From signup to your first keyword report – step by step · Last updated: March 2026 · 16 min read

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How to Use Mangools
Why Mangools?

Mangools costs $29.90/month on the Basic plan (annual billing) and includes five integrated SEO tools. That makes it the most affordable professional SEO toolkit available – and for beginners, the most approachable.

I recommend Mangools to anyone who asks ‘where do I start with SEO tools?’ The interface is clean, the data is easy to understand, and the learning curve is minimal. You can be doing real keyword research within 30 minutes of signing up.

This guide assumes you’re starting from scratch. If you’ve used SEMrush or Ahrefs before, you’ll find Mangools simpler and more focused – that’s intentional. Mangools doesn’t try to do everything. It does five things well.

If you’re still deciding whether Mangools is the right tool for your situation, read our complete guide to the best SEO tools in 2026 first – it covers every serious option with honest pricing and recommendations for every budget level.

Step 1 – Account Setup

Setting up Mangools takes less than five minutes. There is no credit card required for the 10-day free trial.

1. Go to mangools.com and click ‘Start free trial’
2. Enter your email and create a password
3. Check your email and confirm your account
4. You’re in-— the dashboard shows all five tools immediately

The dashboard is clean and uncluttered. You see five tool cards — KWFinder, SERPWatcher, SERPChecker, LinkMiner, and SiteProfiler. Click any one to start using it immediately. There is no onboarding wizard or lengthy setup process.

Mangools Plans at a Glance  Basic: $29.90/month (annual) — 100 keyword lookups/day, 200 tracked keywords Premium: $44.90/month (annual) — 500 keyword lookups/day, 700 tracked keywords Agency: $89.90/month (annual) — 1,200 keyword lookups/day, 1,500 tracked keywords  All plans include access to all five tools. The difference is usage limits, not features.

Step 2 – Keyword Research with KWFinder

KWFinder is Mangools’ flagship tool and the main reason most people choose the platform. It is the best keyword research interface in its price range – fast, visual, and built around a single clear workflow.

Finding Your First Keywords

• Click KWFinder from the dashboard
• Type your seed keyword in the search box (e.g. ‘mangools review’ or your topic)
• Select your target country from the dropdown
• Click Search – results appear in seconds

For each keyword you see:

• Search volume – monthly average searches with a 12-month trend graph
• Keyword Difficulty (KD) – scored 0 to 100, colour-coded from green to red
• CPC – cost per click for paid search, useful context for commercial intent
• Search intent – informational, navigational, commercial, or transactional
• SERP preview – the current top 10 results with their metrics

Understanding Keyword Difficulty

Mangools’ keyword difficulty score is one of its most reliable features. In testing across multiple sites, I’ve found it accurate for predicting how hard it will be to rank for a term.

KD Score	Difficulty	What It Means
0 to 14	Very easy	Rankable in weeks for a new site with good content
15 to 29	Easy	Achievable in months 1 to 4 without backlinks
30 to 49	Possible	Requires some authority and good content
50 to 69	Hard	Needs established authority and backlinks
70+	Very hard	Requires significant authority – not realistic for new sites

For a new site in the first six months, focus on keywords with a difficulty score under 30. Under 20 is ideal. These are the terms you can realistically rank for without needing a large backlink profile.

Finding Related Keywords

After your initial search, look at the Related Keywords and Autocomplete tabs on the left sidebar. These surface:

• Long tail variations of your seed keyword with lower difficulty
• Question-based queries – useful for FAQ content that can earn featured snippets
• Seasonal or trending variations with volume spikes

Click any keyword in the results to immediately see its SERP preview – who currently ranks and how strong their pages are. This is the fastest way to assess whether a keyword is winnable before you invest time writing content.

Local Keyword Research

Mangools covers 65,000+ locations – one of the largest local keyword databases available. To research local keywords:

• Select your country in the main dropdown
• Click the location field that appears and type your city or region
• Search as normal – results show local search volumes and local SERP competition

This is useful for any client with a local audience. You can see exactly what people in a specific city search for and assess local competition separately from national competition.

Step 3 — Rank Tracking with SERPWatcher

SERPWatcher tracks where your pages rank in Google for your target keywords. It updates daily and presents the data in a clean visual format that is easy to understand even for non-technical clients.

Setting Up Rank Tracking

1. Click SERPWatcher from the dashboard
2. Click ‘Add new tracking’
3. Enter your domain name
4. Select your target country and optionally a specific city for local tracking
5. Enter the keywords you want to track – one per line
6. Select tracking frequency: daily is recommended for most keywords
7. Click ‘Create’

Track your primary keyword for each article plus two to three secondary keywords. For a new site, start with 10 to 20 keywords — your most important pages and their target terms. You can always add more later.

Reading the Rankings Dashboard

SERPWatcher shows your ranking history as a graph. You can see at a glance whether positions are trending up, down, or stable over any time period.

The Dominance Index is SERPWatcher’s standout feature. It combines your ranking positions with the search volume of each keyword to produce a single percentage representing your overall search visibility. A Dominance Index of 5% means you’re capturing 5% of the potential traffic for your tracked keywords. This single number is easier to explain to non-technical clients than a list of individual positions.

