Watch Your SEO Campaign with a Google Analytics Dashboard

We’re all busy. It’s easy to overlook important things while being pressured by the tyranny of the urgent.

Have you ever:

• Found out  your developers removed a bunch of pages from your website a couple of weeks ago?
• Gotten a client call asking why they haven’t got any leads- only to realize you could have caught the error earlier?
• Overlooked an undemanding client so much that you didn’t realize their traffic was tanking?

Me neither.

Okay, that was a lie. 

I’ve done all those things. That’s why I created this SEO dashboard. It forces me to take a look at every client’s website each week. From here I can quickly identify if there are any problems that I need to address.

You might not have clients- but this will help you maintain your own website, too.

Questions to Answer Before Setting Up Your Dashboard

What is the most important thing you want from your SEO campaign?

If you said, “ranking,” you need to reconsider. You can rank for something that never brings you any visitors. What good is ranking if it doesn’t send you traffic? You might get traffic but who cares of that doesn’t generate more leads? So, really, you want leads from your SEO campaign.

Can you track leads in your Google Analytics account? If not, stop reading this article, drop everything and fix that.

Since you have your lead tracking setup in Google Analytics, pick a goal as the most important goal. Sure, you want to grow your email list while getting blog subscribers and phone calls- but which is the absolute most important? We’ll need to know this before we setup the campaign.

Who can act on this information?

What good is creating a dashboard, if no one does anything with it? Make sure they receive a copy of the dashboard and take the necessary actions.

Be careful about sending a dashboard to high-level employees. Their job is about the big-picture. The dashboard is about specific actions. Some of the data in a dashboard might lead to overreactions when not understood correctly. It can also be infuriating when a high-level employee tries to micromanage someone based upon a snapshot. I’d create a different report for them.

When I worked in an agency, my entire team had dashboards for each of their clients. Each team member received a copy of this, every week. So did I, as their supervisor. At the same time, I didn’t send this dashboard to my boss or to the clients- it would only be confusing.

A Sample SEO Dashboard

I’ve created a couple different SEO dashboards, over the years. Here’s the latest version.

Get it from the Google Analytics Solutions Gallery

To use this, click on the link and import this into every particular Google Analytics view to which you want to see this dashboard.

This is an SEO dashboard. If I was doing another type of marketing campaign, I’d have designed this in a different way. In this case I don’t just want to know how my campaign is going but if anything is going wrong.

Action Items: What Should You Do With This Information?

I’ve moved this recommendation from this blog to The SEO Game Plan. You can read what to do with this dashboard here: https://www.curiousants.com/game-plan/analytics/weekly-google-analytics-seo-dashboard/

Do you have a dashboard you like to use? Tell us about it! How would you improve this dashboard? Share your thoughts in the comments, below.