How to easily build SEO Monitoring Dashboards

Growing Mondays. In today's Growing Monday, I would like to talk about one of those elements that although not many people will think as necessarily SEO-specific, and actually they are not, but they are critical towards the success of an SEO process. Dashboards. Dashboards will allow us to identify when something goes wrong, when something is going pretty well, to identify problems, issues, and as well as opportunities in our SEO process. And therefore, it is key that we develop, that we create really good dashboards including the most important metrics in our SEO process in order to provide us constant information about what is going on. In it, right? Um, also it's important to clarify that although you might consider dashboards as this report that you will provide to your client, right? And, and, and I might understand how in some scenarios, um, you will provide and give access to your client directly, uh, to the dashboard that you use on a day-to-day basis. They are not necessarily the same, right? One, one, um, thing is this report that you will use yourself to get all the information about the different activities and the output of the different actions that you are taking in your SEO process. And another thing is this other report that you will provide to your client highlighting really, really, really the most important outcomes of these efforts, the goals that have been achieved, which haven't been achieved as you had established, as you had wished or planned, and the different actions that should be taken to whether to improve what you're already seeing that is working pretty well and what hasn't, right? So I think that we can and should differentiate these 2, right? And today I would like to actually talk about the dashboards that you use to actually monitor and follow up with your ongoing SEO activities. And for example, and this is a topic that I actually have spoken quite a bit in the past, you can see here in the screen right now how in the SEO project management presentation I gave last year at Inbounder, I was mentioning how we should track the evolution of the different areas that we are working with in the SEO process, like from those that have to do with technical optimization, crawlability, indexability, those that have to do with, uh, link popularity and promotion, as also the backlinks that we might be getting from other websites, and of course the, the, the visibility metrics, the rankings, the traffic that these rankings are providing us, and at the end of the day, the conversions, the actual, uh, final outcome and value and transaction that the website gets from all of the efforts, right? And actually I share a bit in one of those slides, an example of a dashboard that I had set with one of the tools that I would like to share with you today to show you how we can easily set dashboards that aggregate and provide us the flexibility to aggregate all of this data that we might be working with. Today I would like to share a few ways to do this and a few tools that I have identified that greatly facilitate this process. Let's take a look. The most fundamental dashboard that we have, and free one, for our websites, and we should all have access to it, is the Google Search Console. Because if you take a look at it, you can see that it provides us in the main, in the main page of the new version, the access to view the evolution of the most critical or almost the most important critical areas of our website, the visibility evolution on one hand, then the indexability and error, potential crawling or indexability errors, the enhancement. And I would love to see here included the information about links. That would be amazing to have the information in one report here, the overview of the evolution of backlinks coming to our site and then the internal linking structure organization, for example, to have a view of those orphan pages right away, for example, if they have found any or issues like this highlighted. Of course, there might be ways to improve it, but I believe that this is a really good, right-ahead, straightforward way to have access to a dashboard that is completely free. Another tool that is free and from Google that is also available not only for SEO but for any other digital marketing activity and we can use to create reports or dashboards to integrate and blend data across different different data sources to is the Google Data Studio. And I am super excited that they have been continuously launching new functionalities and many more also SEO tools are providing support and a connector for it. So it's very, very cool. So for example, here you can see a dashboard that I created taking the information from the visibility area of the Google Search Console that is available to be integrated here in the Google Data Studio. So for me, it's pretty cool because it provides us a view that unfortunately we cannot get like this in the Google Search Console report, native report directly, right? Like, which is the the combination of landing pages or pages that are getting visibility and clicks from organic search and the query connected to them directly in a single view like this, right? So this is something that we can set with Google Data Studio and as you can see here, I have also included Google Analytics data information here directly. So for example, if I want to add here information about bounce rate, all of these pages, for example. It's very, very straightforward and it will update and it provides us also an easy way to sort it using different criteria and add a secondary sort and also to compare with a previous period of time and to switch between different ways to show the data between tables and different type of of charts and visuals is very, very, very good. I am very excited about it. And as you can see here, well, we