Transcription
Claude has just released an incredible new feature called skills. When used correctly, it can 10x your output and make you incredibly more efficient, particularly when it comes to your SEO work or any other type of marketing.
But the sad reality is, and this is from a study by McKinsey, that 80% of businesses that use AI actually get worse results than before. And that's because they don't set these new features up correctly. And it's very, very important that you do that when you're doing any type of SEO work. Otherwise, you're going to probably get penalized.
So, in this video, I'm going to show you exactly what Claude skills is and the difference between a skill and the other features that Claude offers. And how to create your first skill that is going to turn Claude into an incredible expert SEO content copywriter that is not only going to write like you, but it's going to inject your experience, going to do research on the topic, embed that research throughout the content, and even backlink to the right sections of your website. These are all non-negotiables if you actually want to write content that is going to show up in the AI search engines like GPT search, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
Let's start by understanding what is a Claude skill. And really, a skill is a specialized instruction that teaches Claude how to excel at a specific task or how to follow tasks step by step in the way that you want. It's a dynamic activation, meaning that you can activate it whenever you want within the Claude interface, whether you're in projects or any other kind of conversation within Claude.
And if we compare it to everything else, as opposed to projects, for example, where projects is a static knowledge base that you place in that project and the subsequent conversations only have access to that custom set of instructions and that custom set of information within that project. Or even a set of custom instructions which will affect all of your Claude when you are using it. Skills can really make you a lot more effective in this.
I want you to understand the folder structure or the potential folder structure of skills, because it can get very simple or it can get quite complex. It's not just a set of instructions to do this, but also you can put other files in the zipped folder, which makes the skills folder altogether that Claude can then reference like a style guide or a bit of code that it needs to execute to do the skill a lot quicker, or anything else that you think might be useful for that, you can place it within the skills folder.
So now let's create a skill that's going to turn Claude into an expert SEO content writer that writes incredible content that is well-researched, backlinking to other sections on your website, and it injects your experience. And for that, we need at least three documents to do this correctly: a tone of voice document, a website sitemap kind of, and an experience document.
A tone of voice document can look like this. And it's just a document outlining the way that you like to write, how it should sound like, and maybe even the words that you don't want it to use when it's writing. I'll leave a custom GPT below that will kind of create this tone of voice for you in a really easy manner.
The second thing is a website sitemap, or a little bit of a sitemap at least. Really, what we want is the URL, the title that corresponds to the URL, and that URL's meta description. And in this instance, the meta description is going to act like a bit of a guide to Claude, telling it what is within this URL. So then it will understand if it needs to reference that or use that within the blog post. You don't have to put your entire sitemap in here, but just the most important pages that you'd like Claude to access every now and then. I recommend that you have at least your transactional type pages, meaning your services pages or your product pages, and a couple of the blogs that it should reference. You should export this as a CSV file.
And finally, you need some sort of folder or document that outlines all of your experiences. This can be case studies that you've done or wins that you've had for your customers, things that you've learned throughout the years. For example, I've done something really easy where I've grabbed screenshots of the wins that we've got for our community members in helping them rank number one in the AI search engines. And I've just grabbed all these images and I've placed it in a zip file that you can see here. So you can do the same or grab text files, whatever you want. You want to put them in a compressed folder.
So now you've got nearly all the assets to make a skill. The last thing that you want is this prompt here that I'll leave a link in the video description below for free. You don't have to sign up to anything to get it. Um, it looks like this actually. Sorry, this one here. But make a copy of it. And you need to fill out everything in brackets there. The instructions are in the prompt itself. So, what you want to do is fill out the brackets here. I've got one here that I've already filled out. It won't take you more than 5 minutes, but trust me, put a little work here. It goes a long way.
With all that done, you want to go to your Claude account and you want to go into the settings. In settings, we want to go to capabilities and scroll all the way down. If you've got any of the paid accounts within Claude, you'll see this new skills preview. And Anthropic have actually given you some pre-built skills, and we're actually going to use one of them. If you scroll a little bit further down, there'll be this skills creator skill, and you want to make sure that that's enabled. By default, it'll be disabled. So, we want to enable that.
