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A Moz Pro Campaign ties together Site Crawl, Rank Tracker, and On-Page Grader for a single site. Set it up sloppily and every downstream report inherits the noise. This is the configuration most DIY accounts get wrong on the first pass.
Who this is forOwners or in-house marketers paying $99-249+/mo for Moz Pro and trying to make the platform produce real, actionable work. If you created a Campaign months ago and the dashboard still feels generic, this is the reset.
What you'll need
Step 1
Moz Pro → Campaigns → + New Campaign → enter the site URL → pick a verification method (DNS TXT, HTML file, or Google Search Console).
Inside Moz Pro, click Campaigns in the top nav, then + New Campaign. Enter the site URL exactly as it serves — if your canonical is https://www.example.com, enter that. Apex vs www mismatch is the #1 source of phantom redirect issues in later reports.
Pick a verification method. DNS TXT is the most durable; HTML file upload is fastest if you have CMS access; the Google Search Console integration is the easiest if GSC is already wired up.
Moz will not start scoring or crawling until verification clears — common reason teams think Moz is 'broken' on day one.
Set a Campaign name a teammate will recognize in six months. 'example.com — production' beats 'example.com (real one).' If you manage staging too, add it as a separate Campaign and label it.
Step 2
Campaign → Tracked Keywords → Add Keywords. Import 30-100 keywords from Keyword Explorer, GSC, or a paste list — not 2,000.
From the Campaign overview, open Tracked Keywords. You have three import paths: paste a list, pull a saved Keyword Explorer list, or sync from a connected Google Search Console property.
GSC sync is the fastest legitimate path: it pulls keywords you already rank for. Filter to positions 1-30 and impressions > 50/mo before adding.
Aim for 30-100 keywords on Moz Pro Standard ($99/mo) and up to 300 on Medium ($179/mo). Over 300 dilutes the signal and you hit plan caps fast.
Tag each keyword at import. Tags become the saved-view filters on the Rank Tracker dashboard — use tags like 'money-pages,' 'top-of-funnel,' 'competitor-comparisons,' 'brand-defense.' Untagged keywords are why most Moz dashboards feel useless.
Step 3
Campaign settings → Competitors. Add 3-5 direct competitors at similar Domain Authority. Set the location and engine.
Open Campaign settings → Competitors. Add 3-5 direct competitors. Stay within 20 DA points of your own — comparing a DA 30 site to a DA 80 publisher produces no actionable signal.
Set the primary search engine and location. Default is google.com, United States. If your audience is UK or AU, switch — rankings and SERP features differ meaningfully across geos.
Pick the device default: Mobile is correct for almost every consumer-facing business (matches Google's mobile-first index). Add Desktop as a secondary tracked device if your buyers convert there.
Save. Moz will start collecting rank data on the next scheduled update (typically within 24-48 hours).
Step 4
Campaign settings → Site Crawl → set crawl scope (subfolder vs whole site), exclusion patterns, and schedule (weekly is the default).
Open Site Crawl settings. By default, Moz crawls the whole verified site weekly. For most accounts, that's right — but it requires guardrails.
Set the crawl scope to the path that matters. If you only want example.com/blog audited, set scope to subfolder. Otherwise you'll burn crawl pages on /app, /docs, and faceted-nav URLs that don't need SEO attention.
Add exclusion patterns for faceted nav (?filter=, ?sort=, ?page=), internal search results (?s=, /search/), and session-ID parameters. Faceted nav is the #1 reason Moz Site Crawl returns 30,000 URLs on a 3,000-page site.
Set the schedule. Weekly is the default and the right cadence for active sites. Monthly for static brochure sites. Don't pick daily — Moz's daily crawl on Medium/Large plans burns 7x the page allowance for marginal extra signal.
Step 5
Campaign settings → Notifications. Turn on critical crawl issues, rank drops, and competitor moves. Route to Slack or email.
Open Notifications. Enable email alerts for new critical issues (broken canonicals, noindex on tracked pages, 5xx spikes), rank drops > 5 positions on tracked keywords, and competitor moves into the top 10 of your tracked terms.
If your team works in Slack, connect the Slack integration under Account → Integrations. Email-only alerts get ignored in most teams.
Set the weekly email digest day to a day you'll actually open it. Monday morning works for most marketers — review before the rest of the week's noise lands.
Skip 'every change' alerts. They produce too much volume to be useful — most teams disable them within a month.
Step 6
Trigger the manual crawl. While it runs, prepare your validation checklist. Compare crawled URL count against GSC indexed count once complete.
Trigger a manual Site Crawl (Campaign → Site Crawl → Recrawl). For sites under 5K URLs, the crawl finishes in 30-90 minutes. For 50K+ URL sites, plan for 4-12 hours.
While it runs, open Google Search Console → Pages → record the 'Indexed' count.
Once the Moz crawl completes, compare crawled URLs vs GSC indexed URLs. If Moz is off by more than 25%, your scope or exclusion rules are wrong. Diagnose before acting on any of the issue data.
Spot-check 10 random URLs from the crawl report against the live site in incognito. If Moz flags a 'noindex' on a page that's actually indexable in the browser, your robots/headers config is sending mixed signals — fix that before triaging the rest of the report.