can easily also go far more granular, allow us to, for example, just see the information about a single query, for example. So I just want the information about this specific query, this specific term, and see all the information about impressions, click-through rate, and I can take a look here which are the specific pages like this. So I always create one of these for any website that I work with because even if I have the Google Search Console access directly there, I have this other way to aggregate data and easily filter data to identify if something is wrong. And as I mentioned before, they provide here resources, ways to to obtain much more data from many other data sources. If I add a data source, we can see that there are ways to add BigQuery data, Google Ads data, from the Google Sheets also, YouTube Analytics, Supermetrics provides a connector for different connectors for the different metrics that they also aggregate for it, Sistrix, They just launched last week a connector for it. There was also a really, really cool presentation that was given by Sam Marsden a few months ago regarding how to also aggregate and use Google Data Studio to aggregate data not only from a visibility perspective and traffic perspective, but also the from Deepflow by using SAPPHIIR, the SAPPHIIR connector that they have. Before I move on with other tools, I would like to say that there's this really, really good resource of Google Data Studio templates that you can reuse and guides too by Lee Hurst that is fantastic because you can see that you can obtain information about the connections that have been covered, in different articles here about dashboards or reports that we can create for SEO or PPC or business and many other different areas. So definitely check it out because maybe it might be a little bit too scary to start from scratch, but you can use this resource here to obtain many of these already developed templates that can really facilitate the task. Another new way to access all the information or most of the information of your SEO activities in a really, really, really good dashboard is the one of Semrush. I have to say that I am very, very impressed and it says that it's still in beta and it was launched not so long ago, but I am so impressed because in most cases, in many occasions, this is a tool that we are already using because it provides so much value that they allow us to do competition analysis, keyword research, but they have already for a while launched many other functionalities for technical optimisation with an SEO audit area, for specific rank tracking also, to connect with the data of our traffic also to provide much more meaningful recommendations. So once that they have all this data, it is very straightforward, should be very straightforward for them to that the next step should be to create something like this, and they have done it really, really, really well. So as you can see here, we have an SEO dashboard, in this case of the Remoters website, for which I connected Google Analytics, Google Search Console, so of course it provides the information about the evolution of the most important metrics of traffic, we can see the keywords that I am specifically tracking with the SEMrush Rank Tracker functionality, the backlinks that they provide too because they have also a backlinks section so I can see also the evolution of the new and the lost links towards my website, a little bit of the evolution of the trend devices and locations, geo-distribution, that is something that is really interesting for international sites, and the evolution of the different visits from different channels, right? Because of course, even if we are focused on SEO, we want to see what is the role of SEO in the overall evolution of the website or the status of the website, right? And again, they have a backlink toxic area to identify potential natural links that are pointing to, to our site, and they provide a, a, an overview of them, uh, here, and a site audit, uh, section for which we can also set, um, frequent and recurrent, uh, crawls, and we will have here the evolution of that. And, and on-page SEO recommendations, that is another module that, that they have, uh, in which they provide us direct actions that we can do to improve from a content and technical perspective, specific pages of our site. And then the performance metrics from the Google Search Console that we connect to, like top queries here, the clicks, impressions, click-through rate, average position here. If we will have had goals here in Google Analytics, also the trend of the goal completions here and the different metrics charts from Google Analytics. So as you can see, it's really, really good because it really aggregates not only the data that they provide directly with their own tool, and they allow us to set with their own tool from links to keyword tracking, popularity evolution, and technical optimization now, the technical configuration of our site, but also they allow us to connect with Google Analytics and Google Search Console for the traffic and additional visibility metrics that we would like to see in a single page. Another great tool that provides us a very flexible, I have to say that probably the most flexible dashboard that I have seen in the market right now is the one of Cognitive SEO. That is an SEO tool that I haven't seen that is yet still as mentioned as it should because it's a really, really good tool. They started a few years ago providing and focusing on link analysis and they used the data from Majestic, so it was very complete data, but for which they provided this additional layer of functionality to facilitate actually the analysis and comparison with other websites. And they also at some point added rank tracking, social visibility. A few months ago they added the site audit feature for