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Getting Started Checklist

What’s covered?

This guide offers tips, tricks, and tools to help you get started with the Moz Pro tool suite in 10 easy steps.

Getting started with Moz Pro

If you’ve just signed up for Moz Pro or you’ve been using it for a little while but never quite found your groove, the Getting Started Checklist is here to help. 

Consider this your unofficial to-do list for getting the most out of Moz Pro. But before we get started, you'll want to sign up for the free trial or reactivate your subscription if you haven’t already, so you can follow along.

Brand new to SEO? Or just need a refresher? Check out the Beginner’s Guide to SEO to start your learning journey!

1. Check your account settings

Within the Account and Billing section of your Moz Account, you can take actions like:

Why is this important? Whether you’ve just signed up for a free trial, inherited Moz Pro as a tool at a new job, or haven’t used it in a while, it’s always a good idea to check your email notification settings, billing info, and subscription limits.

Additional resources: 

2. Do a health check on your site

The Domain Overview tool allows you to quickly discover key SEO metrics to better assess your site’s overall online authority, performance, and health. This is a great way to get started, as it offers a summary of your web presence and provides a bird’s-eye view that will give you a starting point.

To get started:

  1. Head to Domain Overview
  2. Enter your website’s URL and market
  3. Click Analyze

Why is this important? Domain Overview offers a way to get a starting benchmark for metrics like Brand Authority, Domain Authority, and Page Authority. It also serves as an easy-to-use report for sharing with key stakeholders. This tool offers a quick checkup on your site, prospective client, or competitor. 

Additional resources: 

3. Set up your first Campaign to track site issues and rankings over time

To get the most out of your Moz Pro subscription, we highly recommend setting up a Campaign to track your site. Moz Pro Campaigns allow you to track rankings, page optimization, technical SEO, and more weekly.

To get started:

  1. From Domain Overview, click Track this site on the right-hand side
  2. Click Create Campaign

Would you prefer to set up your site manually with custom keywords and settings? Head to Campaigns in the left-hand navigation menu. For more information, be sure to check out our Track a Site guide.  

And don’t forget to connect Google Analytics to your account! You can do this during or after Campaign creation. 

Why is this important? Tracking things like technical SEO insights and rankings over time can help you stay on top of your ongoing performance so you’re ready to answer client and stakeholder questions when they arise. It can also help you spot issues quickly before they have a big impact on traffic or conversions.

Additional resources: 

4. Identify who you’re competing against in the SERPs

The Moz Competitive Research tool suite can help you identify who you’re competing against in the SERPs and how they are performing. 

To get started:

  1. Head to True Competitor
  2. Enter your website’s URL 
  3. Click Find Competitors

The tool will then populate a list of your top 25 competitors. Pay particular attention to the Overlap percentage and Rivalry score, which can help you narrow down which competitors you should watch.

  • Overlap - The percentage of keywords we analyzed that you share with a given competitor (Both of you are ranking in the top 10)
  • Rivalry - A 1-100 score that combines your Domain Authority (DA), your competitor’s DA, keyword overlap, keyword volume, and your rankings to identify your biggest rivals

Why is this important? Knowing who your competitors are can help you stay ahead of the curve and make data-informed decisions about content creation. Additionally, sometimes your online competitors are different from your IRL competitors, and you don’t want to miss out on leads and opportunities because you were looking the wrong way! Doing competitive research on a regular basis can help you spot new competitors in your space, keep an eye on the performance of your current competitors, and give you a more holistic view of your performance.

Additional resources:

5. Find new keyword opportunities

While you’re in the Competitive Research section of the tools, let’s take a look at Keyword Gap. This tool is a fantastic way to find new keyword opportunities and keywords within striking distance.

To get started:

  1. Select up to three competitors from the Top Competitors list in True Competitor and click Compare Competitors (or manually enter the URLs for the competitors you’d like to research in Keyword Gap)
  2. Scroll down to Keyword Rankings

This tool will now show you keywords in four buckets:

  • Keywords to improve — The keywords where your competitor is outranking you and you rank within positions 2-20. 
  • New keyword opportunities — The keywords where your competitor is ranking but you aren’t.
  • Winning keywords — The keywords where you are outranking your competitors.
  • All ranking keywords — The full list of ranking keywords for all the entered sites. 

When looking for new keywords to target or places to improve your rankings, keep an eye on the Traffic Lift metric, which represents the estimated amount of traffic you can expect to gain by outranking your competitor for this keyword.

