How to use Claude for SEO: the complete workflow

Four ways to run SEO: the honest comparison

Before the workflow, it helps to see where this approach actually fits. Here is the honest version against the alternatives most small businesses weigh up.

An agency is still the right call if you want zero involvement and have the budget. A SaaS suite is fine if you enjoy the dashboards and do the work yourself. But if you want the research, the writing, and the publishing to happen in one place, on your own data, at near-zero monthly cost, Claude connected to your stack is now a real option. This guide walks the whole loop.

What "Claude for SEO" actually means

The phrase gets used two ways. The shallow version is "ask Claude to write a blog post," which is useful but is maybe a fifth of the job. The version that moves rankings is Claude with tools connected: it reads your Search Console, knows which queries you already show up for, sees which pages Google has indexed, pulls real keyword volumes, writes the page, publishes it, and checks the result. That is a workflow, not a chat.

The honest framing: Claude does not replace SEO judgement. It removes the manual labour around it. You still decide which topics are worth owning and whether a page is genuinely the best answer. Claude does the data pulls, the drafting, the structuring, and the publishing that used to take a full afternoon each.

The five jobs Claude can actually do for SEO

SEO is not one task. It is five, and Claude handles each one differently. The loop below is the same one we run on this site every week.

The rest of this guide takes each of those five and shows the actual setup and the prompt patterns that work.

Step 1: Connect Claude to your real search data

This is the step that separates real SEO from blind writing, and it is a one-time setup. Claude talks to outside tools through MCP servers, small connectors that give it a specific capability. For SEO, the one that matters most is a Google Search Console connection.

Once it is wired in, you stop describing your site to Claude and start asking it to read your site. The difference in output is night and day. Instead of "write me an article about CRMs," you can say "look at my Search Console, find every query where I rank between position five and fifteen, and tell me which pages are one good edit away from page one." That is a real instruction against real data.

Step 2: Run keyword research from data, not vibes

Most keyword research dies as a brainstorm in a doc. The fix is to put real numbers behind it. Connected to a volume API, Claude takes a seed topic, pulls the search volume and competition for every variation, expands the list with the long-tail questions people actually search, and hands you a ranked queue. You pick from evidence instead of intuition.

A pattern that works: give Claude one seed phrase and ask it to harvest the autocomplete expansions first (the real phrasings people type), then pull volumes for the promising ones, then rank by the opportunity formula of demand against competition. The result is a work queue you can publish against for months.

Step 3: Write pages that are genuinely the best answer

This is where most "AI SEO" goes wrong. A lazy prompt produces a page that reads like every other AI page and ranks like none of them. The pages that rank share a structure: they answer the query in the first paragraph, they include specifics and proof only the author would know, they use a comparison table where a comparison is what the searcher wants, and they close with a real FAQ.

Claude is good at producing that structure on demand, but you have to ask for it. The skill below encodes the structure so you are not re-explaining it every time. The judgement of whether the finished page deserves to rank, whether it actually helps the reader more than the current top result, stays with you. That review is the part that keeps your site out of the thin-content filter.

Step 4: Fix indexing, the half of SEO nobody does

You can publish the best page in your niche and earn nothing if Google never crawls it. On a young or low-authority site, that happens constantly: pages sit undiscovered, the crawl budget gets wasted on test pages and utility URLs, and the sitemap goes stale. This is invisible unless you look, and almost nobody looks.

With Search Console connected, Claude looks for you. It checks which URLs are actually indexed, finds the ones marked "discovered, not indexed," spots the junk pages eating crawl budget, and tells you exactly which money pages to request indexing for first. We ran this on our own site recently and found that most of it had never been crawled at all. The fix was a sitemap cleanup and a round of indexing requests, both of which Claude scoped in minutes.

Then there is the striking-distance work: the pages already ranking on page two that one edit could push to page one. Claude pulls them straight from your query data and tells you which are worth the effort. That is the highest-return hour in SEO, and it is sitting in data most people never open.

Step 5: Get cited in AI Overviews

The search results page changed. For a large and growing share of queries, Google now puts an AI-generated summary at the top, and the links it cites get the attention. Being one of those citations is the new top position, and the rules for earning it are different from classic ranking.

The content that gets quoted is unusually consistent: it opens with a direct, self-contained answer of 40 to 60 words, it puts a comparison table above the fold, it uses FAQPage schema, and it states its methodology. Claude can produce content in exactly that shape, and it can scan which of your existing pages are close. The softer secret is that AI Overviews lean heavily on community sources like Reddit and on YouTube, so the strongest plays pair an on-site page with a genuine answer in the right community and a short video.

The honest limits

A few things Claude will not do for you. It will not invent authority: a brand-new domain still has to earn trust over time, and no workflow shortcuts that. It will not make a thin page rank by force, and trying to mass-produce filler is the fastest way to get filtered. And it will not replace the judgement of knowing your customer better than any model does. The specifics that make a page the best answer, the real numbers, the lived experience, the opinion, have to come from you.

What it does remove is the labour. The research that took an afternoon, the indexing audit nobody ever runs, the internal linking that never gets kept up, the structuring of every page for citations. Hand those to Claude and the part that is left is the part that was always the actual work: deciding what deserves to exist and making sure it is genuinely good.

SoloStack runs its entire SEO operation this way, in one repo, on the same database as the CRM and the rest of the business. We build that setup with you, live, in the workshop.

Skills referenced in this article

Every skill linked above, in one table. Each is a free, downloadable Claude Code prompt.