Quick start: your first result in five minutes

Summary#

This walkthrough takes you from signing up to a finished, exportable report. It uses the On-Page SEO Checker, which costs zero credits, so you can complete every step on a Free account with no payment card. At the end you will have a real result on screen, know how to read it, and know where it was saved.

Purpose#

The fastest way to understand Metric Vault is to run something real against a site you care about. Reading about tools teaches you the vocabulary; running one teaches you the shape of a result, and every other tool in the product uses that same shape. Five minutes here saves an hour of exploring.

We deliberately picked a free tool. Starting with Domain Overview would be more impressive and would also cost 6 credits, which a Free account does not have.

Who this is for#

Anyone who has just created an account, or is about to. No SEO knowledge is assumed. If you have never heard of a meta description, the tool will tell you what is wrong and what to write instead.

If you already know your way around and just want the goal-to-tool map, go to Which tool should I use? instead.

Before you start#

• An account. If you do not have one, Create your account takes about a minute. Free is enough for everything on this page.
• A URL to test. Use a page from your own site. A specific page works better than a homepage, because the checks are page-level. If you have nothing to hand, the tool has a Try sample button that runs a real example at no cost.
• A browser tab, and nothing else. Nothing to install.

Expect the whole thing to take four to five minutes, most of which is reading the result.

The journey#

Stage 1: get into the app#

Open metricvaultai.com/dashboard. A full-screen overlay appears while your session is checked. If you are not signed in yet, it shows a card headed "Sign in to continue" with a Sign In link. Sign in, and you land on the home screen.

On a brand-new account the home screen is intentionally empty: the headline numbers read 0, and a block near the bottom says "Welcome to Metric Vault". That is correct, not broken. Everything on that screen is built from your own history, and you do not have one yet. Your first login explains the screen in detail.

Stage 2: open the On-Page SEO Checker#

There are three ways in. Use whichever suits you.

The fastest: press Ctrl + K (or Cmd + K on a Mac). A search box opens with the placeholder "Jump to tool, workflow, or type a question…". Type on-page, press Enter on the highlighted row. See The command palette (Ctrl+K).

By clicking: in the icon rail down the left edge, click the second icon, Site Health. The panel beside it fills with that section's tools, and the app automatically opens the first one, which is Site Audit. Ignore that and click On-Page SEO Checker in the list.

By address: go to metricvaultai.com/dashboard#/onpage.

You should now see a page titled On-Page SEO Checker, described as "Fetches the live URL and runs 17 SEO checks — titles, meta tags, headings, images, schema, Open Graph."

Stage 3: run it#

1. Click the input field. Its placeholder reads e.g. https://nike.com/mens-running.
2. Type the page you want to check. Both example.com/pricing and https://example.com/pricing work; the address is normalised for you.
3. Press the purple Audit Page · FREE button, or just press Enter.
4. The results area shows a spinner and the line "Analyzing… this can take a few seconds for live data." Most pages return in a few seconds.

If you would rather see a finished report before touching your own site, press Try sample instead. It renders a real saved example and costs nothing.

Stage 4: read the result#

The result appears directly under the run button, in the same layout every tool in Metric Vault uses.

Start with the Issues tab. Each row names one problem, grades its severity, and says what a healthy version looks like. Work top to bottom; the ordering is by impact.

The Get recommendations panel at the bottom writes a prioritized action plan from the result, grouped into Fix first, Do next and Quick wins. It is a paid feature: on Free or Starter you will see a panel headed "Recommendations are a paid feature" with a See plans button rather than a plan. The audit result itself is unaffected. See Get Recommendations.

Stage 5: keep it#

You do not need to do anything to save the result. It is already in your Library.

• Reopen it later, free. Go to Library → Saved Work. Your run is on the Saved work tab, tagged with a "Free to reopen" badge. Reopening never costs credits. Saved Work covers the workspace.
• Export it. The row of buttons above the report offers Export PDF, Export Excel, Export CSV, Export JSON and Share public link. Exports are enabled only once a result has finished rendering. Exporting results covers each format.
• Share it. Share public link creates a URL that anyone can open without signing in. Use it to send a finding to a developer or a client. Sharing a result by link covers the controls.

Stage 6: do it again, wider#

You have now run one page-level check. Two obvious next steps, both free:

• Audit more of the technical picture. Site Health also contains PageSpeed & Vitals, robots.txt Auditor, Schema Tool, Security Headers, Sitemap Validator and Advanced Technical Checks, all at zero credits.
• Run all ten at once. Go to Get Started → Technical SEO and press Run Full Tech Audit · FREE. It fires every free technical check in parallel against one domain and returns a single consolidated report. This is the best single demonstration of what a Free account can do.

After that, Which tool should I use? routes you to the right paid tool for whatever you are actually trying to achieve.

What happens behind the scenes#

Worth knowing, because it explains why this tool is free and why some results differ.

1. Your browser sends the URL to our server. Nothing is analyzed in the page you are viewing; the check is server-side, so the target site never sees your browser.
2. The server refuses unsafe targets. Private, loopback and internal addresses are rejected. You can only audit publicly reachable pages.
3. The page is fetched live. The tool requests the URL at that moment and reads the HTML it gets back: the title, meta tags, headings, images, structured data and Open Graph tags. There is no crawl of the whole site and no third-party data provider involved. That absence of provider cost is exactly why the tool is free.
4. Seventeen checks are graded and returned as structured data. The interface renders it into the shared result layout.
5. The run is saved, both as a reopenable result in your Saved work and as an entry in your Report History.
6. No credit is recorded, because the tool's price is zero. Your top-bar counter does not move.

One shared protection applies on every plan: a fair-use ceiling of 100 light-tool calls per hour, which resets at the top of each hour. Normal use never approaches it.

Troubleshooting#

More symptoms are covered in A tool failed to run and A tool returned no data.