When his company invested in paid Claude accounts, Elmer Boutin, digital manager at Perry Johnson and an SEO practitioner for more than 25 years, tested how much everyday work the desktop app could absorb. Here are the five uses of Claude for SEO he shared in Search Engine Land.
He outlined the news he wanted — industry updates, competitor news, mergers and acquisitions — and set up a daily brief. The key is specificity and iteration: use the output to refine the instructions. You’re paying for the tool, he says, so don’t accept schlock; teach it what you need.
Instead of digging through Google Analytics himself, he asked Claude to read the data and answer questions — and it was much faster. Rank Math published instructions for a direct connection without third-party middleware.
He gave Claude the hreflang sitemap project he had earlier done with Gemini. Claude asked only for links to the XML sitemaps, gathered the pages itself and built the sitemap. On review, the output was excellent on the first try, avoiding the back-and-forth he’d had with Gemini.
His team supports three businesses across several regions, so content updates must be replicated, translated, localized and tracked. After uploading approved content and past translation examples, he instructed Claude to:
Claude did everything except the final upload, and in-country experts rated the translations on par with Google Translate.
A plugin used across more than 20 sites hadn’t been updated in years and had known security issues. At an hour per site, that meant over 20 hours of hands-on work. Using Claude’s Chrome extension on a staging environment, Boutin had Claude find every place the plugin was used, swap in a replacement and do a visual check. A small discrepancy on the first attempt was fixed once he pointed it out, and Claude offered to audit other plugins, finding one more unused, unsupported plugin. His hands-on time dropped to about five minutes per site: copy production to staging, let Claude work, check updated URLs, push to production.
The results are impressive, but staging environments, backups and human sign-off should come first — as a cautionary tale of an AI that cloned the homepage instead of writing SEO pages shows. For model selection, see Claude Fable 5.1 explained.
Daily news briefs, Analytics analysis, hreflang sitemap creation, content translation and localization with task creation, and WordPress plugin replacement.
Work estimated at about an hour per site dropped to roughly five minutes of hands-on time, run on staging and checked visually before pushing live.
Discuss structure and edge cases first, use staging and backups, and always have a human verify the output before it goes live.
To apply what you just read to your own site, start with a free audit of where things are now.
A strategist replies within 24 hours on business days.
YouTube is testing Ask YouTube AI answers at the top of standard search results for how-to and open-ended queries. Here’s who sees it and what it means for video SEO.
A translated first keyword can make a foreign market look empty. An 80-query test shows how international SEO keyword research fails and how to build a market-entry map.
Recommendation engines and video now build preferences before anyone searches, so search increasingly confirms decisions. How brands can influence discovery.