Quick start

This guide walks you through the core workflow: signing in, creating a team and project, connecting to a VPN location, analyzing a page, and tracking your first keyword.

Prerequisites

• SERP Lens installed on your Mac (installation guide)
• An email address for sign-in

Walkthrough

1. 1

   Sign in

   Open SERP Lens and sign in with Google, Apple, or a magic link. If you're new, an account is created automatically.

2. 2

   Create or join a team

   After signing in, you're prompted to create a team or accept a pending invitation. Teams are how SERP Lens organizes everything — projects, keywords, and screenshots all belong to your active team.

   Give your team a name (e.g. your company or agency name) and continue.

3. 3

   Create a project

   Go to Projects in the sidebar and click New project. Enter:

   • Project name — a label for this site (e.g. "Acme Corp")
   • Domain — the root domain you want to track (e.g. acme.com)
   • Competitor domains (optional) — up to 10 competitor domains for ranking comparisons

   Tip

   The domain field tracks all subdomains automatically. Enter just the root domain (e.g. domain.com, not www.domain.com).

4. 4

   Browse and analyze a page

   Navigate to any URL in the browser. Open the sidebar to see real-time SEO analysis:

   • On-Page — title, meta description, headings, content analysis
   • Indexing — robots directives, canonical URLs, hreflang, sitemaps
   • Structured Data — JSON-LD schema detection and validation
   • Crawling — robots.txt rules, bot accessibility, firewall status

   Each panel updates automatically as you navigate.

5. 5

   Connect to a VPN location

   The browser includes a built-in VPN. Press Cmd+Shift+L to open the location panel and select a country (e.g. United States). Once connected, your browsing and search results reflect that location.

   This lets you see Google results as users in that region see them — useful for local SEO work, geo-targeted campaigns, and detecting geo redirects.

6. 6

   Track a keyword

   Go to your project and click Add keywords. Enter:

   • Keyword — the search term to track
   • Location — where to check rankings (e.g. United States)
   • Device — Desktop, Mobile, or Both
   • Refresh interval — how often to check (Daily, Weekly, or Monthly)

   SERP Lens starts tracking your position and shows ranking changes over time.

   Info

   Each keyword uses ranking credits based on refresh interval, device, and location count. Check your available credits before adding keywords.

7. 7

   Take a screenshot

   Found something worth saving? Use the screenshot tool to capture the visible area, a selected region, or a full-page scrolling capture. Annotate with arrows, shapes, and text, then save it to your project.

What to explore next