SEO means search engine optimisation. It is the work of making a website more likely to show up when someone searches for something on Google.
Worth saying up front: Anthropic does not publish an SEO skill. Plenty of articles imply otherwise. Look at the actual list and there is nothing for SEO on it.
That turns out not to matter much, because most SEO work is checking the same things over and over, and that is exactly what you can teach Claude to do yourself.
What Claude Code is genuinely good at here
Claude Code can read every file on your site at once. That makes it very good at the boring, checkable half of SEO:
- Checking every page title. Too long, too short, or accidentally the same as another page.
- Checking descriptions. The grey text under your link in search results.
- Finding images with no description. Every image needs alt text, which is a short written description used by screen readers and by search engines.
- Finding pages nothing links to. A page no other page links to is very hard for Google to find.
- Checking your sitemap. That is the list of pages you give Google. It should match what actually exists.
- Fixing pages that jump about while loading, which Google counts against you.
All of that is mechanical. There is a right answer, and a computer can find it faster than you can.
What it cannot do
Claude cannot see Google. It does not know what is ranking today, how many people search for something, or who your competition is.
Ask it anyway and you will get a confident-sounding answer built from nothing. It will not warn you. This is the most important limitation to hold on to.
Write your rules down once
The trick is to save your standards as a skill, so they get applied the same way every time by everyone.
---
name: seo-audit
description: Check pages against our SEO rules. Use this when
publishing a page, reviewing content, or when someone mentions
SEO, titles, descriptions or alt text.
---
# Page check
Report only the things that fail.
## Titles
- Between 50 and 60 characters
- Main topic near the start
- No two pages share a title
## Descriptions
- Between 140 and 160 characters
- Describes this page, not the whole site
## Images
- Every image has alt text that describes it
- Decorative images have empty alt text, not missing alt textSave that as SKILL.md inside .claude/skills/seo-audit/ in your project, and share it. Now the whole team checks the same things.
The description at the top matters more than the rules underneath. That is the only part Claude reads when deciding whether this is relevant, so put in the words your team actually says.
If you want real numbers
For anything live, such as search volumes or current rankings, Claude needs a connection to a service that has that data.
That connection is called an MCP server. Several SEO companies already provide one. If yours does not, Anthropic publishes a guide for building your own called mcp-builder.
The judgement you have to keep
Here is the mistake that wastes the most time in SEO, and no tool will save you from it.
Every SEO tool gives keywords a difficulty score. Those scores are worked out against an average website. They are not worked out against yours.
The only test that actually means anything is to search the phrase yourself and look at who is on the first page. If those are all huge, famous websites, you are not getting on that page, whatever the score said.
Claude will happily spend an hour perfecting a page aimed at a phrase you have no chance of ranking for. It has no way of knowing, and it will not mention it.
So let it do the checking, which is most of the work. Keep the decision about what to aim at for yourself.
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