SEO audits and keyword research
Audit a site, find the keywords worth ranking for, and see what competitors do, without a monthly SEO subscription.
My stack for this
- 01DataForSEO
The data: keywords, rankings, backlinks and site crawls, paid per call.
- 02HappySkills
Installs seo-pilot, my skill that runs the whole engagement through DataForSEO, from audit to monitoring.
- 03Claude Code
Runs the research and writes the audit.
Don't
- Ahrefs, Semrush and other SEO subscription suites
Ahrefs and Semrush: good data, but an expensive subscription you pay every month, whether you ran one audit or none. DataForSEO gives the same kind of data per call, for pennies.
Instead: DataForSEO
Doesn't cover
Your own site's real clicks, impressions and indexing: that's Google Search Console, free. DataForSEO's volumes and traffic are estimates.
Questions that change the answer
Who will use it: an agent, or a marketing team every day in a dashboard? The team is where a suite's interface earns its price.
Is this a one-off audit or ongoing monitoring? One-off is a few dollars of calls; monitoring needs a daily spending limit.
The picks, in brief
What each one is, my verdict, and what it costs. Every name opens the full entry: when to use it and when not, the gotchas with their fixes, provisioning and alternatives.
SEO data, pay as you go: keywords, rankings, backlinks and site audits for pennies a call, instead of an Ahrefs or Semrush subscription. Built for agents.
Pricing: Pay as you go, no subscription: top up at least $50, and the balance never expires. From $0.0006 per search results page, $0.0012 per keyword task, $0.00015 per audited page; backlinks $0.024 per request plus $0.000036 per row. $1 of free credit to try it.
The package manager for AI agent skills: dependencies, a lock file, sync and team sharing, all by talking to your agent. I built it, and I use it every day.
Pricing: Free for individuals. Installing public skills needs no account; publishing, private skills and workspaces need a free account.
My main tool. I haven't hand-written code in two years.
Pricing: Included in Claude Pro ($20 a month, $17 billed annually), Max ($100 or $200 a month for 5x or 20x Pro's usage) and Team seats ($25 standard or $125 premium a month, $20 or $100 billed annually). Usage resets in five-hour windows, with weekly limits on top. Or pay API rates with a Console key or through Bedrock.
Where they sit
The layers of the stack this job touches, with every tool named on this page.
Build and test
How the code gets written and checked.
Business tools
Payments, analytics, the daily kit.
Want this stack in your AWS account?
Cloudless Labs is a Sydney consultancy. We migrate on-premises systems to AWS, build serverless apps on this stack, and coach teams to ship with Claude Code and Codex.
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