The success of your natural SEO strategy depends largely on your ability to measure and analyze the performance of your site.
In this article, we will explain how to create an SEO dashboard with Google Looker Studio and Search Console to track your key KPIs. Discover the steps to create a powerful dashboard, the necessary tools, and the key indicators to follow to ensure the success of your SEO strategy.
What is an SEO dashboard?
An SEO dashboard is a visual tool for monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing the performance of your website in search engines including Google.
It brings together in one place the main key performance indicators (KPIs) linked to your natural referencing (SEO) strategy. These KPIs typically include average position on targeted keywords, organic traffic, impressions, and page clicks, among others.
The purpose of an SEO dashboard is to make it easier to monitor and analyze SEO data, allowing marketers and website owners to quickly identify trends, opportunities, and potential issues.
This way, they can make informed decisions to improve their SEO model and ultimately drive higher quality traffic and higher rankings in Google search results.
Also Read: SEO Guide for SMEs and Micro businesses
What can an SEO dashboard do for you?
An SEO dashboard provides several benefits for your business and your natural SEO strategy:
- Saves time: By having all the important KPIs in one place, you can quickly get an overview of your SEO performance without having to navigate between different tools and reports.
- Track progress: A dashboard allows you to track your SEO performance over time, helping you identify trends and measure the impact of your SEO efforts.
- Identifying opportunities: By closely monitoring KPIs, you can spot growth opportunities, such as keywords you could rank for or pages that generate a lot of traffic but could be further optimized.
- Problem detection: An SEO dashboard can also help you quickly spot potential issues, such as traffic drops or ranking drops on certain keywords, so you can take corrective action.
- Prioritization of actions: by clearly visualizing your performance, an SEO dashboard makes it easier to prioritize the actions to take to improve your SEO, by focusing on the most promising or most problematic areas.
- Reporting and communication: A well-designed SEO dashboard makes it easy to communicate your SEO results and progress to your business stakeholders, presenting the data clearly and understandably.
Which tools should you use to create an SEO dashboard?
To create an effective SEO dashboard, you must choose the right tools that will allow you to collect, analyze, and present data in a clear and user-friendly way.
Google Looker Studio
This free data visualization tool from Google is ideal for creating personalized and interactive SEO dashboards.
With Google Looker Studio, you can easily import data from different sources, such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and many others.
The tool offers a wide variety of graphs, tables, and maps to present your data visually and intuitively. Additionally, dashboards created with Google Looker Studio are easily shareable with your team members or clients.
Import data from the Search Console
Google Search Console is an essential tool for monitoring your SEO performance. By integrating it into your dashboard, you’ll be able to track data like impressions, clicks, click-through rate (CTR), and average position for your keywords and pages.
To do this, simply connect your Search Console account to Google Looker Studio and choose the data you want to display in your dashboard.
Which KPIs to track in an SEO dashboard?
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are metrics used to evaluate the effectiveness of your SEO strategy and help you achieve your goals.
The average position on important keywords
The average position of your target keywords in search results is a key indicator of your SEO performance. By tracking this KPI, you can determine if your Google SEO efforts are effective and if you are gaining ground against the competition.
It’s important to track not only the overall average position but also the position for the specific keywords most relevant to your business.
To go further, you can also track keyword position relative to your competitors, allowing you to better understand their SEO strategy and adapt yours accordingly.
Incoming traffic to key pages
Organic traffic is the number of visitors who arrive at your site through organic rather than paid search results. Growing organic traffic is generally a sign of a successful SEO strategy.
Track organic traffic volume, traffic sources, and trends over time to gauge the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.
It’s also crucial to monitor traffic on key pages of your site, like product pages, blog posts, or landing pages. This analysis allows you to identify the pages that generate the most traffic and conversions, as well as those that need SEO improvements.
By emphasizing key pages, you can focus your SEO efforts on areas that have the greatest impact on your business goals.
Page impressions and clicks
Impressions are the number of times your pages were displayed in search results, while clicks are the number of times users clicked on your links.
Tracking these SEO KPIs allows you to measure the visibility of your site and user interest in your content. A high click-through rate (CTR) generally indicates that your page titles and descriptions are attractive and entice users to click.
By analyzing impressions and clicks, you can identify pages that have good visibility on Google but have a low click-through rate. These pages can be optimized by improving titles, meta descriptions, and content to increase appeal and encourage more clicks.
Additionally, by comparing click-through rates for different keywords and pages, you can better understand user preferences and adapt your content strategy accordingly.
Also, analyze conversions to check the quality of traffic
It is essential to include conversions in your SEO dashboard because they allow you to check the quality of traffic generated by your SEO efforts. High traffic is certainly important, but if visitors aren’t converting, it means you’re not meeting your business goals.
Conversions can vary depending on your industry and specific goals, but typically include actions like purchases, newsletter signups, quote requests, or resource downloads.
By tracking conversions and correlating them with other KPIs in your dashboard, you can identify traffic sources and keywords that drive real results for your business. This allows you to better target your SEO efforts and optimize your pages to encourage visitors to take the desired actions.
Compare performance between periods
Comparing your site’s performance between different periods is crucial to assess the impact of your SEO strategy and to identify trends and growth opportunities.
By integrating period comparisons into your SEO dashboard, you can quickly determine whether your SEO efforts are paying off and whether you are making progress toward your goals.
You can compare performance between different periods, such as month by month, quarter by quarter, or year by year. This approach helps you understand seasonal fluctuations, specific events, or algorithm changes that may influence your results.
By highlighting variations in performance, you can adjust your SEO strategy accordingly and focus on areas that have the greatest potential for improvement.
Have multiple views of the SEO dashboard
It is important to have several views of your SEO dashboard to adapt the analysis to different needs and objectives. For example, you can create weekly, monthly, and yearly views to track short-term and long-term performance.
A weekly report of your SEO dashboard can help you quickly identify emerging issues or opportunities and respond quickly to changes. A monthly report provides a broader perspective to assess trends and progress over a longer period. Finally, an annual report from the SEO dashboard allows you to analyze the overall performance of your site and plan objectives and actions for the coming year.
By combining multiple views into your SEO dashboard, you can better understand your site’s performance, identify trends and opportunities, and make informed decisions to improve your SEO strategy.
Our tip for creating an SEO dashboard
The most important tip for creating a successful SEO dashboard is to personalize it according to your specific objectives and your industry. This way, you can focus your attention on the KPIs most relevant to your business.
Remember that a powerful SEO dashboard is not enough, you also need to have quality content to analyze.
Hire an SEO Agency Lahore to create SEO-optimized articles and pages that will improve your positioning in Google search results and attract qualified traffic to your site.