SEO with Claude: your first week, step by step

Before Monday: choose a finish line

A first week works better when its finish line is one reviewed draft, rather than an instruction to improve all your SEO. Pick a question your customers actually ask and identify the person who can confirm the answer. You can then tell whether the assistant helped complete something useful without inventing a traffic forecast.

For this guide, imagine Peak Plumbing, a fictional Sheffield business. Its editor wants a page explaining what information to have ready when asking about a boiler-pressure problem. That is a content brief, not permission to give unsafe repair advice. The business owner would need to review the service details and any safety guidance before publication.

Create a small work record with the website, intended reader, question, source material, reviewer and current state. Write unknown beside missing information. Do not add a target ranking, predicted enquiries or a volume estimate simply because a planning sheet has a blank column.

Day 1: connect and check the business facts

Start with connection identity. In Claude, open the custom connector option offered in your account settings and use the address in our connection guide. Complete sign-in, inspect the consent screen and select the workspace intended for this business. Availability and administrator policies vary; do not assume every account has the same menu.

Ask for the website list before creating a new record. Read the hostname carefully, including any subdomain. A plausible business name does not establish that you are looking at the intended site. If the list is wrong, stop and resolve account identity rather than asking the assistant to improvise another workspace.

Then give it a business profile using facts you can defend. Include services actually offered, service area, audience, contact route and editorial exclusions. Separate current facts from ideas you might adopt later. An assistant can turn an uncertain suggestion into confident copy unless the uncertainty travels with the record.

Use this proposed instruction:

For my selected site, show the existing business profile first.
Preview a revision using only the facts I supply.
Keep service area, services and customer audience separate.
Mark unknown details as Not provided.
Do not save until I confirm the exact preview.

Read the preview as if a new employee would rely on it tomorrow. Would they promise an unsupported response time or mention a qualification you have not supplied? Correct that now. Confirm only the intended record and read the saved profile back afterward.

Day 2: inspect three important pages

Choose the home page, the main relevant service page and the contact page. Those are a manageable sample because they explain the business, answer a buying question and provide a route to act. They are not automatically the three pages that matter most for every site; an online shop or publication may need a different sample.

Ask for evidence before a long recommendation list. Each finding should identify the URL, observed text or markup, why it matters and a suggested next action. Keep fetch failures and missing fields visible. A page the connector cannot read should not be described as a page with no useful content.

Read only the three authorized URLs I supply.
For each, separate observed evidence from interpretation.
Show one excerpt or markup fact for each finding.
Suggest a correction, its reviewer and a way to recheck it.
Do not edit the site or invent measurements.

Illustrative expected review record, not an actual response:

Page: selected service page
Observation: the supplied page text does not state service area
Interpretation: a reader may not know whether to enquire
Action: ask the owner to confirm the area before adding copy
Verification: read the updated text and inspect it in a browser

What should you do with that record? Ask the owner whether the absence is real and whether the information belongs on that page. Static HTML may omit text displayed later by JavaScript. Check the browser view before turning a static observation into a public claim about a broken page.

Day 3: bring keywords with their source

Write down questions from real enquiries, existing service material or a licensed research export you already have authority to use. Record where each question came from. A phrase suggested by Claude is a candidate; a phrase from a dated research export is a sourced observation with that export's limitations.

For Peak Plumbing, an illustrative candidate is “what to tell a plumber about low boiler pressure.” Its search volume is not provided. That does not make its volume zero or prove that no one asks it. The owner can still decide that answering a recurring customer question would be useful.

Ask the assistant to group candidates by reader need rather than by superficial word similarity. Someone asking about a repair warning may need safety information. Someone asking for a booking needs service eligibility and a contact route. Those are different jobs even if both queries mention the same appliance.

Keep one row for the phrase, source, source date, intended reader, existing page and unresolved question. When a metric is missing, preserve the gap through every later draft. Do not allow a saved keyword field to become a claimed monthly demand figure.

Day 4: plan one answer and draft it

Choose the candidate you can answer accurately with the facts available today. Ask for a brief before prose: the reader's question, the direct answer, sections needed to support it, original evidence, internal destinations and claims requiring review. If the brief needs information you do not have, obtain it or narrow the subject.

Plan one article from this sourced question and business profile.
Lead with the answer a customer needs.
List the facts required for each section and mark gaps.
Do not invent local regulations, prices, qualifications or examples.
Return the brief for review before drafting.

For the illustrative plumbing brief, an owner might supply how enquiries are handled and what details help the team understand a problem. That first-hand explanation can make the page useful. Filling the same space with generic descriptions of plumbing does little for the reader.

After reviewing the brief, request a draft. Read every heading as a promise the body must keep. Check that opening paragraphs answer the question, links go to relevant live pages and the contact route matches actual service arrangements. Remove unsupported claims instead of adding a vague disclaimer at the end.

Do a second review focused only on uncertainty. Look for words such as always, guaranteed, approved and emergency. They often carry stronger claims than the source material. Save the corrected draft and identify its version so later approval refers to the text you actually read.

Day 5: stage publication and review the destination

Publication requires a separate decision about destination and status. A draft stored in AdvisorSEO is not a WordPress draft; a WordPress draft is not a live page. Ask for those states by name, and request a preview showing which state the proposed action will create.

The WordPress path exists in source, but this guide does not report a successful production walkthrough. Until your own authorized setup has been verified, stop at a staged handoff. Follow the secure credential guidance in the docs; never paste an application password into the conversation or an email.

Prepare a publication handoff for this reviewed draft version.
Show the site, title, destination and requested draft status.
List missing setup or permissions explicitly.
Do not publish, infer approval or claim success without a receipt.

If your setup is verified and you choose to proceed, read the exact preview before approval. Check the resulting destination independently, including the mobile page, links and intended visibility. If the request times out, inspect the destination before retrying; a failed acknowledgement does not prove that no page was created.

End the week with a useful handoff

Your final record should explain what changed and what remains uncertain. Keep the reviewed profile, page evidence, sourced question, draft version and publication state together. Name the next reviewer and the next check. Someone returning next week should not have to reconstruct approval from a long conversation.

Separate completed work from business results. A clearer service description can be inspected immediately. Ranking change, enquiry quality and revenue require their own measurement period and evidence. The first does not prove the others, even when all move in a favourable direction.

For the next cycle, repeat the smallest useful loop. Choose one question, one reviewed output and one verification step. If you need broader keyword research, a backlink index or established rank tracking, use a provider that supplies those datasets. Claude's ability to discuss a metric is not evidence that AdvisorSEO measured it.