Set up an EnterraSEO audit

Adding a site takes a minute. Getting a first crawl that is worth reading takes two settings and a little patience, because a crawler pointed at the wrong pages produces a long list of true statements about the wrong thing.

Add the domain

Use Add domain on the Sites screen and enter the domain without a protocol or a trailing slash. The product fetches the home page, follows what it finds, and stops at your plan's page allowance.

The Sites screen in EnterraSEO. A heading reads Sites with a subtitle of one plan and two SEO domains. A search box, an All plans filter and an All statuses filter sit above an Add domain button. A table lists two domains, each with a Business plan badge and a Verified badge, an authority figure, a backlink count and sparkline, a keyword count, a score sparkline with the number 100, a traffic value, and three action buttons. — One row per site, and the Verified badge is the first thing to check when a crawl returns nothing.

Prove you control it

A domain has to be verified before it will crawl, because a tool that audits sites somebody else owns is a tool that audits competitors on request. Verification is a DNS record or a file the product gives you, and it is checked each run rather than once, so a domain that changes hands stops being audited.

The badge on the Sites row is the state. If it does not say verified, the crawl has nothing to do.

The two settings everybody skips

The location. Search results differ by country, so a crawl that assumes the wrong one measures demand that is not yours. Set the country the business actually sells in, not the country the server is in.

The site profile. A profile tells the rules what kind of site this is, so a marketplace is not marked down for having many thin category pages and a blog is not marked down for publish dates. Choosing the closest profile is worth more than any single finding it suppresses.

Both live on the site's own settings, and both are asked again if the site changes shape.

What the first crawl will and will not do

The first crawl is a technical check. It reads your pages and reports structure, metadata, links and indexability. It does not pull rankings, backlinks or competitor data, because those are paid lookups and they arrive with the monthly analysis.

For that reason a first crawl often looks worse than the site is. Titles, headings and canonicals are fixable in an afternoon. Rankings take months and are not in this report.

If the first crawl finds almost nothing

Three causes, in the order worth checking. The domain is not verified. The site blocks crawlers in robots.txt, which is correct behaviour for a staging site and a problem for a live one. Or the site answers only to a hostname the crawler is not using, such as a bare domain that redirects to www without a certificate for the bare name.

All three are visible from outside, which is why the robots.txt tester and a server check are the first two tools to reach for.