How I Used Claude to Run a Full SEO Audit on My Own Blog (No Agency Needed)

I’ve been testing AI tools against real agency work for a while now, and this one actually surprised me: I asked Claude to run a full SEO audit on a blog post I’d just published, and it came back with a genuinely useful, prioritised list of fixes in under two minutes.

No SEO plugin subscription. No agency retainer. No sitting there guessing whether your meta description is too long.

I filmed the whole process for this week’s video, and I wanted to break it down here too – partly because I think more founders should know this exists, and partly because “AI vs. me doing SEO the old way” is exactly the kind of thing I said I’d keep testing publicly this year.

What I Actually Asked Claude to Do

The first time I typed “/seo-audit,” Claude told me it didn’t recognise the skill – it’s not something built in by default.

So I asked it to check if an SEO audit tool existed anywhere, and it searched its plugin library and came back with a few options, including a free one called SearchFit SEO. One click to add it, and I had a proper audit skill sitting in my toolkit, ready to run on command.

That part matters as much as the audit itself: Claude isn’t a fixed set of features. If it doesn’t have a capability yet, you can usually ask it to go find one.

I gave Claude one URL – a post I’d just published about Gmail blocking cold emails – and asked for an SEO audit. That’s it. No brief, no keyword list, no technical spec.

Claude pulled the live page and checked it against the same categories a technical SEO would run through manually:

• Crawlability and indexation (robots.txt, sitemap, canonical tags)
• Title tag and meta description length
• Heading structure (H1, H2, H3 hierarchy)
• Image alt text and file sizing
• Structured data / schema markup
• Internal and external linking
• Page speed signals like render-blocking scripts and lazy loading

Then it scored the page and split the findings into three buckets: critical issues, warnings, and opportunities. That structure alone is worth stealing for how you review your own content, AI or not.

What It Found on My Site

My page scored 76 out of 100 – solid, not perfect, and honestly about what I expected from a post I wrote quickly and didn’t obsess over.

What was already working:
Title tag length was right, meta description was present, canonical URLs were set, Open Graph and Twitter card tags were complete, and the schema markup (Article, BreadcrumbList, WebSite) was already in place. That’s the unsexy technical stuff that’s easy to get wrong. Yoast mostly handles for you if you’ve set it up properly.

What needed fixing:
The heading structure jumped straight from H1 to H3 with no H2 in between — I’d used H3s for my subheadings and skipped a level entirely. Thirty-nine of my forty images had no width or height set, which causes layout shift while the page loads. And every image on the page was a JPG. This can mean I was leaving load-speed performance on the table.

None of that is content I would’ve caught by eyeballing the page. It’s the kind of detail an actual technical SEO audit catches.

Where AI Wins Here, and Where It Still Needs Me

This is the honest bit, because I’m not interested in selling you a fantasy.

Claude was fast and thorough on the technical checklist – the stuff that’s rules-based and repeatable. Heading hierarchy, missing alt text, image formats, schema presence: all things a checklist can catch, and Claude caught them.

What it can’t do is decide why something matters for my specific brand, or whether a 636-word how-to post needs to be longer because I’m trying to outrank a competitor for a specific term. That judgment call – how deep to go, what my audience actually needs from this page – still needs a human who knows the strategy. AI found the gaps. I still decide which ones are worth closing and why.

How to Try This Yourself

If you want to run this on your own site:

1. Open Claude and ask it to audit a specific page – just paste the URL.
2. Ask it to walk you through the fixes one at a time if you want to actually understand what’s changing and why, rather than just copy-pasting.
3. Apply the fixes in your CMS (WordPress, Shopify, whatever you’re on) and re-check.

That’s genuinely the whole process. No new software, no seat licence, no onboarding call.

The Takeaway

I’m not going to tell you AI replaces an SEO strategist – it doesn’t, and I don’t think it will for a while. But for the technical housekeeping that most founders put off for months because it feels tedious and expensive to outsource? This closes that gap. You get an accurate, prioritised list in minutes, and you decide what’s actually worth fixing.

If you want the full walkthrough with my screen recording, the video’s linked above. And if this is the kind of thing that makes your eyes glaze over – that’s exactly what I’m here for.