The only SEO skill your agent needs

Hey, it’s Ian. It’s been a while since I last sent an email.

This is issue 001 of the new format. Every week I’ll share what I learned using AI, plus some interesting links you might not have seen elsewhere.

If you don’t want to receive these, no hard feelings, here’s a quick unsubscribe link you can use.

TLDR; Click here to try SEO Skill.

I disappeared from social media back in March because I could feel myself spending more time consuming vs creating.

It got to the point where there was just too much FOMO and feeling like I was behind. So I went back to what I know - building a shitload of programmatic SEO projects.

I created about a dozen new sites in various niches. Some content driven, some free tools, some SaaS. A bunch of them are now making $1k+ per month. Many didn’t rank at all…

As I was building them I wanted to see what was working and what didn’t with a bunch of local scripts pulling in Google Search Console and Analytics data plus a crawler to pick up on issues.

I gave Codex the tools with a CLI and it fixed many, many problems and fed that back into my other blueprints I have locally to spin up new sites faster and better.

Those tools are now available to everyone, for free, with a new project called SEO Skill.

I hate skill bloat and having to figure out what skill to use. This is one skill that teaches your agent exactly what audit tools are available, how to run them, when to run them, what to do next, and recommendations for fixing issues.

To use it, just run:

npm i -g seo

seo start

It’s early, but well tested against my own sites and has some very useful programmatic SEO reports too.

Feel free to give feedback on the repo with suggestions on how to make this better.

The onboarding flow lets you authenticate easily with your Google account so there’s almost no technical stuff you need to do. Just give your agent the docs and it’ll know what to do.

Fun fact about the authentication: Google requires a video demo of your app before they grant you Analytics scopes and my human-done video was rejected.

I told Codex to do it for me and it took over my computer, figured out what screens to show, wrote the script, used local text-to-speech, and recorded the entire thing for me.

The Codex version was accepted instantly. Agent 1, human 0.