Why is this important? Whether you’re getting ready to create all new content or you’re trying to prioritize content to refresh, it’s important to know who is already ranking in the space and how you compare. Having this information on hand can help you make better decisions about what and where to spend team resources.

Additional resources: 

6. Investigate search intent and AI Overview presence

Keyword Explorer is a time-saving keyword research tool that helps you find profitable keywords and organize them into clusters. It also helps you identify the primary Search Intent associated with a keyword and spot when an AI Overview is present in the SERP. You can then use this information to tailor your content or adapt your strategy to account for these variables.

To get started:

  1. Head to Keyword Explorer
  2. Enter a keyword you’d like to research
  3. Click Analyze

You’ll now see various keyword research metrics like Organic CTR, Monthly Volume, and Difficulty. Use these metrics to find keywords to target, or head to Keyword Suggestions to find additional keywords and keyword topics.

Why is this important? Keyword research is the bedrock of SEO. With a research tool like Keyword Explorer, you can figure out what keywords people are searching, what keywords you're already ranking for, the demand for certain searches, and the strength of other sites competing for your target keywords.

Additional resources: 

7. See where and how people are talking about you

Our link research tool, Link Explorer, can help you monitor, research, and track who is linking to your site. You can even see the exact anchor text sites are using when linking to you.

To get started:

  1. Head to Link Explorer
  2. Enter your website URL
  3. Click Analyze

Why is this important? Not only are backlinks a ranking factor, but they can also help drive traffic (and new visitors) to your site. With Link Explorer's vast link index, you can uncover valuable prospects, create a solid strategy, and track your progress. Understanding how and where people link to your site can also help you better understand how people see and interact with your brand, so you’re better able to target prospects.

Additional resources: 

8. Identify quick wins and long-term goals with Site Crawl

By now, the Campaign you set up in step three should have data populated. The initial crawl should take about 30 minutes to complete and will crawl up to 250 pages of your site, so you have data to explore. Once that first mini crawl is complete, the tool will kick off a full crawl to capture as many pages as it can up to the site crawl limit set for your Campaign.

With your newly generated Site Crawl data, you can get an overview of what pages need work and where improvement opportunities exist. For example:

  • You may want to prioritize fixing 404 errors that were discovered, as those can result in lost links, traffic, and rankings. 
  • Or you may want to set up a long-term goal of reviewing and updating all your meta descriptions that are too short or too long. 

What you tackle first and what you plan for is really dependent on your SEO strategy and team bandwidth. That said, we do have a few additional resources listed below to help you get started!

Why is this important? When bots encounter issues crawling or parsing your site, it can lead to bigger issues like lost rankings, traffic, and more. If your site isn’t able to be crawled, it can’t be indexed and served in search results. Additionally, things like page load speed and performance metrics can impact customer experience. Keep an eye on your site’s technical SEO health to ensure both bots and humans are able to navigate your site.

Additional resources: 

9. Set up automatic reporting

Automated reporting makes it easy to stay on top of everything and to keep stakeholders informed. With Custom Reports in Moz Pro, you can set up PDF reports to send monthly or weekly in just a few clicks. 

To get started:

  1. Click Custom Reports in the left-hand navigation menu from the Campaign you want reports for
  2. Click Create/Schedule PDF Report
  3. Follow the prompts to create and save your report

Also, be sure to check out Campaign Insights for a running to-do list of high-priority issues to fix and opportunities to seize.

Why is this important? With everyone being so busy, why waste time manually generating reports for your Campaigns when we can do it for you! Set up your Custom Reports and keep everyone (including yourself) up to date on your Campaign’s rankings, site crawl, and more.

Additional resources: 

10. Take SEO on the go

MozBar is a free SEO extension and toolbar that lets you take your SEO on the go. This all-in-one research assistant can help you analyze websites, SERPs, and page optimization while surfing the web.

Why is this important? Sometimes you just need to be able to do SEO on the go! And this easy-to-use extension allows you to do link research, page analysis, and more, without having to navigate to a different tab or tool.

Additional resources: 

Bonus! Keep on learning!

In an industry like marketing (and SEO!), the learning never really stops. We have a ton of resources to help you continue your educational journey no matter where you are in your career. Here are just a few to start you off:

Additional resources: 

Still need help? Or have additional questions?

Explore the rest of the Help Hub to find additional guides, tips, tricks, and workflows for all our tools. Or if you have a question you can’t find the answer to, reach out to Help Team via our contact form and they’ll be happy to help you find your way!

Ready to get the most out of your Moz Pro subscription?

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