Search Console.

But that took too long, so I asked Grok if I could automate this.

Grok said yes and gave me instructions, which I passed to Cursor to build the tool for me.

And I got this...

Pretty cool, right?

This script checks if my URL is indexed in Google. If not, it requests indexing.

Google lets us submit just 100 URLs a day, so I hit that limit just a few minutes after running the script lol

Anyway, I’ll keep requesting indexing tomorrow.

Let's see if I get more traffic as more pages get indexed by Google.

That’s it for this post.

I just wanted to share that I vibe-coded and launched my first web directory.

I couldn’t have done this in under a week without help from AI.

AI is super smart now, and it’s the best time to turn your ideas into reality.

Let’s build something.

-Bank