India's solar sector is exploding, but try Googling "solar installer in Pune" and tell me you find anything useful. It's all lead-gen farms with paid listings. There's no actual directory. So I built one over a weekend.
Registered the domain at 11 PM on a Friday. By Saturday evening I had a working Next.js app with PostgreSQL, a basic search, and city-wise installer listings scraped from public government data. Almost all of the backend was Claude Code. I described what I wanted, iterated on the schema with it, and let it generate the CRUD and the API routes. My job was mostly to point out what was wrong and where to look next.
Sunday was pure content. I wrote unique city pages for 50+ Indian cities, with proper heading hierarchies, local keywords, and structured data. Each one answers the exact thing people actually type: "best solar installer in Pune", "solar panel cost in Bengaluru", "government subsidies for solar in Jaipur".
That's the whole trick. These are informational queries with commercial intent. Google ranks pages that answer the question, not pages that just dump a list of businesses on you.
Monday morning I pushed to Vercel, submitted the sitemap to Search Console, and set up monitoring. First 24 hours were dead silent, zero impressions. Started to think I'd messed something up. Day 4, Google began crawling hard.
By Day 6, indexed pages went from 3 to 51. A 17x jump. Organic impressions started landing on Day 8. Inside two weeks the site was on page 1 for several city-level keywords. Zero rupees of marketing spend.
// The boring SEO checklist that did the heavy lifting
const seoChecklist = {
sitemap: "Auto-generated with next-sitemap",
robots: "Proper crawl directives",
structuredData: "LocalBusiness schema on every listing",
metaTags: "Unique title + description per page",
internalLinks: "City -> installer -> city cross-linking",
pageSpeed: "Static generation, no client-side data fetching",
};Ship first, optimize later. Three days to a live product beats three months to a perfect one. Nobody sees the perfect version because it never ships.
Claude Code changed how I work. I'm not a prompt engineer. I just describe what I want in plain English and iterate. The first pass is usually good enough, and I refactor what survives.
Technical SEO is still a real moat. Most directory founders don't understand indexation, canonical tags, or structured data. Knowing this stuff gives you a six-month head start, no joke.
Content depth beats content polish. 50+ unique city pages in one weekend. Competitors had 10-15 generic ones. Google noticed.