Getting started with SolSEO

What you need before you start

The address of the site, the country its customers are in, and a list of keywords. Nothing else. You do not need WordPress, you do not need to install anything, and you do not need a card.

Add the site

Open Add a site from the dashboard, paste the address including https, and choose the country. One country per site is what every plan carries, and it should be the country the site sells in rather than the country you are sitting in. An extra country is a flat monthly add-on for that site.

Paste the keywords

Paste them one per line. Ten is the free plan's cap and 125 is where Starter begins. Two rules make the list useful:

1. Track what a customer would type, not what you would type. "rank tracker australia" earns its place; "best search engine optimisation platform provider" usually does not.
2. Track the page you want to win with, not the site. A keyword with no matching page is a keyword that will sit at 40 for a year.

What happens next

Each keyword is given a fixed minute of the day worked out from its id, so the first check runs within 24 hours and every check after it runs at the same time. The first crawl of the site starts on the same pass. There is nothing to wait for and nothing to configure.

Reading the first result

A first check is a starting point, not a verdict. A keyword that shows "not found" is outside the top 20 rather than absent from Google, and a day with no bar on the graph is a check that failed validation and was thrown away rather than a position of zero. Give it a week before drawing a line through anything.

The first week, in order

Day 1. Add the site, the country and ten keywords. Connect Search Console if you have it. Press Crawl now rather than waiting for the schedule.

Day 2. Read the first positions and the first audit. Expect the audit to be worse than you thought and the positions to be roughly what you expected. A site that has never been crawled scores below 70 far more often than not.

Day 3. Work through the audit by weight, not by count. Almost every long list is three or four systematic causes: one template with no description, one gallery with no alt text, one caching setting. Fix the causes and re-crawl.

Day 7. Now look at the position graph. Seven checks is the first point at which a line means anything, and a single day's movement before that is weather.

What not to do in the first week

Do not add two hundred keywords. You will not read them, and a list you do not read is a list that hides the ten that matter.

Do not act on one day's movement. A phrase moving 6 to 8 and back is normal.

Do not compare our number with what you see in your own browser. Yours is personalised and ours is not, on purpose. Ours is the one that is comparable with tomorrow.