SEO Cartograph — Dashboard guide

Your first crawl

1. Download the desktop app — the Licenses page of the dashboard, Windows or Linux button. On first launch Windows may show "unknown publisher": More info → Run anyway.
2. Activate it with your key — it's waiting on the same page (copy button). One key = one machine.
3. Run your crawl — enter your site URL in the app, click Crawl. Allow a few minutes depending on site size.
4. The crawl uploads on its own to the dashboard — the Getting started page updates automatically, leave it open.

Every new crawl of the same site enriches the history: score, pages, trend. Nothing is ever overwritten.

Pick your site, once and for all

At the top of the sidebar, the Site selector: choose your site once, and every section — Performance, Editor, Netlinker, Crawls — follows. You never re-select anything when you change pages.

The Crawls section

Each site has its card: audit score, number of crawls, pages, trend. Once inside a site:

• the crawl history with the score curve over time;
• each crawl opens on its detailed audit — issues found (titles, meta, internal linking, 404s, redirects…), the page list, the internal link graph;
• from a crawl you can send issues to the Editor to handle them as tasks.

Performance, the cockpit

One project per site, seven tabs. Every chart is interactive and every time range is free: 7/28/90 days, last month, last quarter, or any custom dates.

Overview

The site KPIs over the period — clicks, impressions, average position, CTR on the Google side; sessions, conversions, engagement on the GA4 side — compared to the previous period. Including traffic from AI engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity…) if your site gets any.

Clusters

Your pages grouped into semantic cocoons, pre-split by language/country if your site is multilingual. For each cluster: pages, clicks, impressions, position, CTR, conversions, coverage, internal linking.

• Deep dive: the cluster's curves, its pages, per-page reconstructed history, monthly snapshot.
• Persistent editing: rename, merge, move — your choices are locked, never overwritten by a crawl or an AI reorganization.
• Cluster SERP analysis: the real Google SERP on the cluster's queries, with typed recommendations — quick win (page 2 → page 1), cannibalization, absent from the SERP, content gap, PAA questions — and your share of voice against competitors.

Keywords

Your rank tracker, on the real SERP (not just GSC data).

• Add keywords by hand, or from any area that shows queries: hover → star → bulk-select → pick the group → send. Solid yellow star = already tracked.
• Each keyword has its target page: you see whether Google ranks the right page, and an alert if not.
• Groups, position, 7-day change, best position, historical curve.

SERP checks consume your monthly credit allowance (see plans); Search Console positions, on the other hand, are unlimited.

Competitors

Declare your competitors, then: the keywords × competitors grid (your position against each, measured in the same SERP pass) and the ecosystem — who occupies the top 10 across your keyword universe, day after day.

Explore

The microscope: 16 cross-views between crawl, GSC and GA4 — pages gaining or losing, queries with no dedicated page, pages with no clicks, conversions by landing page, views by keyword. Each page opens in a detail panel.

History

Every Monday a snapshot is archived: positions, top 10, clicks. It's the project's long memory and the source of the email alerts.

Settings

• The synced crawl: the latest by default, or pin a specific crawl — the whole cockpit aligns to it.
• Google connections: Search Console and GA4 (e-commerce included).
• Tracked competitors, subscription and billing, and for the Agency plan the white label.

The client report

Report button inside the project: a clean printable page — period KPIs, clusters, tracked positions with head-to-head competitors, AI traffic.

White label (Agency plan): in Settings, set your name, logo and color — the report comes out in your colors, with no Cartograph mention at all. Perfect for delivering to your own clients.

The Editor

Issues found by the audit (or sent from a crawl) become fixes to handle: title to rewrite, missing meta, broken link… Each fix has a status — to do, done, ignored — and the whole thing exports. Suggested values can come from AI via MCP, but nothing is applied without your validation.

The Netlinker

Backed by Performance data: it knows your cocoons, your weakly-linked pages, your pages that deserve more link equity.

• Priority targets: weakly-linked pages that matter.
• Internal-link suggestions (analysis or AI): anchor, source, target — you approve or reject. You're the boss of the linking.

Licenses & plans

Search Console and GA4 data are never capped. One SERP credit = one real Google query (via serper.dev): every position check, every SERP analysis consumes one. Cached lookups (a SERP already seen within 7 days) are free and shared between the dashboard and the MCP. The balance resets on the 1st of the month. The Licenses page: your key, its activation state, unbind/revoke a device, generate licenses for your team (Agency), and the app downloads. 14-day trial on paid plans, cancellable in one click.

Billing

The Billing page: your subscription (status, trial, next charge), your invoice history with downloadable PDF, and the Stripe portal to change card or cancel. By email you get: subscription confirmation, a receipt on every payment, a reminder 3 days before the trial ends, an alert if a payment fails.

