1. Account and organization
Sign up, confirm your email, and sign in. Create an organization — this holds your projects, team, and billing. Until a subscription is added it’s on the free plan, which allows one project and ten tracked keywords. An agency running several clients should decide now whether each client gets its own organization. Separate organizations mean separate billing, separate teams, and hard data isolation — but also separate subscriptions. One organization with several projects is simpler and cheaper; separate organizations are right when clients need their own invoices or must not see each other’s data.2. Create the project
Three fields matter more than the rest. Domain.example.com and www.example.com are different hosts to a search engine. Enter the one you actually want measured. A domain can only be tracked once per organization.
Location and language. These decide which market’s results you’re measured in — the first decision worth getting right. You can change them later in Project settings, but existing history keeps the locale it was collected under, so a change leaves you comparing two different markets across the boundary.
Keywords. At least one is required. Click Suggest Keywords and Surnex returns up to 20 the domain already ranks for, with volumes, all pre-selected. That’s a reasonable start for an established site. For a new domain, expect nothing back and type your own.
Competitors are optional but worth adding now — up to 10. Adding them here means their first data arrives in the same initial collection run, so you have comparisons on day one instead of day two.
3. Nothing collects yet
This is the step that surprises people: creating a project collects nothing immediately. It creates four schedules, all set to daily at 00:00 UTC, and the first jobs run when those come due — up to 24 hours later. So a new project’s dashboard is empty, and that’s expected. Two ways to see data sooner:- Move the run hour forward. On each feature’s Settings panel, set the hour to one still ahead of you today.
- Run the on-demand features now. Audits, web vitals, domain overview, and keyword research have no schedule at all — they only ever run when you ask, so there’s nothing to wait for.
4. Set your schedules
Four features re-collect on schedules you control, each from the Settings button on its overview page: All four default to every day at 00:00 UTC — the most expensive setting available, and rarely what you want on every feature. The Timezone is applied, so set the hour in your own zone. Cadences are real intervals from the last run, not calendar rules: “once a week” is seven days later, not a fixed weekday. Worth changing on day one:- Backlinks to weekly. Link profiles barely move day to day, and each snapshot spends backlink-lookup quota.
- Rank tracking to every 3 days if you’re on a smaller plan. Most sites don’t move enough daily to justify it.
- Local SEO off, or rarely, unless you have a physical location.
5. First real work
Once the initial run has finished, in this order:- Audit issues — the most actionable list you’ll have on day one. Fix errors first, sitewide patterns before one-offs.
- Domain overview → Top Keywords — what you already rank for. Anything at positions 11–20 with real volume is close to page one and cheap to move.
- Tracking comparison — check the competitors you added actually appear. A domain dashed on most of your keywords isn’t a search competitor, whatever it is commercially.
- AI Overviews — read the trigger rate. Near zero means AI search isn’t affecting your market yet and you can ignore that section for now.