Your website may have SEO problems that affect crawling, indexing, rankings, and organic traffic. Identifying these issues early can help improve search visibility and website performance.
Claude can help SEO professionals audit websites, analyze technical problems, identify content gaps, and create actionable optimization plans. With the right prompts and supporting website data, you can make SEO audits faster and more structured.
In this guide, we will explore 10 Claude prompts to identify common SEO issues and understand how to fix them.
1. Find Website Crawlability Issues
Crawlability issues can prevent search engines from discovering important pages. Problems with robots.txt, redirects, broken links, and internal navigation may affect how search engines crawl your website.
Claude prompt:
"Analyze my website's crawlability using the robots.txt file, XML sitemap, URL crawl data, and redirect reports I provide. Identify blocked pages, redirect chains, broken links, and potential crawl waste. Explain each issue and recommend fixes based on SEO impact."
What to check:
Incorrect robots.txt directives
Broken internal and external links
Redirect chains and loops
Important pages with poor internal linking
2. Identify Indexing Problems
A page can be accessible to search engines but still remain unindexed. Indexing problems may result from noindex directives, canonical conflicts, duplicate content, or low-quality pages.
Claude prompt:
"Analyze my Google Search Console indexing reports, sitemap URLs, and page-level SEO data. Identify pages that are not indexed, group them by likely cause, and recommend the appropriate fix. Do not assume a cause without supporting evidence."
What to check:
Pages marked as crawled but not indexed
Incorrect noindex directives
Sitemap URLs returning errors
Canonical URLs pointing to the wrong pages
3. Audit Technical SEO Issues
Technical SEO helps search engines access, understand, and process your website. A technical audit can uncover errors affecting website performance and search visibility.
Claude prompt:
"Perform a technical SEO audit using the crawl report, website URLs, response codes, page source, and performance data I provide. Identify critical errors, explain their SEO impact, and prioritize fixes by severity, affected URLs, and implementation effort."
What to check:
HTTP status code errors
HTTPS and redirect problems
XML sitemap issues
Mobile usability and rendering problems
4. Optimize Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Title tags and meta descriptions help communicate page relevance and can influence how your pages appear in search results.
Claude prompt:
"Review my website's page URLs, title tags, meta descriptions, headings, and target keywords. Identify missing, duplicated, excessively long, or poorly written metadata. Suggest relevant replacements that match search intent and accurately describe each page without keyword stuffing."
What to check:
Missing or duplicate title tags
Unclear or irrelevant meta descriptions
Titles that do not match search intent
Missing primary topics in important page titles
5. Improve Internal Linking
Internal links help users navigate your website and help search engines discover relationships between pages. Poor internal linking can leave valuable pages difficult to find.
Claude prompt:
"Analyze my website crawl report and internal link data. Identify orphan pages, important pages with few internal links, and relevant opportunities to connect related content. Recommend the source page, destination page, and natural anchor text for each suggested link."
What to check:
Orphan pages
Important pages with few internal links
Irrelevant or repetitive anchor text
Missing links between related blog posts and service pages
6. Audit Canonical Tags
Canonical tags indicate the preferred URL when similar or duplicate pages exist. Incorrect implementation can create conflicting signals for search engines.
Claude prompt:
"Review the canonical tags, URL variations, redirects, and indexability data I provide. Identify missing, incorrect, self-referencing, or conflicting canonical tags. Recommend the correct canonical URL for each affected page and explain the reasoning."
What to check:
Canonical tags pointing to irrelevant URLs
HTTP and HTTPS inconsistencies
Conflicting canonical and redirect signals
Canonical URLs pointing to noindex pages
7. Validate Schema Markup
Structured data helps search engines understand specific information on a page. Valid schema markup may make eligible pages suitable for certain enhanced search appearances, depending on Google's guidelines.
Claude prompt:
"Review the JSON-LD structured data and page content I provide. Identify invalid properties, missing required fields, incorrect entity relationships, and schema types that do not match the visible content. Suggest corrected JSON-LD and explain which items need validation using Google's official tools."
What to check:
Organization schema
Breadcrumb schema
Article schema
Product or LocalBusiness schema where relevant
Always validate the final markup before publishing it.
8. Find Duplicate Content and Keyword Cannibalization
Duplicate or overlapping pages can make it harder to determine which URL best satisfies a search query. Keyword cannibalization may occur when multiple pages compete for similar search intent.
Claude prompt:
"Analyze my website URLs, page content, target keywords, and Google Search Console performance data. Identify substantially duplicated content and pages targeting overlapping search intent. Recommend whether to consolidate, differentiate, redirect, or retain each page based on its purpose and performance."
What to check:
Pages with substantially similar content
Multiple pages targeting the same search intent
Duplicate product or service descriptions
Blog posts competing with service pages
Do not merge pages solely because they share a keyword. Evaluate their purpose and search intent first.
9. Analyze Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals measure important aspects of the user experience, including loading performance, responsiveness, and visual stability.
Claude prompt:
"Analyze my PageSpeed Insights reports and Core Web Vitals data. Identify the main problems affecting Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Recommend practical fixes and prioritize them by expected impact and implementation effort."
What to check:
Slow server response times
Large images and unnecessary scripts
JavaScript execution affecting responsiveness
Layout shifts caused by images, ads, or dynamically inserted elements
Use PageSpeed Insights and real-user field data where available to verify improvements.
10. Audit AI Search Visibility
Search visibility now extends beyond traditional search results to AI-generated answers and search experiences. Clear content, accessible pages, reliable information, and strong evidence of expertise can help search systems understand your brand.
Claude prompt:
"Audit my website's content and technical SEO for traditional search and AI search visibility. Review content structure, factual accuracy, entity information, internal links, schema markup, source citations, and topical coverage using the evidence I provide. Identify gaps and recommend practical improvements without guaranteeing AI citations or rankings."
What to check:
Clear answers to relevant user questions
Accurate and consistent brand information
Helpful, well-structured content
Relevant supporting sources and references
Accessible pages and valid structured data
Remember that no prompt or optimization guarantees inclusion in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, or other AI search experiences.
How to Use Claude for a More Accurate SEO Audit
Follow these steps to get more useful results from Claude.
Collect website data: Export crawl reports, Google Search Console performance and indexing reports, PageSpeed Insights results, and relevant URL lists.
Choose a specific issue: Start with crawlability, indexing, metadata, internal links, or another defined SEO problem.
Provide supporting evidence: Upload the relevant reports or paste the technical details Claude needs to analyze.
Request prioritized recommendations: Ask Claude to separate critical errors, high-impact improvements, and lower-priority opportunities.
Verify the findings: Check recommendations against Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, PageSpeed Insights, and other relevant tools.
Implement and monitor: Test changes, deploy them carefully, and monitor results after implementation.
