User Guide

This guide follows the left menu of the app. Every screen also explains itself with short hints, and every audit issue opens to show what it is, its impact and how to fix it.

Contents: Getting started · Projects · Crawl · SEO Audit · Structured Data · Robots.txt · Compare Crawls · URL List Check · Sitemap Generator · Speed · Migration · Exports and white-label · License · Your data · Troubleshooting

1. Getting started

1. Install the app (see Download) and open it.
2. Accept the End User License Agreement and start the free trial – or activate the key you bought.
3. Create a project for the website you work on, then start a crawl.

The badge at the bottom of the left menu shows your license: days left in the trial, your plan, or a warning when something needs attention. The theme button switches between light and dark.

2. Projects

A project is one website. Everything you do – crawls, audits, list checks, speed tests, migrations – is saved in the project of that website, and the project switcher at the top of the menu chooses the active one. The Projects page shows how much disk space each item uses and lets you delete single items or a whole project; Compact returns the freed space to Windows.

3. Crawl

1. Enter the start URL and press Analyse site. The pre-flight check reads robots.txt and sitemaps, tests HTTPS and host variants, crawls a small sample and estimates the size of the site, the disk space, memory and time.
2. Review the estimate, set the URL limit, the speed and the user agent, then confirm. Use Polite for small or shared hosting and sites behind a firewall, Normal for most sites and Fast only for your own site or when your IP address is whitelisted.
3. The crawl runs in chunks. You can pause it, close the app and resume later.

If a firewall starts blocking the crawl, O2X pauses automatically and shows your public IP address. Ask the site owner to whitelist it, or resume at the Polite speed. Avoid the Googlebot user agent on sites with a firewall: firewalls verify Googlebot and usually block a fake one at once.

When the crawl finishes, open Explore URLs to filter every URL by status, indexability, content type and on-page data, and open any URL for its full details.

4. SEO Audit

The audit runs automatically at the end of each crawl. Issues are sorted by severity – errors first – and grouped into categories. Open an issue to read what it is, why it matters and how to fix it, and to see the affected URLs ten at a time. Download HTML report creates a standalone report you can send to a client. The audit is informational: only an SEO specialist can confirm an issue for a particular site.

5. Structured Data

The Site audit tab summarises the markup found by a crawl: types, errors, warnings and pages without markup. Open a page to see each item, its problems, a corrected copy and the JSON-LD recommended for that page type – replace the [REPLACE: …] placeholders with real values before using it. The Validator tab checks any URL or pasted code.

6. Robots.txt

The From a crawl tab shows the robots.txt findings of a crawl, which crawlers can access the site, important pages that are blocked, private pages that should be noindex, recommended rules and a suggested robots.txt to copy or download. The URL tester shows which rule allows or blocks a URL for each crawler. Live check audits the robots.txt of any site with just two requests. On a password-protected staging site, blocking everything is fine – the report reminds you what to change at launch.

7. Compare Crawls

Choose two crawls of the same site to see new and removed URLs, status code changes and on-page changes. URLs are matched by path and query, so you can also compare a staging crawl with the live site.

8. URL List Check

Paste a list of URLs (for example old URLs after a migration) to check status codes, redirect chains, the final URL and indexability. Requests are throttled per host. Results are saved in the project.

9. Sitemap Generator

Pick a crawl, choose how to set lastmod and download the XML sitemap. Only indexable pages that answer 200 are included. Above 50,000 URLs you get several sitemaps and a sitemap index in a ZIP file.

10. Speed

Enter up to 100 URLs, choose mobile and/or desktop and the number of runs, then start the test. Tests run one at a time so the results are not skewed. Lighthouse runs on your computer – the app installs it the first time, which needs Node.js and Chrome or Edge. Alternatively, enter a free Google PageSpeed Insights API key to test through Google.

11. Migration

1. Create a migration with the old site, the new site and, if there is one, the staging site and its password.
2. Baseline: crawl the old live site and import Google Search Console, GA4 and backlink exports, so pages with traffic or links are never lost.
3. Pre-launch: crawl the staging site and compare it with the old one – missing pages, changed titles, H1 and canonicals, leftover noindex.
4. Redirect mapping: run the automatic mapping, review and approve the redirects, then export the rules for your server or platform.
5. Redirect test and go / no-go: test the rules on a test host and read the pre-launch report.
6. Post-launch: crawl the new live site, check the redirects again and follow the checklist.

The built-in Migration guide describes each step in detail.

12. Exports and white-label

Every table has an Export button (Excel, CSV, HTML, PDF) and every report page an Export page button (HTML, PDF). With the Agency license (and during the trial) open Agency Profile to add your logo, company details and brand colour: they appear in the header of every export and, if you choose, in the app itself and on the desktop shortcut. With the Solo license, HTML and PDF exports end with a small “Created with O2X” credit.

13. License

• Activate: open License, paste the key from the purchase email and press Activate.
• New computer: install the app on the new computer and activate the same key. With a Solo license the old computer is deactivated automatically – even if it is broken or lost. With an Agency license, when all 10 computers are in use, you choose which one the new computer replaces.
• Deactivate: Deactivate this computer frees its seat.
• Offline use: the license is checked in the background every few days and works offline for up to 30 days between checks.
• Updates: the License page shows until when updates are included. To renew, use Renew updates or the form on the Pricing page, then press Check now.

More in the Licensing & Updates Policy.

14. Your data

Projects, crawls, reports and settings are stored in %LOCALAPPDATA%\O2 SEO Tool on your computer. To move them to a new computer, copy that folder while the app is closed. Back it up like any other work files – we have no copy of it.

15. Troubleshooting

• “Windows protected your PC” – click More info → Run anyway.
• The crawl paused with a block warning – the site’s firewall blocked your IP address. Whitelist the IP shown, or resume at the Polite speed with the Chrome user agent.
• “Could not reach the license server” – check the internet connection, proxy or firewall; the app needs to reach seo2agency.com over HTTPS.
• “This license was moved to another computer” – the key was activated elsewhere. Activate it again here if this is the computer you want to use.
• “Your 12 months of updates ended…” – this version was released after your update period. Renew updates or install a version released before the date shown.
• Speed tests do not start – install Node.js and Chrome or Edge, or add a PageSpeed Insights API key.

Still stuck? Contact support.