Help

Getting started

1. Register your business on the register page and pay the first month (R 150.00) on PayStack.
2. Sign in with your email address and password.
3. On your first visit, fill in My details: business name, default website, contact details and your logo. Your logo and name are printed on your reports.
4. Your default website appears under My Websites. Verify it (see below), then press Crawl now.
5. When the crawl finishes, open the Report, fix the most important problems first, and crawl again to see your progress.

Adding websites and verifying them

Press Add a website on the dashboard and type the address, for example https://www.mybusiness.co.za. Choose how you are connected to it:

• I own or manage this website — you can crawl every page after you verify it.
• Competitor or market research — only public pages are read, following the website's robots.txt rules.

To verify a website press Verify on its card and do one of these:

• upload the small text file shown (named shophook-….txt) to the main folder of the website, or
• paste the meta tag shown into the <head> of the home page.

Then press Check now. You can remove the file or tag after it says Verified owner. You can delete any website with the bin button on its card.

Crawling a website

Crawl now reads the pages of the website one by one, the way Google does, and checks each one against the rulebook. You can watch the progress bar; you may also close the page — the crawl carries on in the background.

• Crawl scope lets you crawl only certain parts of a website, leave parts out, or skip addresses with ? in them (filters and searches). Use it when a crawl reaches its page limit.
• Settings > Crawl speed: Gentle for small or busy hosting, Balanced for most websites, Fast after hours.
• Up to 500 pages are checked per crawl.

Reading the report

The SEO score (out of 100) shows the overall health of the website: 80+ Good, 50–79 Needs work, under 50 Poor. Below it you see a score for each area (crawling, titles and descriptions, links, content, speed and so on).

• Critical problems stop pages from being found or shown properly — fix these first.
• Warnings hold your ranking back.
• Notices are smaller improvements.

Click any problem to see which pages have it, why it matters to Google and Bing, and how to fix it. Click a page to see all of its problems.

Fixing problems

Open a page in the report and scroll to Repair this page. Each fix tells you exactly what to change and in which file. Where possible a ready-made code snippet is given — press the copy button and paste it into your page.

The Repair kit on the report gives you a ready-made sitemap.xml and robots.txt to upload to your website.

After making changes, upload your files and press Crawl again to confirm the problems are gone.

Compare & Rank (competitors)

Open Compare & Rank on one of your websites, add the search phrases your customers use and your competitors' websites, and crawl them. You will see who is best placed for your searches and the steps that would move you up.

Progress and competitor reports

Every crawl is kept. On a report press:

• Progress report — compares a crawl with an earlier one: score change, what was fixed, what got better, what is new or worse, and your score over time. Choose any two crawls at the top.
• Competitor report — your ranking against each competitor at that crawl, area by area, and how the gap changes crawl by crawl.

Both can be printed or downloaded as PDF.

Client report (PDF)

Client report makes a branded, plain-language report of one crawl with your logo, the website that was checked, the score, top priorities and a page list. Use Download PDF or Print. Tick or untick the competitor ranking and page list to make it shorter.

My details and your logo

My details (top of the dashboard) holds your business name, default website, contact details and logo. Upload a PNG, JPG, GIF or WEBP logo of up to 2 MB — a wide logo on a white or clear background looks best on reports.

Subscription and payments

• PIL SEO ONLY is R 150.00 a month, charged by PayStack on the same date every month.
• My details > Subscription shows the status, the next payment date and your payments.
• Change card opens PayStack's secure page to update the card.
• Cancel subscription stops future payments; the SEO Suite stays open until the end of the month you paid for.
• If a payment fails, the SEO Suite stays open for 7 more days so you can update your card.

NetWatch (internet monitor)

NetWatch checks your internet connection every few seconds while it is open and records drop-outs, weak signal and recoveries, with the time, your IP address and internet provider.

• Leave the Monitor page open (for example on a PC in the office) to build up a history.
• Reports shows the history by day and hour, grouped by IP address or location, and can be printed or exported to CSV — useful evidence when you complain to your internet provider.
• Ping target checks how quickly our server can reach another public address (e.g. 8.8.8.8). Traceroute shows the route to it.