Step 7
Site Crawl → All Issues. Sort by Critical first, then by URLs affected descending. Tackle the top 5-10 issues, not the long tail.
Open Site Crawl → All Issues. Look at the four severity buckets: Critical, Warnings, Notices, and SEO Best Practice.
Filter to Critical only. Sort by 'URLs affected' descending. The top 5-10 issues by URL count almost always represent the highest-leverage fixes.
A 'broken internal link' affecting 800 pages beats fixing 12 individual 4xx pages every time. Same effort, 60x the impact.
Export the top 20 issues as CSV from the issue detail view. Assign owners, set deadlines, and re-run the crawl after fixes ship. The Campaign Health metric should move 5-15 points after the first triage round.
Common mistakes
Pointing the Campaign at the wrong host (apex vs www)
What goes wrong: Every crawled URL burns a redirect hop. Page Optimization scores look worse than reality. You spend $99-179/mo getting data that's off by one redirect on every report. Three months wasted.
How to avoid: Check your canonical with `curl -I https://example.com` and `curl -I https://www.example.com`. Whichever returns 200 (not a 301) is your canonical. Match the Campaign URL exactly.
Tracking 2,000 keywords on a Medium plan
What goes wrong: Moz Medium ($179/mo) caps tracked keywords. Importing your full GSC list hits the cap and adds noise to every dashboard. You can't see which money-page rankings moved.
How to avoid: Cap at 30-100 keywords on Standard, up to 300 on Medium. Pick keywords that drive revenue + topical authority. Skip every keyword you 'happen to rank for' that doesn't matter.
No crawl exclusion rules for faceted nav
What goes wrong: Moz returns 32,000 URLs on a 3,000-page site. Faceted-nav parameters dominate the issue list. You spend 8 hours filtering noise that should never have been crawled. Page allowance burned on garbage.
How to avoid: Before the first crawl, add exclusion patterns for ?filter=, ?sort=, ?page=, ?s=, /search/, and any session-ID parameters. Re-crawl with a clean scope.
Adding aspirational competitors
What goes wrong: You add HubSpot (DA 93) as a competitor for your DA 32 site. Every weekly report shows them outranking you everywhere. The team gets demoralized. No actionable signal.
How to avoid: Pick 3-5 direct competitors within 20 DA points. They're the realistic benchmark. Move the bar up only when you've closed the gap.
Daily Site Crawl with no use case
What goes wrong: You enable daily crawl 'just in case.' Page allowance drains 7x faster. You hit the cap mid-month and lose data on critical pages. The $179/mo plan suddenly only covers 2 weeks.
How to avoid: Weekly is the right default. Daily only if you're shipping site changes daily AND have a Large plan with the headroom for it.
Treating Campaign Health as the goal
What goes wrong: You chase a 100% Campaign Health score and fix low-value issues (missing alt text on decorative images, single-H2 warnings). The real ranking-impactful issues (broken canonicals, noindex on money pages) sit untouched.
How to avoid: Use Campaign Health as a trend indicator. The real metric is URLs affected by Critical issues — and the right work is the top 5-10 Critical issues by URL count.
Recap
Done — what's next
How to triage and fix Moz Site Crawl issues (the right priority order)
Read the next tutorial
Hand it off
Configuring a Moz Campaign once is a project. Running it weekly, triaging Site Crawl issues, and closing fixes is a job. A vetted technical SEO specialist on EverestX will own the Campaign, the schedule, and the fixes — typically $400-1,000/mo at $14-16/hr depending on site size.
See specialist rates
Standard ($99/mo) caps you at 1 Campaign and limited tracked keywords — fine for a single small site. Medium ($179/mo) gives 3 Campaigns and significantly higher keyword/page allowances. If you manage more than one site or have any site over 3K URLs, Medium pays for itself in headroom.
Domain Authority (DA) is Moz's machine-learned score (0-100) predicting how a site will rank in Google. It's based on link profile, content quality signals, and historical ranking behavior. It's NOT a Google metric — Google has stated repeatedly that DA isn't used in their algorithm. Use DA as a directional competitive benchmark, not a ranking target.
Three usual reasons: (1) Moz's Site Crawl hasn't crawled orphan URLs that GSC indexed via sitemaps or external links; (2) Moz is crawling staging or parameter URLs that aren't in GSC's index; (3) your sitemap is incomplete. Reconcile by tightening Site Crawl scope and ensuring sitemap parity with GSC.
Campaign Health in isolation is meaningless. Look at the issues breakdown: 1,000 URLs with broken canonicals is a real problem; 1,000 URLs flagged for missing meta descriptions is usually noise. Prioritize by URL count and severity, not the headline number.
Wait 7-14 days after fixes ship before re-crawling. CDN caches and crawl-discovery delays mean immediate re-crawls show stale state. The weekly default cadence handles this naturally.
No — Campaigns require verified ownership. For competitor research, use Link Explorer's Compare Link Profiles (no verification needed) and Domain Analysis. Those don't require ownership but produce less detail than a full Campaign.
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