How to use Claude for SEO audits with SEMrush, connected through the Semrush MCP connector — no code, done entirely from a Chromebook.
Why I Connected Semrush to Claude
I've been doing SEO for sixteen years, and I've used SEMrush for most of them. The problem was never reading the data — it's the time it takes. Export this report, export that one, stick them in a sheet, cross-reference, filter. Every single time.
So now I ask Claude to do that part, using SEMrush's own data through the connector. Nothing about the underlying SEO work has changed. What's changed is how often I actually get round to doing it.
Watch the video
Running an SEO Audit with Claude and SEMrush
For a site audit, I ask Claude what a site ranks for and where the easy wins are. It pulls the positions, groups the page-two terms by page, and flags where two pages are cannibalising each other — the kind of thing I know how to find, but would normally batch up and do once a quarter. Now it's a Tuesday-afternoon job.
Competitor Gap Analysis
Same approach for competitors: who's outranking me, and what have they built that I haven't? Claude pulls the keyword gap from SEMrush and hands back a list of pages worth building, not a spreadsheet to interpret. Deciding what's actually worth doing is still mine.
Keyword Research for New Pages
I tell it what a page is for, and it pulls volumes, difficulty and intent, then gives me a shortlist — usually the same shortlist I'd have landed on myself, in thirty seconds instead of forty minutes of exporting CSVs. This is the same process I use to script and title YouTube videos, which is covered in more detail in How to Engineer a YouTube Script for Search.
Setting Up the SEMrush MCP Connector
Setup takes about two minutes, done entirely from a Chromebook — no terminal, no code. In Claude's settings, under connectors, search SEMrush and sign in with your SEMrush account. That's the whole setup. "MCP" sounds like a developer term, but this part isn't.
A few things worth knowing before you start: large reports use up your SEMrush API units, so don't run them carelessly. Spot-check the numbers against SEMrush itself now and again. And Claude defaults to US search data unless you tell it otherwise — worth specifying if you're working with UK or other regional figures.
Is SEMrush Worth It?
If you already use SEMrush, connecting it to Claude is two minutes of setup that removes most of the exporting. If you don't have SEMrush yet, I use and recommend it — there's an affiliate link in the video description, which pays me a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Where This Fits with Voice SEO
Keyword research isn't just for web pages on this channel — it's built into how I script every video, using the same SEMrush data. The reasoning behind that is in I Think YouTube Uses Your Voice As SEO, and the templates I use to run the process are Voice SEO — Video Keyword Brief and Voice SEO: A Remote Business Operator's Theory. If you're coming at this from an SEO background rather than starting from scratch, The SEO Professional's Guide to YouTube is built specifically for that.
For getting Claude connected to SEMrush or any other tool, Getting Started with Connectors on Claude AI covers the setup in more depth than fits here.
I use the same Claude + connector approach to manage my Shopify course marketplace — that's covered in How Does Shopify Work? Inside My 5,000-Product Marketplace.
This channel and website document the real transition from operator to creator — including the parts nobody talks about honestly.
0 comments