Building Claude Skills for Niche SEO: Industry-Specific AI Workflows

Why generic SEO prompts don't work for specialised industries, and how to build Claude skills that encode niche-specific tactics.

If you prompt Claude with "give me SEO advice for my website," you'll get generic advice that applies to everyone and helps no one. The same thing happens when you use a generic SEO audit prompt across different types of businesses.

Ecommerce SEO is not local SEO. Local SEO is not enterprise SEO. A dental practice and a furniture retailer need fundamentally different optimisation strategies, even though they're both "doing SEO."

That's why we build industry-specific Claude skills at StudioHawk — reusable AI workflows that encode the exact tactics, priorities, and considerations for each niche.

Why Generic SEO Prompts Fail

A generic "SEO audit" prompt will tell every business to:

• Optimise title tags and meta descriptions
• Improve Core Web Vitals
• Build backlinks
• Create quality content

That's true but useless. It's like a doctor telling every patient to "eat better and exercise." Technically correct, practically worthless.

What a niche-specific skill does is encode the tactical differences:

A Claude skill for ecommerce SEO knows to check product schema, category page structure, and faceted navigation handling. It doesn't waste time suggesting Google Business Profile optimisation for an online-only retailer.

A skill for local SEO knows that Google Business Profile is the single most important ranking factor and that citation consistency matters more than backlinks. It doesn't suggest enterprise crawl budget optimisation for a dental practice with 20 pages.

How to Build a Niche-Specific Skill

Step 1: Define the Niche Boundaries

Start by answering: what does THIS type of business need from SEO that other types don't?

For a restaurant:

• Google Business Profile with menu, photos, and hours
• Local pack rankings (not organic blue links)
• Review velocity and response
• Schema: Restaurant, Menu, LocalBusiness
• "Near me" keyword targeting
• NOT: blog content strategy, backlink campaigns, technical crawl audits

Step 2: Encode the Priority Order

Every niche has a different priority stack. The skill should know what to check first, second, third — not just what to check.

For ecommerce, the priority is typically:

1. Technical health (indexation, crawl errors, page speed)
2. Product page quality (schema, descriptions, images, reviews)
3. Category page structure (faceted navigation, internal linking)
4. Content strategy (buying guides, comparisons)
5. Link building (digital PR, product mentions)

For local, it's completely different:

1. Google Business Profile completeness and accuracy
2. Review quantity and recency
3. Citation consistency (NAP across directories)
4. On-page optimisation (service pages, location pages)
5. Local link building (community partnerships, sponsorships)

Step 3: Build the Skill Prompt

A Claude skill is a set of instructions you save as custom instructions in a Claude Project. The skill tells Claude:

• What type of business this is and what matters for their SEO
• What to check and in what order
• What's NOT relevant (so it doesn't waste time on irrelevant suggestions)
• What output format to use (audit report, action items, priority matrix)
• What data sources to reference (GSC, SEOtesting, specific industry benchmarks)

The skill should be specific enough that you can hand it to any team member and they'll produce a quality audit for that niche without deep industry expertise.

Examples of Niche Skills We've Built

Ecommerce SEO Skill

Checks product schema implementation, category page structure, faceted navigation crawl impact, internal linking from categories to products, and AI search visibility for product queries. Ignores local SEO signals entirely.

Local SEO Skill

Audits GBP completeness (40+ fields), citation consistency across top 20 AU directories, review response rate and sentiment, local keyword rankings, and service area page coverage. Ignores enterprise-scale concerns.

B2B / Enterprise Skill

Focuses on crawl budget efficiency, JavaScript rendering issues, cross-team governance (dev team dependencies), content strategy for long sales cycles, and technical SEO at scale. Ignores local signals.

Restaurant Skill

GBP menu upload verification, photo strategy, review velocity benchmarks for the local market, schema (Restaurant + Menu), and "near me" keyword coverage. Entire audit runs in 15 minutes because the scope is tightly defined.

The Compound Effect

Each time you run a niche skill on a new client, you learn something. Maybe the ecommerce skill missed a faceted navigation pattern you hadn't seen before. Maybe the local skill didn't check for GBP suspension risks.

You update the skill. Next time, it catches that pattern automatically. Over months, the skill compounds in quality — every edge case you encounter makes it sharper.

This is the real advantage of using Claude for SEO. Not that AI gives you answers. That AI lets you encode your expertise into a system that scales beyond what any one person can hold in their head.

Get Started

We've published free starter skills for ecommerce, local, restaurant, and B2B SEO. Each one encodes the niche-specific tactics, priorities, and schema recommendations for that industry.

Download one, drop it into a Claude Project, and run it against a client site. Then customise it based on what you learn. That's how the best skills get built — through use, not theory.