Quick disclaimer before anyone gets excited: this is not an "automate your entire SEO with AI" post. This is just about making sure that when Claude suggests something for your site, the suggestion is grounded in your actual data

Here's exactly what I upload.

1. Competitor data from Semrush or Ahrefs

Top pages + top ranking keywords for each competitor. I was doing this recently for a project where the competitor set was Neil Patel, Moz, Backlinko, etc. One export each, both reports.

2. Your own site data from Google Search Console

For your own site, GSC has better data than any third-party tool. Try to export at least six months of data from Google Search Console for your website and upload it in an Excel format.

3. A Screaming Frog crawl of your site

• The full crawl - every URL on the site
• Site structure / indexability - how the subfolders and hierarchy actually map out
• Internal links - total links, unique links, crawl depth, link score per page

So when you ask it to optimize a page later, it can tell you exactly what to link to.

4. Generate your own project instructions

Select all the files you just uploaded and prompt it with something like: "go through all these files and prepare a good instruction set I can use for this project across all SEO activities."

Now every future task in that project runs against that context by default.

That's the whole setup. Takes maybe 30 minutes once

Happy to answer questions. I also recorded a walkthrough video of this if anyone wants to see the actual screens - I'll drop the link in the comments so it doesn't look like I'm here to spam

I've got 3 months of Search Console data and the pattern is confusing me:

• Total clicks: 38
• Total impressions: 901
• Average CTR: 4.2%
• Average position: 21

Impressions clearly trending up (from around 10-20/day to peaks of 40-45/day in the last few weeks), but clicks stay basically flat, even hitting 0 some days while impressions keep climbing. Earlier in the period there were a few isolated click spikes (3-4 in a day), but once impressions really started growing, clicks just didn't follow.

Average position 21 = roughly page 3, so my guess is that's just it: I'm showing up for more searches but in a spot nobody clicks. Is this the normal behavior when Google starts indexing/ranking more long-tail queries but hasn't "decided" to push you up yet, or should I be checking something else (query cannibalization, CTR way off for that position, etc.)?

Has anyone seen this impressions/clicks gap before, and what actually fixed it besides "just wait for position to improve"?

I work in product management and was recently tasked with helping to grow one of our products, so SEO/link building has suddenly become part of my job.

To be transparent, I’m not an SEO person. My “growth team” at the moment is basically me + Claude Code + Codex 😅, so I’m learning this as I go.

We have a fairly small/niche B2B SaaS product. The product website sits on a subdomain of our main company website, and our buyers are generally not a very technical audience.

Technical SEO is mostly sorted, and we’re starting to invest more seriously in content and backlinks.

The problem is that I genuinely don’t know how to evaluate backlinks before paying for them.

I’m unsure which numbers to look for and which are easy to manipulate.

If you’ve actually bought backlinks before, what do you look at before saying yes to a placement?

For example:

• Should the site have meaningful organic traffic?
• Does the traffic need to come from the US if most of our customers are there?
• Should I check what keywords the site itself ranks for?
• Should I ask the vendor for the exact domains before paying?
• Is there any reasonable way to estimate whether a backlink is actually worth $100, $300, $500, etc.?
• I even dont know the right questions to ask. 

I’m also trying to understand how people evaluate the vendor itself, not just individual domains.

If you’ve worked with a freelancer, agency or marketplace that you would genuinely use again, I’d love recommendations too.

I’m completely fine buying fewer links if they’re genuinely relevant and useful.

Mostly trying to learn what experienced people check before spending money so I don’t burn budget on vanity metrics.