# seo-audit

> A Claude Code skill that audits a site for SEO issues — technical, on-page, content, link, Core Web Vitals — and produces a prioritized action plan tied to ranking impact.

**Use case**: Diagnose SEO issues without buying five tools

**Canonical URL**: https://agentcookbooks.com/skills/seo-audit/

**Topics**: claude-code, skills, marketing, seo

**Trigger phrases**: "SEO audit", "technical SEO", "why am I not ranking", "lost rankings", "core web vitals"

**Source**: [Corey Haines](https://github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills/tree/main/skills/seo-audit)

**License**: MIT

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## What it does

`seo-audit` is a Claude Code skill from Corey Haines's [marketing-skills repo](https://github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills). It turns Claude into an SEO auditor who walks the site systematically — technical health, on-page optimization, content quality, link profile, Core Web Vitals — and produces a prioritized action plan, not a 200-row report nobody reads. The skill activates when you mention "SEO audit", "technical SEO", "why am I not ranking", "lost rankings", or "Core Web Vitals".

The output of a session is an audit report: critical-first findings (indexation issues, broken canonicals, security flags), high-leverage on-page issues (title/meta gaps, heading structure), content thinness inventory, link-profile flags, Core Web Vitals diagnostics, and a top-10 prioritized action list.

## When to use it

Reach for it when:

- Traffic dropped and you don't know if it's a Google update, a technical regression, or content drift
- You inherited a site and need a triage pass before any optimization work
- A migration just shipped and you need a post-mortem audit

When *not* to reach for it:

- The site is brand new with no rankings; audit is for diagnosis, not creation
- You need ongoing monitoring; audit is a snapshot, not a feed

## Install

The skill is distributed via Corey Haines's [marketing-skills repo](https://github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills). Install via the repo's recommended path — copy the [`seo-audit` SKILL.md](https://github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills/tree/main/skills/seo-audit) into your project's `.claude/skills/seo-audit/` directory, or use the repo's plugin install if you've set it up.

Once installed, the skill activates on the trigger phrases above. The first time it runs, it will check for `.agents/product-marketing-context.md` (or `.claude/product-marketing-context.md`) — populating that file with your product context first dramatically improves output quality across all of Haines's marketing skills.

## What a session looks like

A typical session has three phases:

1. **Technical pass.** Indexation, canonicals, robots.txt, sitemap, crawl errors, hreflang if multilingual, Core Web Vitals snapshot.
2. **On-page + content pass.** Title/meta coverage, heading structure, content thinness, internal-linking gaps, schema presence.
3. **Action plan.** Top 10 fixes ordered by impact-vs-effort, with the criticals (indexation, security) flagged separately so you ship those first.

The discipline that makes it work: criticals before optimizations. A 500 missing title-tags fix doesn't matter if the homepage has `noindex`.

## Receipts

Honest reporting on what `seo-audit` produces and where it has limits:

**Where it works well:**
- Critical-first ordering catches the indexation problems that quietly nuke a site
- The thinness inventory is where most quick traffic wins live (consolidate or expand)
- Core Web Vitals snapshot tells you whether the latency tax is biting

**Where it backfires:**
- Without paid tools (Ahrefs, Semrush, Screaming Frog) the link-profile and crawl coverage are partial
- Some "best practices" don't apply at certain scales; the skill defaults to the broadly-true ones

**Pattern that works:** run the audit, ship the criticals this week, the high-leverage on-page items this month. Don't try to fix the whole list at once — most lists never get finished.

## Source and attribution

Originally written by [Corey Haines](https://corey.co). The canonical SKILL.md and any supporting files live in the [`seo-audit` folder](https://github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills/tree/main/skills/seo-audit) of his [marketing-skills repository](https://github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills).

License: MIT. You can install, adapt, and redistribute the skill, with attribution preserved.

This page documents the skill from a practitioner's perspective. For the formal spec and any updates, defer to the source repo.