With a free set of Claude SEO skills you can audit any page on your site, check its structured data, snapshot it before you change it, and see two weeks later whether the change worked. You don’t need an agency for that, and you don’t need to write code. What you do need is to know where the skills go blind, because a tool that’s right most of the time trains you to stop checking.
This guide gives you the skills worth installing, a three-step routine you can run on your best page today, and six checks that catch what the skills miss. Each check comes from a real mistake on livenewschat.eu, a news site I run that gets about 22,000 organic clicks a month. Of the eight pages Google showed for “claude seo skills” on 5 November 2026, none showed the skills working on a site with real traffic, so that’s what this one does.
A skill, if you’re new to this, is a folder of instructions Claude loads for one kind of job. An MCP is a plug that lets Claude call an outside tool or API. The harness is the program that runs Claude and hands it both. That’s all the jargon here.
Which Claude SEO Skills Should You Install?
Start with the free set. claude-seo by Daniel Agrici is 24 skills under an MIT licence. Learn these seven first:
seo-pageaudits one URL.seo-technicalfinds crawl and index problems.seo-schemachecks your structured data.seo-driftsnapshots a page so you can compare it later.seo-backlinksandseo-dataforseopull the paid data.seo-geotells you whether AI answers can cite the page.
If you run a local business or a store, seo-local, seo-ecommerce and seo-maps are built for you.
Add five more if you publish long content. The SuperSEO set from inhouseseo has eleven skills. The five worth keeping are expert-interview, featured-snippet-optimizer, improve-content, semantic-gap-analysis and linkbuilding; the rest overlap with the free set. One setting to change before you use it: its writing rules allow the long dash, so give it a short context file that bans it.
Then write one or two of your own. A skill is a text file, so any job only you do can become one. On my sites that’s a scorer for guest-post offers (paste 200 links, get a score and a yes or no), an image fixer that swaps a stock photo for a branded one in one step, and a baseline of 61 money pages captured on 8 May 2026 so I can see what any of them used to say.
Run This on Your Best Page Today
Pick one page, the one that makes you money, and run the single-page audit on it.
/seo-page https://yoursite.com/your-money-page/Read what it says. Then, before you change anything, snapshot it.
/seo-drift baseline https://yoursite.com/your-money-page/Make your changes. Two weeks later, compare. If the numbers moved, you’ll know why, because you kept the before.
/seo-drift compare https://yoursite.com/your-money-page/That’s the whole routine. One page is plenty to start with.
Six Checks That Catch What the Skills Can’t See
1. Check the exact URL before you rebuild a “dead” page. On 19 May 2026 a baseline on my news site flagged /france-24-live-stream/ as a 404 and the top fix of the week. The page was fine. The real slug has no hyphen, and every audit after the typo repeated it. Pull the live record before you rebuild anything:
GET /wp-json/wp/v2/pages?slug[]=france-24-live-stream&status=any -> []
GET /wp-json/wp/v2/pages?slug[]=france24-live-stream&status=any -> [{"id":74140,"status":"publish"}]2. Look at the live results before you trust a difficulty score. On 18 July 2026 a cluster of “how to cancel” searches scored difficulty 2 on a term with 27,100 searches a month. Difficulty is a guess built from backlinks. It can’t see that the providers’ own help pages hold four of the top eight, or that Google pins Reddit threads above everyone. Across the four biggest terms, one of 28 results was a site weaker than mine. Pulling the live page first costs under a cent a search and saves you a month.
3. Compare against a page on your own site that already works. The same day, sixteen agents reading Google’s documentation agreed a video page pattern would never get indexed. The “video indexed” report in Search Console showed three pages built that way, already indexed. Documentation tells you what should happen. A page on your own site that already works is an experiment that already ran.
4. Make your monitors fail loudly. A weekly backlink monitor fired every Sunday for three weeks in May 2026 and produced nothing, because one unhandled error stopped it before it wrote a file. Its spam filter also let a wave of low-spam casino links through. Wrap every call, and add a second alarm on volume (forty new linking sites in a week) whatever the spam score says.
5. Ask agents for a text report, not a file. On 15 October 2026 four analysis agents each stopped at about twenty turns with no report. Put everything in one script and have it return the findings as text.
6. If your own firewall blocks the audit, crawl from outside. The same week, the site’s security plugin read an audit crawl as an attack and locked the machine out. A hosted crawl through DataForSEO, 450 pages with the raw HTML kept, ran the whole audit offline instead.
In all six, the skill was sure about something it couldn’t see: a typo in its own input, a score with no eyes on the page, a document that didn’t match the site, a job that failed without saying so. The skills do the work fast. The check is yours, and each one takes minutes.
Which page would you run first?
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on the page that pays your bills, the intro call is free.