Automated Rank Reports

SERPWatcher can send automated email reports with your ranking data on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule. To set this up:

1. Go to your tracking project in SERPWatcher
2. Click the Settings icon
3. Select Report frequency and enter the recipient email address
4. Save

Reports include position changes, trend graphs, and the Dominance Index. Clean enough to send directly to clients for basic reporting — though not white-label branded like SE Ranking’s reports.

Tracking Competitor Rankings

SERPWatcher lets you track competitor rankings for the same keywords alongside your own. To add a competitor:

• Open your tracking project
• Click ‘Add competitor’
• Enter the competitor’s domain

Seeing a competitor’s ranking drop is often a signal of an algorithm update — and an opportunity to target their keywords more aggressively.

Step 4 — SERP Analysis with SERPChecker

SERPChecker shows you exactly who ranks in the top 100 results for any keyword and how strong their pages are. Use this before writing content to assess whether a keyword is realistically winnable.

How to Use SERPChecker

• Click SERPChecker from the dashboard
• Enter the keyword you want to analyse
• Select your target country
• Click Check SERP

For each result in the top 100 you see:

• Citation Flow and Trust Flow – Majestic’s authority metrics
• Domain Authority and Page Authority – Moz metrics
• Number of referring domains and total backlinks
• Estimated monthly traffic
• Facebook shares
• Whether the keyword appears in the title, URL, and meta description

The most useful data point: referring domains to each ranking page. If position 1 through 5 all have 500+ referring domains, you need significant authority to compete. If position 8 is a page with only 12 referring domains on a medium-authority site — that’s your opportunity.

SERPChecker and KWFinder Together

The most efficient workflow combines both tools:

• Find a keyword in KWFinder with a difficulty score under 30
• Click the SERP preview in KWFinder – it opens SERPChecker for that keyword
• Assess whether the current top 10 is actually beatable based on referring domains and authority
• If yes – add it to your content plan. If no – look for a lower-difficulty variation

This combined workflow lets you qualify or disqualify keywords in under two minutes each. It is the fastest way to build a realistic content plan for a new site.

Step 5 — Backlink Analysis with LinkMiner

LinkMiner shows the backlink profile for any URL or domain. Use it to monitor your own backlinks, analyse competitor link profiles, and find link building opportunities.

Checking Your Backlink Profile

• Click LinkMiner from the dashboard
• Enter your domain name
• Click Analyze

You see:

• Total backlinks and referring domains
• Follow vs nofollow breakdown
• Anchor text distribution
• Link Strength – Mangools’ proprietary authority metric
• New and lost links over the last 30 days

Check your backlink profile monthly to catch:

• New links you’ve earned – opportunities to reach out and build a relationship
• Lost links – pages that previously linked to you but no longer do
• Potentially toxic links – low quality or spammy referring domains

Analysing Competitor Backlinks

The most useful application of LinkMiner for link building is competitor backlink research:

• Enter a competitor’s domain or a specific competing page
• Sort by Link Strength descending – highest authority links first
• Look for links from sites that could also link to your content
• Note the page that earned the link – what made it link-worthy?

If a competitor earned a link from a marketing blog by publishing an original study, you know what kind of content that site links to. Create something better and pitch it.

Important note: LinkMiner’s database is smaller than Ahrefs – significantly so. For serious link building campaigns where data depth matters, Ahrefs at $108/month is the more appropriate tool. LinkMiner is adequate for monitoring and basic research, not for comprehensive link prospecting.

Step 6 — Site Overview with SiteProfiler

SiteProfiler gives a quick authority and traffic overview for any domain. It is the fastest tool in the Mangools suite – useful for quick competitive research before a client call or prospect meeting.

How to Use SiteProfiler

• Click SiteProfiler from the dashboard
• Enter any domain name
• Click Analyze

You see:

• Authority Score – Mangools’ composite domain authority metric
• Citation Flow and Trust Flow from Majestic
• Domain Authority and Page Authority from Moz
• Total backlinks and referring domains
• Top content – the pages that have attracted the most backlinks
• Top competitors – domains with the most keyword overlap
• Audience overlap – shared audience with similar sites

The top content section is particularly useful for content strategy. It shows which pages on a competitor’s site have earned the most backlinks – giving you insight into what topics resonate in your niche and attract external links.

Mangools vs. The Alternatives

Mangools is not the right tool for every situation. Here’s where it fits in the broader SEO tool landscape:

Tool	Price/mo (annual)	Best For
Mangools	$29.90	Beginners, bloggers, single-site owners
SE Ranking	$103.20	Freelancers and small agencies – all-in-one
SEMrush Pro	$117.33	Full-service agency platform – deepest data
Ahrefs Lite	$108	Backlink analysis and link building

Mangools vs. SE Ranking: SE Ranking at $103.20/month is the natural upgrade when you outgrow Mangools. It adds site audit, white-label reporting, deeper keyword database, and competitor traffic analysis. The price jump is significant but the functionality jump is larger. When you’re managing more than two or three client sites, SE Ranking becomes better value.

Mangools vs. SEMrush: These serve different audiences. Mangools is for beginners and solo operators. SEMrush is for agencies and serious in-house teams. If you’re billing multiple SEO clients, skip Mangools and start with SE Ranking or SEMrush directly.

For a complete comparison of every serious SEO tool – including detailed feature breakdowns and honest recommendations for every budget – read our complete guide to the best SEO tools for agencies in 2026.

Frequently Asked Questions