First-week checklist

Summary#

Everything below can be done in about an hour, spread across your first week. The order matters: each step makes the next one produce better output, because tools that know your domain, your competitors and your connected data return sharper results than tools starting from nothing. Steps are marked Free or Paid so you can see how far a Free account gets, which is further than most people expect.

Purpose#

A new workspace is a blank one. The dashboard's Opportunities card, the daily briefing, and the Growth Actions queue are all built from your own history, so on day one they correctly show nothing. Working through this list is what turns the app from a set of tools you run manually into something that tells you what changed while you were not looking.

Requirements#

• An account, signed in. See Create your account.
• The domain you are responsible for.
• For step 4, permission to authorise a Google account against Search Console.
• For steps 7 to 10, a paid plan. Each is marked.

Permissions#

Steps 1 to 5 work on any plan, including Free. Steps 6 onwards need credits or a plan feature:

Navigation Path#

Most of this happens in two places: Dashboard → Account & Team and Dashboard → Track & Report.

Step-by-Step Guide#

1. Finish your profile · Free#

Account & Team → Account → Profile

Type your name into Display Name, described as "How your name appears across the platform", and press Save Changes. You should see Profile saved. This is the name shown beside your avatar and on shared reports. Your profile covers the card.

2. Set your theme and language · Free#

The theme toggle sits in the top bar and shows the theme you would switch to: "Dark" while you are in light mode, "Light" while you are in dark. Light is the default. The language switcher is at the bottom of the tool panel on the left, and offers English, Español, Français, Português, Deutsch and Русский. Both choices are remembered in your browser. See Light and dark mode and Changing the language.

3. Check your notification preferences · Free#

Account & Team → Account → Preferences

Four notification switches control what reaches you: Email Notifications, Weekly Digest, Competitor Alerts and SEO Score Alerts. New accounts have all four on. Turning off Competitor Alerts or SEO Score Alerts also hides those items from your in-app notification feed, so leave them on unless you are certain. Notification preferences explains what each one governs.

4. Run the free technical audit · Free#

Get Started → Technical SEO

Enter your domain and press Run Full Tech Audit · FREE. It fires all ten zero-credit technical checks in parallel and returns one consolidated report. This is the single highest-value free action in the product, and it gives you a baseline to compare against later. Technical SEO covers the workflow.

Fix whatever it flags as critical before spending credits on anything else. Ranking work on a site with broken schema or a blocked robots.txt is wasted effort.

5. Connect Google Search Console · Free#

Account & Team → Integrations → Google Search Console + Analytics → Connect Google

The badge on the card reads Not connected until you do. The connection is Read-only and uses OAuth 2.0; you are choosing which Google account to authorise, not handing over a password. Once connected, tools that can show your actual measured numbers alongside their estimates do so, marked with a "Live data" badge.

Setup takes under a minute. If Google shows a warning during the flow, the card has a Seeing a Google warning? link that explains it. Google Search Console is the full walkthrough, and Google connection problems covers failures.

6. Build your competitor list · Free#

Competitors & Backlinks → Competitor Manager

Add the three to five domains you genuinely compete with. This list is reused by comparison tools so you stop retyping domains, and it is shared with any teammates you invite later. Competitor Manager covers it.

While you are here, consider Keyword & Content → Keyword Vault for the same reason: it keeps the keywords you care about in one place.

7. Set your primary domain · Paid#

Run any analysis against your own domain and the app remembers it as your active target, pre-filling it into other tools. The most direct route is the 8-Second Quick Preview on the home screen: enter your domain, press Probe · 6 reports, and on the result press Pin as primary.

This is a metered action, because the probe is a full Domain Overview at 6 credits. On Free, skip this step; running the free technical audit in step 4 already gives the tools a target to work with in that session.

Setting a primary domain is what unlocks the weekly Opportunities card, which otherwise reads "Enter a primary domain to unlock weekly opportunities."

8. Start rank alerts · Paid#

Track & Report → Rank Alerts

In the Track a New Keyword card:

1. Enter the keyword in KEYWORD.
2. Enter your site in YOUR DOMAIN, placeholder e.g., yourbrand.com.
3. Choose a threshold in ALERT ON DROP OF. The options are 5+ positions, 3+ positions, 10+ positions and Out of top 10.
4. Press Start Tracking · 1 report.

Metric Vault then checks Google once a day, at 06:00 UTC, and alerts you when you drop past your threshold. For more than a handful of keywords, use Download CSV template, fill it in, and press Bulk import CSV. The template is two columns, keyword, domain, with an optional third for the drop threshold and a header row. Rank alerts covers the whole feature.

9. Schedule a report · Starter and above#

Track & Report → Scheduled Reports → Create a New Schedule

Press Create Schedule. Creating schedules is free and unlimited; the workflow's own credit cost is charged on each run, so a weekly Competitor Intelligence at 20 credits costs 80 credits a month. Every run is saved to your reports regardless of whether email is configured. Scheduled reports covers cadence and delivery.

10. Brand your reports · Pro and above#

Account & Team → Integrations → White-label Branding

Set COMPANY NAME, upload a logo (PNG or SVG, under 500KB), and pick a PRIMARY COLOR and ACCENT COLOR. The defaults are #7C5CFC and #E0399B. A LIVE PREVIEW panel updates as you type. Optionally add a CUSTOM FOOTER and switch on Hide "Powered by Metric Vault". Press Save branding.

Your branding is applied to every exported PDF and every public share page. White-label reports and Custom branding cover it.

11. Invite the team · Pro and above#

Account & Team → Team → Invite a Teammate

Enter the address, choose a role from the dropdown, and press Send Invite. Do not choose Owner — full access; the server rejects it. Teammates immediately share your monitored URLs, rank alerts, scheduled reports and branding.

One thing to plan for: credits are shared inside a workspace. A teammate's runs draw on your plan and shared monthly credits while they work in your workspace, so a colleague on Free can run the paid tools there on your allowance. Size your plan for the whole team. Workspaces explained explains the model and Inviting teammates the flow.

Optional: watch a competitor's pages#

Competitors & Backlinks → Competitor Monitor

Enter a URL, choose what to watch (Watch everything, Pricing only, Titles & meta, Page structure, or Availability), pick a check interval (the default is Check every 6h (recommended)), and press Monitor URL. The first check fires immediately. Point it at a specific page such as a pricing page rather than a homepage for the most useful signal. Competitor monitor covers it.

Troubleshooting#

FAQs#

How long does this really take? Steps 1 to 6 take about twenty minutes. Steps 7 to 11 take another twenty, plus whatever time you spend fixing what the audit finds.

Do I have to verify ownership of my domain? No. Metric Vault analyses public data, so there is no verification step and you can audit any public site, including competitors. Connecting Search Console in step 5 is the only place you prove ownership, and that is Google's check, not ours.

Can I do this in a different order? Yes, with one caveat: run the free technical audit before spending credits. Ranking and content work on a technically broken site produces recommendations you cannot act on.

What should an agency do differently? Do steps 1 to 4 in your own workspace, then have each client create an account and invite you. That keeps every client's monitoring, alerts and reports separate. See Client workspaces.

Does anything here notify other people? Only step 11. Invitations send an email to the address you enter. Nothing else in this list notifies anyone outside your workspace.

Can I undo these steps? Yes. Integrations can be disconnected (Disconnecting an integration), alerts and schedules deleted, branding reset with the Reset button, and members removed (Removing a member).