Four Skills an SEO marketer should actually build, what goes in each, what each one refuses to do, and a full worked SKILL.md you can copy tonight.
Most "Claude for SEO" advice stops at "paste this prompt." That works once. The problem is that SEO is repetitive by nature: you write the same kind of brief every week, cluster the same kind of keyword export, run the same on-page checks across a hundred pages. A prompt you paste each time leaks consistency, because you paraphrase it slightly differently every Tuesday. A Skill does not. It loads on its own, the same way every time, and it carries your rules with it.
This is the SEO-specific cut of the complete guide to Claude Skills for marketing. If you have not read the pillar, start there for what a Skill is and where it lives. This post assumes you know the shape and gets straight to the four Skills an SEO operator should build, in order of payback.
A Skill is for what is always true about how you do SEO, not what you are ranking for this month. Your brief format is always true. Your clustering logic is always true. The keyword you are chasing this week is a plain prompt or a Project. Build narrow Skills, each earning its trigger, not one giant "SEO Skill" that loads on every conversation.
You do not need ten. Three to five narrow Skills cover the bulk of repeatable SEO work. These four are the ones that pay back fastest, because each maps to a task you do weekly and each has a clear refuse-condition that keeps Claude honest.
What it knows: your house brief format. The exact sections you want every brief to carry: target query, search intent, the entities and subtopics a ranking page covers, recommended H2s, word-count range, internal links to include, and the one angle that differentiates your page from the current top ten.
What it refuses: inventing the SERP. Claude has not seen today's results for your keyword unless you give them to it. The Skill instructs it to ask for the pasted SERP or top-competitor outlines, and to mark intent as assumed when it has to infer. This is the pair with the free SERP-Informed Brief prompt: that prompt produces the brief, the Skill makes the format load automatically every time.
What it knows: your clustering logic. Group by search intent first, then by parent topic, then flag which cluster maps to a single page versus a hub of pages. It knows your site's existing URL structure if you give it one, so it can tell you which clusters you already cover and which are gaps.
What it refuses: making up search volume or difficulty. This is the big one. Claude cannot see live volume, and a clustering Skill that confidently prints "2,400 searches/month" next to a keyword is worse than useless, because someone will act on it. The Skill refuses to attach any metric it was not given, and labels its groupings as intent-based, not volume-ranked, unless you paste the numbers.
What it knows: your on-page checklist. Title and meta against the target query, H1 uniqueness, heading hierarchy, intent match between the query and the body, thin or duplicated sections, missing internal links, and whether the page actually answers the question it ranks for. It runs the same checklist in the same order every time, so two audits are comparable.
What it refuses: claiming to have crawled anything. The Skill works on the copy and metadata you paste, or on a page it can read if you have given it that ability. It does not invent Core Web Vitals scores, it does not guess at backlink counts, and it flags any check it could not run rather than passing it silently.
What it knows: your link logic. Given a new page and a list of your existing URLs, it proposes contextual links in both directions: which existing pages should link to the new one, and which the new one should link out to. It uses descriptive anchor text drawn from the target page's topic, not "click here," and it respects a cap so you do not stuff thirty links into one paragraph.
What it refuses: linking to URLs you did not give it. It will not invent a "/guides/seo-basics" page because the topic sounds like one should exist. If the relevant page is not in the list you pasted, it says so and flags the gap, rather than fabricating a link that returns a 404.
Here is the full file for Skill 2, end to end. The YAML frontmatter is the part doing the heavy lifting: Claude reads the description to decide when to load the Skill, so it names the trigger words explicitly. The instructions split into what it knows, what it does, and what it refuses, the same three-part shape that works for every marketing Skill in the full build walkthrough.
---
name: keyword-clustering
description: Use this Skill whenever the user pastes a list or
CSV of keywords, or asks to cluster, group, or organise
keywords by topic or intent. Triggers on "cluster," "group
these keywords," "organise this export," "keyword map," or
any pasted keyword list. Groups by search intent first, then
parent topic, maps clusters to single pages vs hubs, and
flags gaps against the site's existing URLs.
---
# Keyword Clustering ## What this Skill knows Cluster keywords in this order: 1. Search intent (informational, commercial, transactional, navigational) 2. Parent topic within each intent group 3. Page mapping: one cluster = one page, or one cluster = a hub of supporting pages If the user pastes their existing URLs, compare each cluster against them and label: COVERED, PARTIAL, or GAP. ## What this Skill does - Return clusters as a table: cluster name, intent, member keywords, suggested page, coverage status - Name the single differentiating angle per cluster - Keep the user's own keywords verbatim; do not rewrite or "improve" their query phrasing ## What this Skill refuses - Do not invent search volume, difficulty, or CPC. If the user did not paste a metric, do not print one. - Label output as intent-based grouping, NOT volume-ranked, unless volume was supplied. - Do not merge clusters across different intents to make the list look tidier. Intent boundaries hold. - If the keyword list is ambiguous (single words with no context), ask one clarifying question before clustering rather than guessing the intent.
Save that as SKILL.md in a folder called keyword-clustering, package it, and install it. Test it by pasting a real keyword export and typing "cluster these." If it loads, Claude will note the Skill activated, and the output will follow your table format without you describing it.
Notice that every one of these four Skills has the same load-bearing refusal: do not invent the numbers. Search volume, difficulty, Core Web Vitals, backlink counts, crawl status. Claude does not have live access to any of those unless you hand them over, and an SEO Skill that fills the gap with a confident guess is the single most expensive mistake you can wire in, because the output looks authoritative and someone downstream will build a quarter's roadmap on it.
A good prompt names this every time you remember to. A good Skill names it whether you remember or not. That is the real reason to move your repeatable SEO work out of pasted prompts and into Skills: the refusal stops depending on your discipline and starts being structural. The keyword-clustering Skill cannot quietly invent a volume figure, because the file forbids it on every load.
Build the SERP-brief Skill first. It pairs with a free prompt you can run today, and it pays back the first time you brief out a piece of content. Then add clustering, then on-page, then internal linking as the work demands them. Four narrow Skills, each refusing to make things up, will carry most of an SEO team's repeatable load. For the full mechanics of building one, including the YAML gotchas and the mistake everyone makes on their first Skill, the 20-minute build walkthrough has the complete steps. For the brief format itself, the SEO content briefs guide goes deep on what a ranking brief needs.
If you do not want to build from scratch, the four free Claude Skills on the Hub are the same four free prompts packaged as installable Skills, with the YAML and instructions already wired. The SERP-Informed Brief is one of them, ready to drag into Claude Desktop or Claude Code. CC BY 4.0. No email gate.
Get the 4 free Skills