Now, we want to start a brand new conversation and you want to grab the completed prompt that I've given you and that you have filled out. So grab that, go back to Claude, paste that in there, and before you hit enter, we need to give it all the other three documents. So in this instance, the tone of voice, the CSV file representing the sections of your website, and that compressed file from all my wins or my experiences that I've had. And that is it. All we got to do now is press enter. We don't nearly we don't even have to call the skills builder because within the prompt you see that it says "using the skills creator skill." So we are calling that particular skill which we just enabled within Claude.
This is going to take a couple of minutes to create. After a little while, Claude should return at least two files for you. Sometimes it might be three, but the one that you're after is really this one, the SEO content writer. The other one is a usage guide outlining how to use this. We want to download this file here and leave it as a zipped file.
And now we want to inject this as a skill that we can reference by going again to settings. We want to go to capabilities. Scroll all the way down and there should be a section saying "upload skill." You want to do that and we're just going to drag that skill that we just created. Keep it in the zip file. You don't have to unzip this. And you should get this success message: "Skill uploaded successfully." So, we should be good to go.
Let's try it out right from here. I'm going to go "try in chat." Uh, and let's say, um, I want to write a blog post about how creating a lot more specific local pages with individual services in them can really help you rank a lot higher locally. And you can automate this with SEO as well. So really, kind of a broad subject, but I want to show you the workflow that Claude is going to follow because we're calling this new skill the SEO content writer. It's reading the documents within the skill. And now it should ask you some preliminary questions. So it really understands how we're taking this content, which approach we're taking here. And it's saying, um, the primary keywords, are you thinking something like "local SEO pages," "automated local pages"? Um, I'm going to say, let's go with "how to rank locally with service pages." The word count can be around 2,000 words. The specific focus can be the strategy of creating individual service plus location pages. I want to lean this from a small agency, maybe even a one-man SEO agency that can do this via automations. So, it's asking me the right questions because it understands my audience or the types of audience that I'm writing to. These are all things that you should have filled out in that prompt that I gave you.
Now, what it should start doing is doing some research first. I don't want it just to write this, but I want it to search the most up-to-date information about this. Sorry, our content is very up-to-date and very relevant to today's strategies in whatever it is that we're writing.
Now, it's going to come up with an outline for the blog. So, it's the proposed blog outline. Perfect. It's given me the anatomy, uh, some questions there as well that we're going to answer right away because I've given it all best practices within the prompt that I've provided in how we write to get cited or to give us the highest possibility to get cited in the AI search engines. It's given me a source integration plan, which sources we're using. In case you don't want to use a certain source, you can tell it in this section now. And then it should give us an internal guideline of where we're going to search, where we're going to, uh, embed things internally to our website. See internal linking strategy. And it's even gotten the right stuff here. Uh, the case studies. Perfect. The relevant client wins here for this. And perfect. Go ahead.
Okay. So, it's written our entire blog post. Let's just read the first sentence to see what it's starting to sound like. "Here's what small SEO agencies get wrong about local rankings. They're still trying to rank one homepage for 20 different cities." I would say that kind of sounds like me. Perfect. Let's just see here. Uh, if it's integrated the right back links and it's not just making things up. So, it got this from uh Search Engine Journal. Uh, I want to just verify that it's not just hallucinating and it isn't. That is a real URL, although from and then with an annoying popup. And ideally, we also wanted to reference internally. This is written as a, um, as a markdown, that's why it's showing the URLs a little bit differently. And I wanted to see finally if it's linking to my website. So this is a page here about local SEO for dentists. Uh, let's see if it's a real page and it's not just again, yeah, perfect. So, "learn how to do SEO for dentists." So, it's getting the the right kind of sources here. Fantastic.
So, now we've got an incredible blog post that also integrates at my experiences or my wins as well because if I see here, it even has the real results. So, Steven Mark runs a local SEO uh business service, someone in our community, and that's part of the integration that I gave it in our wins.
Now, anytime you want to write a quick but highly effective blog post that follows all best practices, all you need to do is call your SEO expert writer skill. Really useful tool. You can probably expand this to create a lot of uh other SEO tasks like keyword research, competitor analysis, and a lot more things.
Now, you know how to create really good content now with Claude, but SEO isn't just about writing good blog posts. It's about more than that. You need to have a good understanding of what on-site SEO is, how to get a few back links, and ideally how to automate a lot of these tasks, which can get a little overwhelming. But thankfully, I've done a 3-hour long SEO tutorial that will walk you from zero to 100% in terms of everything you need to know on how to do SEO in 2025. You should go watch that.