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Managing SEO campaigns for clients can come with its fair share of challenges! Not only do clients struggle to understand the complexity of this ever-changing field, but it also takes time to measure impactful results.
In short, there is no step-by-step guide that you can follow that will guarantee that your clients rank higher on SERPs. So, how can you communicate your ongoing efforts and avoid the “What am I paying you for” talk…?
…By developing a relationship with your client that promotes transparency, provides proof of results, successfully communicates the value of your efforts, and aligns the achievement of goals with the overall vision – AKA an SEO client dashboard.
This article will explain how to create an SEO dashboard to communicate your marketing efforts effectively. This includes exploring:
An SEO client dashboard helps track and monitor organic search performance in real-time. By combining crucial SEO elements in one comprehensive view, marketing teams can quickly identify new opportunities to optimize long-term results. At the same time, clients will gain more visibility into what was achieved (short-term goals) through easy-to-understand data visualizations.
Dashboards are a great way to highlight the current performance of your campaign. With this in mind, here are several essential SEO metrics that you should track in your client’s dashboard:
Keywords are the backbone of your SEO strategy! Search engines will use keywords to identify the most relevant pages to a certain search query. With this in mind, regularly tracking your keyword ranking will help you identify any fluctuations or further improvements that can impact your performance.
Organic traffic measures the number of sessions your website receives from search engines like Google. In other words, it measures how successful your content is at attracting organic visitors. A good SEO strategy will focus on improving the visibility of a website in the SERPs to ultimately bring more organic traffic.
Related: 9 Ways to Break Through a Website Traffic Plateau
This metric highlights the conversions generated from organic traffic and should be what drives your business goals. Conversions can be anything that relates to the success of your campaign (form submissions, downloads, online purchases) and will provide a general indication of your performance.
Related: Are Your Website Conversion Rates Dropping? Try These 20 Tips
Authoritative websites rank higher on Google. Your SEO strategy should incorporate ways to increase your website authority through referring domains. Monitoring new/lost backlinks will highlight the success of your outreach strategy. Too many lost backlinks may affect your search engine performance.
Domain authority gives an overview of likely search engine performance. In other words, it will give you an indication of how credible your website is to SERPs. Domain authority can be used to assess the performance of your website in relation to your competitors.
Monitoring organic traffic is not enough! It’s important to understand where this traffic is going. By tracking your top landing pages you can quickly see the pages that are driving the most traffic for a client, giving you more clarity on the content you should optimize for conversions. Your clients can also reference this data to get a better understanding of their current performance, helping you highlight the impact of your work.
Your keyword rankings and website traffic won’t mean much if the landing pages you’re driving traffic to aren’t converting well.
Watch the data snack below to learn:
Like what you see?
If you need help tracking and visualizing your Landing Page performance, our Customer Success team can help you build this, and any supporting dashboards, for free to get you started.
Here are a few best practices to keep in mind when creating your dashboard:
Your data dashboard should only include the metrics that are most beneficial to your client. When thinking about what metrics you want to include, it’s important to pick the ones that will highlight the success or failure of accomplishing a set of goals. To keep your dashboard focused, we recommend including a maximum of 9 metrics.
When creating your dashboard, keep in mind that your client is not the SEO expert, you are! Make sure to introduce each metric and its value by using clear and ‘relatable’ language. Ask yourself:
Related: 9 Ways Agency Reporting Can Help Create Transparency with Clients and Boost Client Retention
Think carefully about how you want to present this information to your client. Remember, the way the data is presented is equally important as the data itself. When creating your dashboards, visualizations should be simple, effective, and easily digestible. You should be careful about the use of color in your charts. Your focus should be on how you want to aggregate the data, the values that are worth including, and what date range is the most relevant to show.
With the staggering amount of data available in the digital world, it can be overwhelming to think about building an SEO dashboard from scratch. SEO dashboard templates can be used as starting points and customized to fit your needs better. Dashboard templates also implement reporting best practices and help visualize the data in a digestible manner.
