seo-audit

Trigger phrases

Phrases that activate this skill when typed to Claude Code:

• SEO audit
• technical SEO
• why am I not ranking
• lost rankings
• core web vitals

What it does

seo-audit is a Claude Code skill from Corey Haines’s marketing-skills repo. 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. Install via the repo’s recommended path — copy the seo-audit SKILL.md 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. The canonical SKILL.md and any supporting files live in the seo-audit folder of his marketing-skills repository.

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.