Thank you very much for your interest in searchVIU. This guide will help you understand how the tool works and how you can set it up to help you with your website migration and relaunch projects.
If anything remains unclear, please don’t hesitate to get in contact with us. We are here to help.
Create an account
Go to https://app.searchviu.com/pages/auth/register to sign up for searchVIU. You can enter your data manually or use your Google or Facebook account to log in.
Once you’ve signed in, you will be asked to create your first project:
Set up your first project
After opening a searchVIU account, you will immediately be asked to create your first project.
Project name: Enter a project name that you will recognise, like the name of the website.
Project goal: This influences which KPIs searchVIU will focus on in the reports and it can always be changed later on. Select revenue or conversions if this type of data is available in your Google Analytics account. Otherwise, select traffic.
Preferred crawl device(s): Let us know if you want us to crawl your website with a mobile user agent, a desktop user agent, or both. Please note that each crawled URL will be counted twice if you select “both” and that this might impact how much we charge you for your project.
Configure LIVE website: Please enter a URL that serves as a starting point for our crawlers (normally your home page). On the right side, you can restrict the crawls to a certain subdomain or subfolder, or just enter the domain without a subdomain or a subfolder, so that all subdomains and subfolders are crawled.
Add another LIVE website URL: You can use this option if you want searchVIU to crawl several subdomains or subfolders, but not all, or if your website consists of more than one domain, for example several international country domains.
Allow searchVIU team members to access your account: Uncheck this box if you would not like us to look at your account. We will respect this setting. This can be changed at a later stage, if you decide that do you need us to access your account to provide support.
Now you can hit “Create account” and here we go! Please note that the first LIVE crawl will now start automatically. After that, searchVIU will crawl your LIVE website once a week. This way, you always have current crawl data including full JavaScript rendering at your disposal.
Finish configuring your project
searchVIU will now begin to crawl your LIVE website. In the meantime, you can complete the following settings to finish configuring your website relaunch project.
Connect Google Analytics (GA): Connect the Google Analytics property (or several properties) of your LIVE website, so that searchVIU can import data about your organic search traffic, landing pages, conversions, revenue, backlinks and keywords (or whatever’s left after “not provided”). This data is important for prioritising searchVIU’s recommendations and calculating the risk of your website migration project.
Connect Google Search Console (GSC): Google Search Console provides us with better keyword data than Google Analytics and also contains valuable information on impressions and landing pages. Google Search Console does not allow us to import backlink data automatically, so we recommend that you import your backlink data into searchVIU manually.
Add a DEV website: This is the last, very important step for you. We need to crawl your DEV website, so that we can compare it to your current LIVE website and use the data imported from GA and GSC to analyse the potential impact of the changes. Learn about the details in the next step.
Add a DEV website
searchVIU is an SEO tool for website migrations that compares your LIVE website with the staging environment of your new website, so adding a DEV website is essential for making the most out of searchVIU.
Adding a DEV website to searchVIU works very similarly to adding a LIVE website. The name of the DEV website should be recognisable to you, especially if you are adding several DEV environments. Just like for the LIVE website, you can add a starting point for the DEV crawl and limit the crawl to a certain subdomain or subfolder.
There are currently two authentication methods available: IP address and HTTP user/password. If you need a different authentication method for your project, please get in contact with us.
Before clicking “Add DEV website”, you can decide if you want to start a DEV crawl immediately. If you don’t start one now, you can always start one manually later on.
Well done – wait until your crawls are ready
You’re all set up, but there’s still more interesting stuff to do…
Now your LIVE and DEV crawls are queued (or already running) and we are importing the data we need from your GA and GSC account. The crawls might take a while, depending on the size of your website, as they include full JavaScript rendering. This uses a lots of resources and we crawl your website carefully, because we don’t want to overload it. You can adjust the crawling settings in the project settings, which you can access by opening the dropdown menu next to the name of your project (the name of the project is “Test” in the screenshot below) at the top of the app and clicking on the setting icon:
We will send you an email when your LIVE crawl is ready and another one when your DEV crawl and relaunch / release reports are available. In the meantime, if you’re bored, you should read our blog or have a look at the options we give you in the project settings:
Project settings
This is a quick overview of the settings that are currently available for searchVIU projects. If anything remains unclear, please just give us a shout.
General: Here, you can change the settings you selected when you first created your project: Project name, goal, preferred crawling devices, crawl starting point and scope, and privacy settings.
External Links: This module allows you to import data about external links from Google Search Console or other sources, like SEO tools that provide backlink data, into searchVIU. This data will help us detect pages that are linked externally and therefore should not be lost when your page is updated, migrated, or relaunched.
LIVE crawling settings: In the LIVE crawling settings, you can change some basic setting for the LIVE crawler, such as obeying the robots.txt file, crawl depth and volume, or URL parameters the crawler should ignore.
DEV website: Change your DEV website settings (including DEV crawling settings) or add more DEV websites.
Google Analytics / Google Search Console: View and change the GA and GSC data imports you have set up.
Project access: Grant other users access to your projects. Here, you can also see if searchVIU team members currently have access to your project. We will only grant ourselves access to your project if you have allowed us to in the general project settings.
If you have detailed questions about the project settings or if you are missing a feature, please don’t hesitate to get in contact with us.
Do you want to talk to us?
We hope this guide helped you set up your searchVIU project correctly. If there is anything you are not too sure about, just let us know. We’d be happy to schedule a call with you to have a look at your project together. We can also help you with the interpretation of your reports, once the crawls are done and your data is ready.