It’s been many months of hard work and graft, but finally Carpet Tiles UK is live. It happened as somewhat of an accident. A client had made an enquiry about making a website to sell carpet tiles, I saw some of the competition, and I thought, you know what? I like the look of this challenge!

Many months later, after the toil of getting a VAT Number, opening up a bank account with Barclays (that took 3 months!) We finally were able to push it live. I’m working on this project with Adam, my business partner. He has all the industry know-how and knowledge, and I have the digital experience to start, grow and scale this through running my agency the past 11 years.

So, in this early stage what has all of this taught me?

 

MCPs change everything.

I’ve been using Claude with the Shopify MCP, and oh my. Tasks that would take weeks are now condensed into a day. If you know what you are doing with this tech, it is honestly mind blowing. I was able to do keyword research using SEMRush MCP, feed in all my current products and then rewrite 800 SEO Titles at scale and push live once I had overseen them.

 

It can’t be understated how incredible that is. The direction of travel for agencies will be interesting because the exchange of time for value feels like it’s coming to an end. Pricing end product and value has to be the way to go if agencies are to survive and thrive.

When planning the site I made a mistake, I’d uploaded my products as variable products but because of how Shopify is built that means I was then unable to populate my variants on said collection pages. E.g. show all the grey carpet tiles on a grey carpet tiles collection pages.

So, I used Claude. Claude was able to break down all my variable products into single products effortlessly, It ran a small scale test and then deployed it. Wow. Another task which would have taken an age to complete, done in a day.

My next problem was swatches, how could I maintain the look of a variable product page while keeping the flexibility a single product page gives you. Massive thanks to some chaps I met at networking for this suggestion. I was able to deploy some code which looked for specific tags on the products, from that tag it was then able to bring in the product and the colour name because of consistent naming conventions. This is what AI is incredible at. The beauty is with the MCP connection I was able to test and deploy all these changes to a draft theme, test the logic and then push live.

Many people use AI in the wrong way, they ask it a question and then copy and paste the new code or task back in. Using a MCP removed all the friction.

 

Good Data Architecture Planning can save you a lot of time.

One thing I wish I had done better was building out my data architecture for products better. Saying that, I often see people and business owners that get caught up on having everything perfect before they launch.

I did have the hindsight to build out some metafields – but in some cases I used a calculated field e.g. for the Price per m2. I wish I’d put this in as a set metafield, so then I could use it for filtering consequently. Some products we sell look cheap, but arn’t due to a low amount of tiles per box, and visa versa for expensive products that have a large amount of tiles per box.

However, not to fear! Because with Claude and the MCP I can easily create this metafield, calculate the values and push it live. Following this I can create this as a future standard for product uploads.

 

EMDs seem to get favoured a lot by Bing.

The domain is an exact match domain carpettiles.co.uk it also cost a lot of money for that privilege. I knew that Exact Match Domains can kill it, but I wasn’t expecting to rank as high as quickly as I did on Bing. While google is taking it’s sweet time to mature, bing rocketed us ot 3rd place for some queries within a couple of months.

I also discovered that one of our competitors was DOMINATING the product grids. I wondered how? Well it turns out not many people think about Bing, I mean I don’t! So, I setup my merchant account on Bing, waiting for the magic to happen… and it never arrived.

I have to do a long arduous verification process with Bing. But I did find something interesting that Brodie Clark said about putting some token spend on the platform to then “enable” your products to go live across the free listings. So, we’ll wait and see whether this is the case and whether spending £5 a day unlocks a massive amount of free visibility.

It gets worse before it gets better.

The “Changing a Rank of a Document by Applying a Rank Transition Function” patent as it’s known. I first heard about this from Mark Williams Cook, and to be honest, I’d not seen it all that much in my years of SEO.

I’d certainly seen the “sandbox” heck, I’ve even seen it with this project, it took 6 weeks before our impressions started to explode.

But I saw this happen on this project. Right before the huge surge in impressions, the impressions dipped for a period of a few days.

This is a hard coded into the algorithm and is meant to catch spam. I certainly think if you were running your SEO autonomously with Agents, then this is the kind of thing that would spook them.

 

Final Thoughts

Whether we like it or not, AI is here to stay. I also think many industries are about to get incredibly competitive as the bar for resource and work needed drops, meaning anyone with good knowledge of how AI works could spin up a site and product quickly.

Saying this, creation doesn’t feel like the hard thing anymore. Websites were notoriously difficult for years, they required skill, knowledge and expertise. They required multiple disciplines an departments. Now they can be done to a really high standard by 1 man teams armed with tech.

But, you know what has never felt harder? Marketing. If more people than ever are building product, more people than ever will be competing against you and your brand. SEO gets more difficult, writing original content is harder than ever. It feels like we’re in a time when creating shit is as easy as it has ever been, but making great content, great work, that feels hard.

Agencies are changing. I think the people agencies once hated, the multi-disciplinary marketeers that you didn’t quite know how to place, are going to be the hot property of the next few years. Those that have the ideas, and the know how to execute, those are going to be the people that are incredibly valuable because they can take an idea and execute it now. Something that historically was very difficult to do.