How to Prompt Claude Code for SEO
Treat your coding agent like an SEO specialist with unlimited patience: ask everything, hand over every idea, and steer it so the work serves your strategy.
The thing people ask us most is how to use Claude Code for SEO without doing it badly.
The worry is usually about technique. There is very little technique. What works is treating the agent as a specialist who has read everything, never tires, and will answer the same question twelve times in a row. So ask the twelve questions. Bring the ideas you have not finished thinking about. Bring the ones that sound ridiculous.
Steering is your half of the job. The agent does not know which customer pays you. You do.
SEO itself goes deep, and you can skip most of that depth. Working a problem alongside an agent teaches you the part you need, when you need it. That beats reading a textbook in advance and forgetting it.
A 60-second example
You: We published twenty posts this quarter and traffic is flat. Why?
Claude: Three likely causes, cheapest to check first: some posts are not indexed, some target terms nobody searches, and some rank on page two where nobody clicks. Let me start with indexing, since Search Console answers it in one query.
You: Say it's page two. What then?
Claude: Rewrite the four with buying intent behind them, and leave the rest alone. A page sitting at position 14 is a small edit away from page one. Twenty pages touched lightly is not worth anything.
Notice what happened between the second and third message. The first answer was a diagnosis. The second was a plan, with an order of operations attached. One follow-up produced it.
Setting it up
Two commands install the Doverity MCP server plus all nine agent skills into Claude Code:
The Doverity plugin marketplace isn't publicly installable yet. Until it is, set up Doverity MCP and Agent Skills manually instead. The commands below are correct and will work once the marketplace is public.
/plugin marketplace add AkhilPathak/doverity
/plugin install openseo@openseoCodex CLI gets a plugin of its own. Anything else that speaks MCP — Cursor included — can connect directly.
Why the data is not free
An agent with no data source will produce search volumes that look authoritative and are fiction. Real numbers are the difference between an SEO conversation and a plausible one.
The numbers are expensive to produce. Crawling the web and storing what people type into Google is serious infrastructure, which is why the established suites bill north of $100 a month.
Doverity is $10 a month, and that includes $10 of metered usage. Creating an account is free and comes with $0.50 of credits to test with. Talking to your agent costs nothing extra — you are already paying for Claude. Charges only happen when the agent fetches live data, and a keyword lookup lands around five cents. Your own Search Console numbers are never billed.
Your first prompt
Skip the documentation. Ask this instead:
Which SEO skills are installed here, and which one fits my situation best?
Each skill is a packaged workflow — audits, keyword research, link prospecting and so on — and the agent will choose one and justify the choice. If it reports that nothing is installed, run the two commands above and repeat the question.
Prompts that produce useful answers
We dictate our own prompts, which is why these read like speech. A voice memo with a tangent in it carries more context than a sentence you polished, and mistranscribed words do not break anything. Wispr Flow and superwhisper handle this well; Handy and FluidVoice are both open source.
Push back on everything. Options are cheap. Make the agent defend them.
Of those six, which one changes revenue this quarter, and what is the strongest case for doing nothing at all?
Bring unfinished ideas. Killing a bad idea costs a minute. Building one costs a month.
Someone suggested we write a comparison page against each competitor. Before I agree to that, tell me every reason it could fail.
Explain your buyer the way you would to a friend. Including who it is not for. That context does more for keyword selection than any setting.
Our product is for engineers who would rather script this than click through a UI. Agencies want dashboards and we are not going to win them. Look for searches those engineers actually run.
Describe the result you want. Let the agent choose the steps.
Find the highest-value technical problem on this site and fix it. I do not want a report first.
Send the thing itself. A screenshot of something that looks broken is a complete prompt. Interrupting a task that has gone sideways is also fine, and it costs you nothing.
Getting a clear answer out of it
Nothing here is fragile:
- Lost? Ask for the explanation again, aimed at a beginner. It costs seconds and the tone never changes.
- Doubtful? Ask what evidence would settle it, then send the agent at your own Search Console numbers.
- Nervous? Reading data and answering questions touches nothing. When the agent does change a file, it shows you first, and most SEO changes are text you can undo.
There is no audience judging your prompts. Asking something clumsy wastes a moment, and so does repeating yourself.
Where to begin
Record yourself describing the business: what you sell, who pays for it, and what you want from search. Send it, then ask what to attack first and what it turned down.
You will get a short ranked list with the reasoning next to each item. Disagree with at least one of them before you act on the rest.
This works whether or not Doverity is connected. Connected, the reasoning arrives with real numbers behind it.
What each skill does
The two commands above install all nine. The Codex plugin ships the same set. On any other client, wire up MCP, then drop in the skill files.
Each one is a full workflow rather than a prompt fragment. The five you will use most:
- SEO Audit — reviews the site and hands back one page of plain language, organised around a single next action.
- Keyword Research — finds terms worth targeting and says why each one suits your business.
- Competitive Landscape — maps who is winning your market and where the gaps are.
- Link Prospecting — finds outreach prospects worth contacting and the reason each one would care.
- Local SEO — reviews a Google Business Profile, sets it beside local competitors, and maps where you vanish from Google Maps around a location.
None of this needs memorising. Ask which skill fits, or browse the skills docs.
FAQ
Do AI SEO agents get real results?
For legwork, yes. Research, audits, tracking, competitor analysis — these are data problems, and an agent holding real data is good at exactly those. Autopilot is different. Google's spam policies call out scaled AI content generation by name, and no agent hands you a strategy. Judgment stays on your side of the keyboard — that is the arrangement this guide assumes.
Will AI replace SEO?
It is relocating the answers instead. A growing share of searches end in an AI-written response rather than a results page, and those responses cite their sources. Citation-worthiness has not moved: pages a crawler can read, content that settles the question, and a reputation other sites will vouch for.
Is SEO dead?
Demand is intact and spread across more surfaces: Google, AI Overviews, and chat assistants. What ended is the version built on stuffing keywords and waiting. Being found, and now being cited, still comes down to questions your agent can help you work through.
Can I do SEO myself?
Yes. That is the reason to work this way. Reading data, choosing a priority, and knowing what to check next used to be what you paid a specialist for, and those are the agent's strengths. What you bring — knowing your own business — no agency can supply. Hiring an SEO later can be worthwhile. It is not a prerequisite.
How much does SEO cost?
Your hours, and a data bill. The data is $10 a month on Doverity, north of $100 with the big suites, or a provider deposit if you self-host and bring your own key. Content is priced in your own time. No agency required to start.
How long before SEO pays off?
Months. Pages have to be recrawled, re-ranked, and trusted, so movement starts in weeks and meaningful results land around the three to six month mark. Weekly rank tracking and your Search Console data exist for exactly this stretch — they give you proof of progress before the traffic graph does.
Is SEO worth running for a small business?
When customers search for what you sell, yes. Spend ten minutes confirming before you commit: pull up the terms you would want, and check whether anyone searches them and who holds the results today. If there is no search demand for your category, spend the time on a different channel and look again later.