Tips to Set Up Actionable SEO Dashboards
by Julie Weishaar
August 23, 2022
Tips to Set Up Actionable SEO Dashboards

Setting up SEO dashboards will show what brings sales to the site. And this information is crucial.

These dashboards tell you how your site works and help you improve the strategies for future marketing campaigns.

The most important question for an SEO campaign is which metrics you should track. You should be very careful while picking the right ones.

Business owners often make a mistake by focusing on one metric and blowing it out of proportion only to ignore the other important ones.

However, the correct way of doing this is to start with general sales data and eventually work your way into more specific data.

Before we hop into the tips to set up an actionable SEO dashboard, let’s get to know why you must have an SEO dashboard.

Importance Of SEO Dashboards

Marketers usually encounter problems when they look at entire marketing campaigns. Most of the time, these campaigns are complex and require marketers to look at different platforms to have a clear picture of successes and failures.

These complex campaigns lead to confusion as it becomes challenging to look at various platforms and determine the most critical metrics.

To deal with this, marketers have to spend hours every month compiling reports and showing them in a linear fashion.

They often have to take screenshots of the metrics to represent this data and paste them into Google Slides or other presentation tools.

With the help of an SEO dashboard, you can simplify the process and get all the essential data represented on one single page.

The simplification means you won’t have to dig through various platforms to find the needed data. You won’t even have to store tons of clumsy screenshots.

Moreover, once you set up this dashboard, you won’t have to set it up again before your next meeting.

Because, unlike those screenshots, a dashboard shows the most recent data meaning you won’t have to waste hours creating a new report.

With that out of the way, let’s jump into the tips to help you create an actionable SEO dashboard. These tips will take you through your campaign from up to down and let you know the action you can take to improve the numbers.

5 Tips For Creating An Actionable SEO Dashboard

After putting a lot of time and resources into SEO, you must understand how these things work. This is only possible by putting together a report that translates how your SEO results are driving the results.

Here are five tips to help you make a dashboard with proper metrics to take the right actions and improve the results.

Target Should Be On A Specific Audience

Dashboards generally try to serve a very wide set of audiences. A broad set of information is included to appease such a diverse audience, which weakens the signal-to-noise ratio for everyone. To ensure this ratio is not hurt, you must know for whom you are creating the dashboard.

A dashboard should be able to give clear insights and an overview of the current business state without consuming too much time and attention. It is advisable to always report in percentages or absolute numbers.

According to a study by Databox, an SEO manager and C-level executive is most likely to use the dashboard.

SEO dashboard

Source: Databox

Actually, understanding who you are creating a website for plays a significant role in determining what it should include.

For example, because of a more profound knowledge of how variables influence the ranking of SERPs, an SEO Manager will benefit more by having more detailed metrics on the dashboards.

On the other hand, a C-level executive will not understand how the variables connect, so it’ll be best to give them high-level metrics on steps to achieve high-level objectives.

Provide Context For KPIs

While reporting for revenue and how it is performing week over week or year over year, marketers often make the mistake of regurgitating KPIs without any context of how the performance is as per the expectations.

For example, if the revenue is up by 10% YoY, it might appear to be a mediocre success. But suppose the expected growth goal called for at least 25%. In this case, the campaign would be a massive failure.

So without context, what appears to be a success might be a possible failure. Hence, it is essential to provide context to make more informed decisions.

Show The Essential SEO Metrics

Determining the marketing KPIs you’ll create is critical to setting up an actionable SEO dashboard. You need to know the valuable metrics for your business and the strategies you need to make. This can include a lot of marketing metrics like PPC, click-through rates, traffic, etc.

SEO marketing dashboards help you keep track of all these metrics, which can help you achieve your business goals easily.

Giving the dashboard users what they want in their language is also very helpful. For example, if your client wants appointments from the website, don’t say conversion on the dashboard; call them appointments.

It is unnecessary to track every metric when those metrics have nothing to do with your business growth goals.

On the flip side, when you have fewer metrics to follow, you can focus much better, and your ability to influence these metrics improves in the process.

It is essential to keep the dashboard simple and clean. Bogging it down with too much information and data will only create confusion and drive the focus away from primary goals.

The Dashboard Should Be Visual-Heavy

As we just mentioned, keeping the dashboard simple and clean is necessary. It is one of the most essential ways of making it effective and easily digestible for your audience.

To simplify, you can use charts, graphs, and even maps to show your SEO campaign’s performance.

For a multi-location business, maps can be beneficial to show your clients how the campaign is performing at different locations.

The place that needs the most help can be allocated more resources. It is crucial to ensure that the dashboard is not hard to read. Otherwise, it can waste plenty of time. If anything, it should be easy to scan for anomalies.

Update Dashboard Consistently

According to Stan Tan, Digital Marketing Expert at Selby’s, the SEO dashboard should be updated monthly or quarterly. Updating it daily will be too frequent because SEO results are improved from the activities done months ago.

When looking at the effects of the SEO campaign you ran, you should focus on the long-term growth.

Other aspects of your business strategies might show immediate results, but SEO takes time and is worth it.

To get a bigger picture of your results, you can consider building a dashboard that measures the metrics year over year.

Final Words

Creating an SEO dashboard doesn’t necessarily have to be a time-consuming task. If you focus on your business goals and only include the data you might need, you can build a more effective dashboard in less time.

Use these expert tips the next time you create an actionable SEO dashboard. This will ensure that your report will be client-facing and engaging from which everyone can pull some value.

Read more SEO-related content:

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Categories: Digital Marketing | SEO

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