Device Health (PC and phone check-up)

Device Health gives your computer or phone a check-up from inside your browser:

• Device report — processor cores, approximate memory, browser storage, network, battery and screen, with a health score.
• Scan a folder (Chrome or Edge on Windows, Mac, Linux and Chromebook) — choose a folder such as Downloads or Documents. It finds junk and temporary files, unfinished downloads, duplicate files, very large files, files not changed for a long time, and empty files and folders.
• Clean up — tick what you want to remove and press Move to PIL Cleanup. The files are moved into a PIL Cleanup folder inside the folder you scanned, so you can check them (each name gets .pilclean added, so the browser does not stop to ask about every file; remove that ending to put a file back). When you are happy, press Empty PIL Cleanup to delete them for good.
• Full phone check (phones and tablets) — opens by itself on a phone. It checks the Android or iPhone version, whether Chrome is up to date, memory, a speed test, battery, internet speed and the clock. Then nine one-tap questions show you exactly where to look in your phone’s Settings (storage, updates, unused apps, WhatsApp and photos, battery health, overheating, restarts, screen lock and the security scan). You get a score and a list of what to fix first. Phones do not let any website or web app look inside the phone itself, so this is the safest complete check a browser can do.
• Big files (phones) — choose your photos and videos (press and hold the first one, then Select all) to find duplicates, big videos, WhatsApp media, screenshots and old files. The result is added to the phone check. Delete them in Files by Google, Google Photos or the iPhone Photos app — the steps are shown. The Tips tab has more steps for your phone.

Your files are checked on your own device; only the totals are saved to your history. Keep backups of important files — you decide what is removed.

Browsers do not allow any website to clean system files, other apps or memory. For those, Device Health shows the steps for your device (for example Storage Sense on Windows or Storage on Android).

PIL PC Clean for Windows

Download PIL PC Clean from the Device Health page for a full clean-up of a Windows 10 or 11 PC. It asks for administrator rights when it opens.

• Overview — graphs of drive space used and free, memory in use and available, and live processor and memory use, with a health score and what to do first.
• Clean-up — press Analyse, tick what to remove and press Clean selected: your and Windows' temporary files, Windows Update downloads, superseded updates (DISM component clean-up), error reports, thumbnail cache, browser caches, unfinished downloads, browsing history, cookies (signs you out of websites) and the Recycle Bin.
• Start-up & background — switch off programs that start with Windows (the same switch as Task Manager, so it can be undone) and stop Store apps running in the background.
• Memory & programs — close programs using a lot of memory, flush the DNS cache and clear the standby memory list.
• Disk & apps — optimise drives (TRIM for SSDs, defragment for hard drives), set up Storage Sense, and uninstall programs you no longer use.
• Repair Windows — DISM /RestoreHealth and System File Checker (sfc /scannow).

Press Create a restore point before big changes. Everything the program does is written to %LocalAppData%\PIL PC Clean\log.txt. It sends nothing to PIL Mobi.

Spam Detective (stop spam calls, SMS and email)

Spam Detective helps you and everyone using PIL Mobi SEO fight unwanted marketing calls, SMSes and emails:

• Look up any number, email address, SMS sender or website to see how many people reported it, what they were selling and when it was last seen.
• Report spam in a few taps, for yourself or for someone else (for example an employee) who asked you to. Paste the SMS or email and the numbers, addresses and links in it are found automatically. Add a screenshot if you have one.
• They contacted me too — one tap adds your report to an existing number, so everyone can see who is being hounded.
• Opt-out letter — in My reports, send a formal demand under POPIA and the Consumer Protection Act to stop and delete your details. A copy comes to you as proof.
• Still coming? Mark it, then open the Complaint pack: a printable page with everything the Information Regulator needs. Save it as a PDF and lodge it on their eService portal. For SMS spam you can also go to WASPA.
• Named and shamed — once at least 5 different people reported a company and PIL Mobi checked the reports, the company is named on the Spam board. Your name is never shown to other users.

Scammers sometimes fake other people’s numbers, so a reported number is not proof of who called. Only report what really happened.

Your devices (up to 3)

Your login works on up to 3 of your own devices, for example your office PC, laptop and phone. The first time you sign in on a device you give it a name.

To use a new device when all 3 are in use, open My details > My devices on one of your devices and remove the one you no longer use (one removal every 30 days), or email support@pilmobi.com. On iPhone the installed app and Safari count as two devices.

Install the app on your phone or computer

• Android (Chrome) and Windows / Mac (Chrome or Edge): press Install app on the sign-in page or dashboard, or use the browser menu > Install app.
• iPhone / iPad (Safari): press Install app and follow the steps: Share > Add to Home Screen > Add.

The app opens full-screen from your home screen and signs you in like the website.

Free up resources and settings

Free up resources removes the page-by-page detail of older crawls to keep the system fast. Scores, history and progress reports are kept. Settings holds the crawl speed, your own Google PageSpeed key (optional) and the name and contact line printed on client reports.

Questions

Why is my score different from another SEO tool?

Every tool weighs things differently. Use the score to measure your own progress from crawl to crawl.

Will fixing everything put me first on Google?

Not on its own. A healthy website is the foundation; Google also looks at content, links from other websites, reviews and much more.

The crawl stopped at the page limit.

Use Crawl scope to leave out repeated pages such as filters, tags or search results.

I forgot my password.

Email support@pilmobi.com from your registered email address.