In Crawl Cove, everything lives inside a client. A client is a site (or a set of domains) that you manage, and it's the workspace that holds that site's audits, findings, rankings, tasks, and reports. Before you can crawl anything, you add the client. That takes two steps and about a minute, because the only thing a first crawl needs is a domain.
Note
What you'll need: Crawl Cove installed and open, and the domain you want to audit. ~1 minute. On a free trial or the Solo plan the app says Project wherever this guide says client, because a single site of your own is not a client relationship. Same screens, same two steps.
Open the wizard
From the Clients page in the agency-level rail, click Add Client (Add Project on a trial or Solo licence). A two-step dialog opens: Name & domains, then First crawl. The step you are on is marked at the top of the dialog.
Step 1: Name & domains
Enter one or more domains. The first one is the primary domain and becomes the seed of your first crawl. A single client can hold more than one website (a main site plus a microsite or a separate language domain), so add them all here if they belong together. Crawl Cove refuses anything that is not a web address (a company name typed into the domain field, say) and a domain that is the same site as one already listed, because this is the last screen on which a typo is cheap: what you type here becomes the stored domain and the first crawl's seed URL.
The name is optional. Leave it blank and the client is named after the primary domain; you can rename it later from Client settings. Press Next and the client is created.
Step 2: First crawl
The second step is one button, Start crawl & finish. Every crawl option (label, seed URLs, include and exclude patterns, page limit, staging login, ignore robots.txt) sits behind a closed Crawl options (optional) section. The defaults suit most sites, so you can start straight away and adjust these on a later crawl. Running your first audit lists every option and its real default.
One check happens for you before you press anything. Crawl Cove reads the site's sitemap for a page count, and if the site looks bigger than the 500-page default a note says so and offers to raise the limit in one click, rather than silently truncating your very first audit. If there is no sitemap, nothing is shown.
Not ready to crawl? Skip finishes the wizard and opens the new client, and you can queue the crawl later from its Audits page. Closing the dialog at this point does the same thing, because the client already exists.
Logo and Search Console come after the crawl
A logo, brand colours and a Search Console connection are all optional, and none of them is needed to produce an audit, so the wizard does not ask for them. Once the client is open, a Finish setting up card on its Overview lists whatever is still outstanding:
- Connect Search Console takes you to the client's Connections page. This is what unlocks impact scoring, search performance, and per-URL query data. See Connecting Search Console for the full setup.
- Add your logo and brand colours takes you to Client settings, Branding. Capture the brand once and it flows automatically into every white-label PDF report for this client, so you never re-upload a logo per report. See White-label reports.
The card only appears while one of those is outstanding, so a fully set-up client never sees it.
Clients are archived, never deleted
When a client relationship ends, you archive the client. It disappears from your active and global lists, along with its tasks, but nothing is destroyed. Audit history, findings, and rankings are all preserved. This is deliberate: a versioned, prove-the-fix workflow only works if the history survives, and a client who comes back next year picks up exactly where they left off.
Next steps
- Running your first audit: kick off the crawl and watch it work.
- Connecting Search Console: the one integration that unlocks impact-ranked findings.