technical optimization. So of course now with this dashboard functionality that they provide, it's brilliant because we can actually see all the information, all the metrics from the different areas in SEO, um, as in, in an easy-to-access and very flexible dashboard. As you can see here, for example, uh, they provide— this is my rank tracking that I have set with, with them. So they can— they tell me the, the, the improved, declined keywords, the ranking trend over time, uh, the links that have— I have gained or lost, those that might look unnatural to check out. This Google Analytics traffic data, the trend over time, the organic trend over time, those top pages, and then of course the specific keywords that have increased or decreased that I have specifically set with them, and my visibility, my overall website visibility versus the one of my competitors to give a bigger context if everything is going good or bad. So this is brilliant that they also connect with data of third parties like this. Um, to provide much more complete information. And again here, more link data and the technical, um, configuration of my website, the thin content issues, redirects, broken pages over time, etc. So I think this is really great. As you can see here, look, we can move like every— any dashboard from one side to the other like this. It's very, very straightforward. I can go and if you see here I can select here for any of the metrics here, not only the websites, but for example, what way I would like to show those specific information, to filter out for which country, if I want to add additional filtering by location, for example, by search engine. Maybe it's easier if I show it like this, take a look. So they have all these different type of widgets that we can choose from to show, uh, the, the data that we want, right? From rank tracking, the link analysis, site audit, social visibility, alerts that I have set with them, and also custom widgets. So I have to say that it's really, really good, and I love that they integrate Google Analytics. Uh, probably the only thing that I haven't seen yet that they integrate with is Google Search Console, Hopefully it's coming, but I think that it's, it's pretty good. Again, it's pretty good, good value from what it costs. And at the end of the day, if you are already using them already for your ongoing SEO activities and tasks, it's pretty straightforward. It's pretty cool that they provide this easy way to access the information in a single view to avoid going through each different reports and, and views for each single area that you are working with. With them. So take a look, I think it can provide a really good option for SEO dashboard for you. Another way to create a dashboard is actually by using a dashboard tool. There was a boom, I think, a few years ago of many, many dashboards, web dashboards, that at some point a few of them died, a few of them stayed and evolved and integrated much more with specific metrics in the different areas of especially digital marketing in order to provide more value. There was this post that I wrote already 5 years ago, oh my God, it makes me feel so old already, about how to easily create an SEO dashboard using DashThis. And as you can see, I was showing the post how you could create by integrating data out of Google Master Tools, at the time it was called like this, Google Analytics and Moz data right there like this, right, with DashThis and also a further online marketing dashboard with also Twitter data, Facebook data, Mailchimp data that will provide you like an easy way to follow the different activities in SEO or digital marketing, right? Um, DashThis is still in the market thankfully because I really believe it's a, is a, is a really, really good tool, really good value tool, and, and it really facilitates, and this is why I, I wrote about it in the first place 5 years ago, I It still facilitates the aggregation of data from all of these different data sources. And you can see here how you can select from preset widgets. So I am showing here the different data sources that I have already connected with them, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and all of the different custom widgets that I can use to show the data in a way that is much more meaningful for me, easier to understand. For me and some static widgets here that I can also include with comments, with data that I might want to manually import, with CSV or with a CSV or something like this. But you can see here how, for example, overall traffic, SEO, organic traffic from Google Analytics, I can set, I can bring the top pages from Google Search Console, the clicks, impressions, and average click-through rate, and here the trend over time that I can easily see, oh my God, this will be amazing to have directly again in the Google Search Console. But then again, as you can see, this data that I can include here in dashes and as I showed before also that you can set in Google Data Studio. This is amazing and it makes it so, so, so easy to see a little bit of the trend over time in a much more easier way. The clicks per query too to see in a very, very easy way which are those queries that are improving, or increasing, decreasing over time, and the backlinks data with Ahrefs. I hope that you have enjoyed this episode of Crawling Mondays. Hopefully you have seen a new way to follow up with your current SEO activities in a nice-looking dashboard, with a dashboard that really facilitates, and this is what is really more important I believe than if it is really, really nice-looking or not, facilitates the analysis and provides actionability. to really facilitate your day-to-day SEO, ongoing SEO activities, right? This is the most important, more critical thing. And I am very looking forward to see you next Monday in a new episode. Bye-bye. Chronic Mondays.