Claude SEO skills: the best free ones, and how to build your own

SEO runs on checklists: what to fix first in an audit, what goes in a content brief, when a page needs a refresh. That makes it one of the best fits for Claude Skills. A Skill holds the checklist, and Claude follows it every time instead of giving generic advice.

This guide covers the best free Claude SEO skills, how to give Claude real ranking data (a Skill alone doesn't have any), and how to turn your own SEO process into a Skill. If Skills are new to you, start with What are Claude Skills?

The best free Claude SEO skills

Claude SEO: a full audit toolkit for Claude Code

Claude SEO, by Daniel Agrici, is the biggest dedicated SEO project for Claude we found, with about 18,000 GitHub stars. It's MIT-licensed and describes itself as running "26 sub-skills and 19 specialist agents" across technical SEO, content quality, schema, AI search, local SEO, e-commerce and international SEO.

You run it with commands such as /seo audit <url> for a full site audit, /seo page, /seo schema, /seo geo for AI search, and /seo content-brief <topic>. In Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add AgriciDaniel/claude-seo
/plugin install claude-seo@agricidaniel-claude-seo
/seo setup

Good to know:

• It's built for Claude Code and needs Python 3.10 or newer.
• It works without any API keys. Google's free APIs (Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, GA4) add real data once you connect your own account.
• Full audits aren't cheap to run. Five of its agents use Opus, Claude's largest model, and its README notes that a full audit costs more as a result.

Marketing Skills: lighter SEO skills you can mix and match

Corey Haines' Marketing Skills collection (MIT, about 53,000 GitHub stars) includes a set of plain-instruction SEO skills:

• seo-audit: diagnoses technical and on-page issues, from "why am I not ranking" to crawl errors.
• ai-seo: optimizes content to be cited in AI answers and AI Overviews.
• programmatic-seo: plans pages built at scale from templates and data.
• schema: adds and fixes structured data for rich results.
• site-architecture: plans page hierarchy, URLs and internal linking.
• content-strategy: decides what to write and how topics cluster.

Install just the SEO ones:

npx skills add coreyhaines31/marketingskills --skill seo-audit ai-seo programmatic-seo schema site-architecture content-strategy

The skills share one context file about your product and audience (the product-marketing skill), so set that up first. Because they're instructions rather than code, they're also the easier ones to use in a normal Claude chat: zip a skill's folder and upload it in Customize > Skills.

Give Claude real ranking data

A Skill holds a method, not data. Claude doesn't have search volumes or rankings of its own, so for keyword research and rank checks, connect a data source:

• Semrush, Ahrefs and Similarweb are in Claude's connector directory. Add them in Customize > Connectors; each needs its own account with that service. See The best Claude connectors for marketers and course creators.
• DataForSEO runs a remote MCP server at https://mcp.dataforseo.com/v3/mcp. Add it as a custom connector; it needs a DataForSEO API account. On Claude's Free plan you can add one custom connector (how to add one).
• Google Search Console connects through Claude SEO's own Google setup (/seo google setup).

With a skill and a data source together, "find my striking-distance keywords and brief the top three" becomes one request instead of an afternoon.

What a good SEO skill contains

The public skills above are general on purpose. The ones that make the biggest difference encode your own rules:

• Thresholds: what counts as striking distance, when a page has decayed enough to refresh, how much overlap is cannibalization.
• Your brief format: the sections, word counts and internal links every brief must have.
• Priorities: what to fix first when an audit finds 200 issues.
• What not to do: practices you've stopped using and why.

Here's a short example for a content brief skill:

---
name: seo-content-brief
description: Writes an SEO content brief for a target keyword. Use when asked for a brief, an outline for a blog post, or what to write for a keyword. Not for auditing existing pages.
---

# SEO content brief

1. Confirm the target keyword and the reader it's for.
2. Check the top 10 results (use the search data connector if one is available). Note the search intent and what every top result covers.
3. Write the brief in this format:
   - Working title (under 60 characters, keyword near the start)
   - Search intent, in one sentence
   - Outline: H2s and H3s, each with one line on what it must answer
   - Questions to answer, from People also ask
   - Three internal links to add, with suggested anchor text
4. Flag anything the top results get wrong. That's the angle.

The fastest way to write one is to ask Claude: its built-in skill-creator interviews you and drafts the SKILL.md. See Claude's Skill Creator: how to use it, and where it stops.

If you teach SEO

If your SEO process is what you sell, in a course, a coaching program or an agency, it can also become a Skill your customers use. expertrelay reads your course, finds the Skills inside it, and lets you review each one privately. Customers then use them from Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor without getting your files, and every update reaches everyone at once.

See what's in your course →

FAQ

Are there Claude skills for SEO?

Yes. Two widely used free options are Claude SEO, a full audit toolkit for Claude Code, and the SEO skills in Corey Haines' Marketing Skills collection. Both are MIT-licensed.

Can Claude do keyword research?

Only with a data source. Claude has no search volume or ranking data of its own, so connect Semrush, Ahrefs or DataForSEO and pair it with a Skill that says how you choose keywords.

Do these work in claude.ai, or only in Claude Code?

Claude SEO needs Claude Code. The Marketing Skills SEO skills are plain instructions, so you can zip one and upload it in Customize > Skills.

Are Claude SEO skills free?

The skills on this list are. The data tools you connect to them, like Semrush, Ahrefs and DataForSEO, are paid services.

What's the best Claude SEO skill?

For a full technical audit, Claude SEO. For specific jobs like schema or AI search, the matching Marketing Skills skill. For your own way of working, one you build yourself.