Getting started

The dashboard shows a three-step checklist when you first sign in. This is the same path, with the reasoning attached.

1. Add your site

Enter the domain. We resolve it, create the site, and start discovering URLs from the sitemap and internal links.

Give discovery a moment before judging the result. The number you see first is URLs we know exist, not pages we have looked at.

2. Map categories before you crawl

Without this step a large site is not crawled.

A category selects which pages get crawled and which share a metadata template. Open the URLs page and use the suggested patterns. They come from your URL paths, so they work before the first crawl. On a large site a dozen patterns cover most of it.

If your site has more than 5,000 URLs, this step is not optional: the automatic crawl does not run on large sites, and a crawl with nothing mapped fetches nothing. Crawling and categories explains why it works that way.

3. Crawl

Start a crawl and let it finish. Until it does there is no score, only the count of discovered URLs. The first crawl is what turns the dashboard from a list into a measurement.

4. Connect Search Console

Optional for scoring, and the single best thing you can do for everything else. Connecting a Google account brings in clicks, impressions, CTR and position per page and per query, which is what the Performance view, the keyword work and the movers list all read.

You connect an account, then map one of its properties to this site. A property you have not mapped contributes nothing.

5. Publish something small

Pick one category, write a title and description template for it, preview it, and publish. Then look at Deploy.

Deploy shows whether the integration is installed and answering. One published category is easier to verify than the whole site.

Afterwards

The score comes from the last crawl, so it moves when you crawl, not when you edit. Publish, crawl, then read the score. The work log records what you changed and what the next crawl made of it.