Building SEO Tools with AI: What Works Right Now - Ian Howells

an Howells, SEO consultant and founder of LuckyPixel, presents "Building SEO Tools with AI: What Works Right Now" at the Triangle SEO Meetup in Raleigh, NC.

Ian shares how a career spent building SEO tools long before AI was in the picture evolved into using Claude Code to solve real problems for his clients and personal projects. He walks through specific tools he's built, gives honest takes on what's actually worth your time and what isn't, recommends specific approaches and plugins that have worked well for him, and gives away scripts and repos attendees can take home and run themselves.

Transcript

1. Building SEO Tools with AI Triangle SEO Meetup | March 2026
2. ABOUT Wait, Who’s This Guy? I've been publishing and monetizing web content since 2001, and leading digital marketing teams since 2007. I’ve led SEO in-house at places like Opendoor, LendingTree, and Red Ventures. I co-founded Traffic Think Tank in 2017 and sold it to Semrush in 2023. Now I'm building personal projects, search-centered tools, and consulting with a small number of clients. Ian Howells
3. Building has changed Building used to mean… • Learning Python, Go, PHP, etc • Debugging dependencies • Fighting APIs • Deploying and maintaining servers But now it just means… • Describing the problem clearly The skill that matters now is knowing what to build, not the exact details of how to build it.
4. What’s working now? What will keep working?
5. Code will keep working… when models change when models get nerfed after subsidized model pricing ends Use LLMs for as little as possible in your actual tools.
6. One Weird Trick That Fixes Most Vibe Coding
7. "Give me six hours to… chop down a tree one-shot an app and I will spend the first four… sharpening the axe in plan mode" - Viberaham Lincoln
8. Example Apps
9. Atlas Problem • What topics can we go after that actually have a good shot of getting ranked? • What traffic is really out there to go get? • What’s our opportunity in new pages vs optimizing or refreshing existing content? Solution • Competitor anchored traffic assumptions, hand picked for each topic.
10. Atlas Workflow • User load in… ◦ Keywords ◦ Top Pages data from aHrefs ◦ Organic Keywords report from aHrefs • Atlas then… ◦ Hits DataForSEO for the top 10 in Google for all terms ◦ Clusters into topics ◦ Uses an assumed CTR to get the top 8 URLs per cluster ◦ Sends those to the aHrefs API to get DR and traffic data • User then… ◦ Filters and confirms opportunities ◦ Exports the content map
15. Signal Problem • How are clicks / impressions / avg position changing period over period? • When we’re losing clicks - what’s the driver? Is it demand or are we getting beat by competitors? • How much of our performance is position vs demand vs CTR? Solution • Pull the data from the GSC API and run comparisons automatically.
22. Recommendations
23. Tabby Terminal App Tabby - saved connections and snippets. https://tabby.sh
24. Hetzner Servers Hetzner - super affordable servers, solid connections, automated daily backups in case you break stuff (odds are good if you’re yolo’ing agent permissions) https://hetzner.com/cloud
25. Sequel Ace Database Management Sequel Ace - view your databases like a spreadsheet. (Also… modern LLMs are really good at SQL if you need a quick query to check something.) https://sequel-ace.com/
26. Free Stuff
27. WhatBox The Purpose Claudecode (etc) needs to know what’s on your server, and what isn’t. Running this gives your coding tool of choice a full rundown of what you’ve got running so it doesn’t guess and give you code that fails due to missing dependencies. https://github.com/inhmedia/whatbox
28. Design Guide The Purpose If you want to show clients your tools, or just have them all look uniform, you need a stock set of design guidance so the LLM of your choice knows what to make the frontend look like. Enter plan mode, and point your LLM to… https://github.com/inhmedia/design-guide
29. Planner The Purpose The prior docs give your agent the details on your server, and what you want tools to look like… now the Planner helps you more clearly define what it is you want to have built. Enter plan mode and point your agent here: https://github.com/inhmedia/planner
30. Q&A