If you want to understand how your visitors are behaving on your landing pages, there are several on-page events and metrics you can track from Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console that will help:
And more…
Now you can benefit from the experience of our SEO and website conversion experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template showing the most important metrics for monitoring your landing page performance. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in marketing reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console accounts with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
We’ve created a step-by-step guide outlining how to build the best SEO dashboard for your clients. Watch this quick video or go through the breakdown of each step below.
Let’s dive in.
The first step is to create a Client Account in Databox. Client Accounts are available in Agency Accounts and can be used to secure, customize and organize your client’s data in one place. We recommend creating a separate account for each client.
You can create a Client Account by navigating to the Client Page > + New Client.
In order to monitor and track your client’s SEO performance, you can connect 100+ Data Sources in just a few clicks. By connecting popular SEO Data Sources like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Semrush, and Moz, you can easily sync your SEO data with Databox’s templates.
You can connect a Data Source to your Client Account by navigating to the Data Manager > +New Connection.
As the focus is on tracking SEO data, you will want to create a dedicated SEO dashboard in your Client Account. You can choose to create a dashboard by starting with a Blank Databoard, using the Wizard, or by selecting an available template in our Public Template Library. The Wizard is a great tool to use if you already have a list of metrics in mind.
In this case, we will use the Wizard by selecting + New Databoard > Use Wizard. You will then be prompted to select the Data Source and the Basic Metrics that you would like to add to the dashboard.
Now that the data has been added to your dashboard, you can further customize it to better fit your client’s needs.
This can include:
A key step in reporting on the performance of your client’s SEO campaign is to include interactive annotations to help better interpret KPIs and provide more context into any trends that have impacted search performance.
Additionally, adding Goals to your visualizations is a great way to stay up to date with the progress towards the overall business objective. Creating a Goal from within the Designer will signal Notifications to help you monitor your client’s performance in real-time. Notifications will be sent to your email address to alert you when your goals have been hit or when your goals won’t be hit.
Lastly, there are various ways to share your results with your clients. This includes:
You can share your dashboard by selecting the Share option from within the Designer.
With Databox you have access to 25+ ready-to-use SEO dashboard templates. Don’t waste time creating your dashboards from scratch!
Here are just a few examples of the free dashboards we offer:
If you are looking to track the overall performance of your SEO efforts, then the SEO Overview Dashboard is the perfect template for you!
By combining data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Semrush, and Moz, you can easily answer questions about your keyword ranking, search queries, ranking distributions, and much more.
To monitor the impact of your SEO strategy, the SEO Campaign Performance Dashboard will help you identify areas of your campaign that can help you maximize your results.
This template can help you answer questions like:
The Google Analytics SEO Dashboard is one of the best ways to track the pages that are driving the most traffic to your website.
By downloading this free template you will learn more about:
You can use the Ahrefs Audit Dashboard to track your website’s overall health.
This dashboard will provide valuable insights to help you answer questions like:
If you are looking to understand how your rankings translate to traffic, the Semrush Keywords & Organic Dashboard is just what you need!
By downloading this dashboard you are able to track and monitor metrics like sessions, top keywords by position, users, pageviews, and much more.
We all know that it can take months to start seeing the results from your SEO strategy. But it’s still important to regularly monitor metrics to ensure you stay on track with your targets.
With Databox, you can seamlessly create dedicated SEO dashboards to help you track your client’s performance regularly. By automating SEO analytics, you will have more time to focus on the things that matter, like finding new ways to improve campaign performance and communicating its results to your clients.
Databox can help your agency make SEO analysis a regular part of your daily routine through its fully automated system! Start a 15-day free trial now.
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At Databox, we’re obsessed with helping companies more easily monitor, analyze, and report their results. Whether it’s the resources we put into building and maintaining integrations with 100+ popular marketing tools, enabling customizability of charts, dashboards, and reports, or building functionality to make analysis, benchmarking, and forecasting easier, we’re constantly trying to find ways to help our customers save time and deliver better results.
Product Marketing Specialist at Databox
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