Automatic alerts

Every week, if — and only if — something moves, you get an email "SEO Cartograph · your-site — …": average position shifting, keywords entering or leaving the top 10, clicks breaking down, Google↔crawl gaps (404s Google still visits, a stale crawl). Nothing to report = no email.

MCP: plug AI into your data

MCP (Model Context Protocol) lets Claude — or any compatible assistant — query your Cartograph data directly: crawls, clusters, Search Console, GA4, positions, SERP, linking. Your assistant becomes an SEO consultant that knows your site by heart. And the intelligence is paid by your Claude subscription — no AI surcharge on our side.

Setup — the plugin (recommended)

Note: connecting the MCP server alone (URL https://app.tnedjar.com/mcp/cartograph) gives you the tools, but not the skills. The skills ship with the plugin, which is a separate install. The plugin is a single step that gives you the MCP connector and the skills library (see below). Pick whichever matches your client:

In the Claude Desktop app (UI) — Settings → Plugins → Add:

• Add a marketplace → paste tom-ned/seo-cartograph-mcp, then install the seo-cartograph plugin. Recommended: it auto-updates whenever something is published.
• Upload a plugin → drag-and-drop the plugin folder (or its .zip). Handy offline or for a quick test, but it's a frozen snapshot (no auto-update).

In a terminal (CLI) — from any shell (PowerShell, bash…):

1. claude plugin marketplace add tom-ned/seo-cartograph-mcp
2. claude plugin install seo-cartograph

Inside Claude Code (slash command) — type these in the Claude Code prompt, not in your shell:

1. /plugin marketplace add tom-ned/seo-cartograph-mcp
2. /plugin install seo-cartograph

After installing, restart Claude so the skills load. If you had already added a cartograph server by hand, remove it (claude mcp remove cartograph) — the plugin wires it for you, otherwise you end up with a duplicate. On first tool use, an OAuth sign-in screen opens: you log in with your dashboard account, read-only access, scoped to your account, revocable in one click.

What the AI can do

About thirty tools, read-only — the AI proposes, you always validate in the cockpit:

• Crawl & technical (from the Free plan): list your sites and crawls, a crawl's audit, a page's detail, clusters, inspect a URL the way Google sees it, re-run a crawl.
• Performance (Pro plan): your Search Console queries, GSC/GA4 history (traffic, conversions, position distribution over time), your tracked positions with their evolution.
• SERP & positions (Pro plan): the real SERP for a query, check your positions on a keyword list, analyze a cluster's SERP, re-read archived SERP reports, check your credit balance.
• Actions under your control (Pro plan): put keywords under tracking, propose cluster reorganizations, internal links (→ Netlinker) or on-page fixes (→ Editor), pending your validation.

On the Free plan, Performance/SERP tools reply with an invitation to upgrade to Pro — crawl and audit stay open.

The skills: ready-to-use workflows

The plugin also installs skills — complete methods Claude runs on its own against your data. Free (no account): express audit of a page, SEO landing-page creation, JSON-LD schema generation. With your account: technical audit, prioritized opportunities, content brief, page verdict (keep/refresh/merge/kill), internal-linking project, editorial calendar, monthly review and white-label client report. You ask "prepare this quarter's client report" and the skill does the rest.

Example prompts

• List my Cartograph sites and give me the latest crawl score for each.
• How have my traffic and conversions evolved over the past 2 months? Surface the notable moves.
• Analyze the SERP for the "trail running shoes" cluster and give me the 3 most profitable actions.
• Which pages have been losing clicks for 3 weeks? Cross-reference with linking and propose internal links.
• Track the 10 queries where I'm on page 2 with the most impressions, group "quick wins".
• Compare today's SERP to last month's on my strategic clusters.
• How many SERP credits do I have left this month?

SERP credits and the number of tracked keywords follow your plan, exactly like in the cockpit — a SERP already in cache costs nothing.

Quick FAQ

Where does my crawl data go?

The crawl runs on your machine. Only the results (pages, links, issues) upload to your dashboard, nowhere else.

How fresh is the Google data?

Search Console: fresh to ~48h. GA4: previous day. SERP: real-time at the moment of the check.

I'm switching machines.

Licenses page → unbind the device → activate the key on the new machine.

What is a SERP credit?

One real Google query (via serper.dev): every position check or SERP analysis consumes one. A SERP already looked up within 7 days is served from cache, for free. Your plan sets the monthly allowance (4,000 on Pro, 35,000 on Agency), which resets on the 1st of the month.

Does the MCP work on Free?

Yes for crawl, audit, clusters and the Editor. Performance tools (Search Console, SERP, positions, linking) require a Pro plan — same as the cockpit.

Does installing the MCP install the skills?

If you go through the plugin (the two /plugin … commands), yes: MCP connector + skills at once. If you connect just the server URL, you only get the tools.

If I cancel, do I lose everything?

No. Crawls, history and clusters are kept — if you come back, you find it all.

A bug, an idea?

The bubble at the bottom right of the dashboard: it lands straight with Thomas.