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Ranking first on Google’s SERP is everyone’s wish. Some may even think it’s easy—you create high-quality content, and voila! One day, you wake up in a featured snippet.
However, SEO requires a lot of skill, time, and data-tracking to make that wish come true. It’s a long-run game that doesn’t give you instant results, and it’s critical to make data-driven decisions to make the most out of your efforts.
But how do you make informed decisions when there’s so much data to track and analyze, and so many SEO tools that collect that data? You need a tool that gives you a simple, quick overview of your activities so you can come up with ways to perform better with the limited resources you’ve got.
Google Data Studio may be the solution you’re looking for. In this guide, we’ll help you set up your very first SEO dashboard in Google Data Studio, for easy monitoring of all your relevant data in one place.
Google Data Studio is a data visualization and analytics tool. It helps users display their data as informative, shareable, customizable reports and dashboards for marketing and SEO campaigns. The tool displays the raw data strategically, which makes it easy to read and interpret, so the user can easily draw conclusions and make data-based decisions.
Google Data Studio is loved by many because of the opportunity to create and customize your own dashboards and make the data digestible and visually appealing. Moreover, Google Data Studio allows you to use your brand identity with the dashboards, so the reports you create truly represent your business in every way.
It’s worth mentioning that Google Data Studio is free and belongs to the Google Marketing Platform toolkit, a useful set of marketing tools for companies of all sizes.
In terms of SEO, Google Data Studio is an effective tool for creating SEO reports. It allows the user to get strategic insight into their data and create a compelling narrative around it, tailored to their audience.
With an SEO dashboard, Google Data Studio helps you see the whole picture of your campaign or project and plan the future actions accordingly. Here are a few examples of what you can do:
All it takes to get started is to create a free account. When you do so, you can start telling stories with your data—we’ll show you how.
When starting a new project in Google Data Studio, you’ll face a blank page that you need to build from scratch. Here’s how to access this page:
Note: To add more data sources, click on the Resource tab at the top and choose Manage Added Data Sources from the drop-down menu. You can connect new data sources here or modify the parameters you previously selected.
To start adding visualizations, you need to choose one dimension and one metric at least. You can do it by clicking on the Data tab and selecting what you need for the report, for example, total URL Clicks by Device category.
The ultimate proof that your SEO efforts are working is, of course, the amount of organic traffic you gain. However, there are more relevant SEO KPIs and metrics to follow if you want to see how much your SEO efforts are paying off.
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.
Related: 15 Tips for Setting Realistic Website Traffic Goals
To let you build a customized SEO dashboard, Google Data Studio offers many data visualizations so you can choose what suits the best the data you want to display.
You can add:
To add a line chart, suitable for metrics like total unique visitors over time or organic traffic over time, follow these steps:
If you want a bar chart, appropriate for comparing the performance of two pages or more pages, for example, follow the steps below:
For a geo chart, which is great for representing your website visitors by country, do the following:
If you want a device-type pie chart, which can help you optimize your website for the device that gets you the most visits and clicks, follow the steps below:
To add a time series chart, which is helpful for displaying how your metrics have grown over time (like organic traffic, for example), follow the steps below:
If you want to add a table, suitable for displaying high-level metrics of your SEO performance at-a-glance, do the following:
If you need a scorecard, which can help you track metrics like bounce rate, organic visitors, average time on page, and more, follow the steps below:
To add a date slicer, suitable for comparing your performance in different periods, follow these steps:
Other than a large number of different data visualizations, Google Data Studio allows you to “brand” your reports by adding your company logo to the report, or choosing among a wide range of themes, colors, and text options.
Choose visualizations and themes that suit the story you want to tell with the data and help you tell it in the most effective way possible, especially if your audience is made of those with limited SEO knowledge.
PRO TIP: Looking for ways to track your organic search, and learn which keywords and landing pages are ranking best? This Databox dashboard can help you decide which topics and keywords to focus on for content marketing.
Especially in remote and distributed teams, it’s critical for you to be able to share your reports easily. Even more if several people are working on the same report—sending it back and forth would be too complicated and time-consuming. Thanks to Google Data Studio, you can simply create a collaborative SEO dashboard and share it with your team in a few clicks.
The steps are straightforward:
With Databox, you can share any report easier than ever before. It’s super easy to get started. Try Databox for free now.
Despite offering a wide range of practical features, Google Data Studio isn’t all-powerful—there are several limitations to this tool, which you may want to consider.
Is there a way to overcome the limitations of using Google Data Studio for building SEO dashboards? You may want to try Databox. Databox dashboards and templates come with multiple benefits you may appreciate. Here are a few examples of what you can do in Databox:
Databox offers over 25 free SEO dashboard templates that you can start using instantly and save your time. You can see a few examples in this section, but make sure you visit our website to find more use cases and learn how you can create an even deeper analysis with various dashboard templates.
With our simple Google Analytics KPI dashboard template, you can have a streamlined overview of the most relevant website engagement analytics and other SEO performance indicators. Discover your top-performing keywords, track the number of returning visitors, identify the channels that drive the most traffic, and more.
Available metrics:
The Google Analytics Acquisition Snapshot dashboard template enables you to examine your traffic sources on a deeper level. Tracking the metrics included in this dashboard will help you identify your top-performing campaigns, paid and organic keywords, top traffic sources, and more.
With our streamlined Google Analytics Landing Page SEO dashboard template, you can discover your top-performing landing pages, find out the total number of sessions, and whether those landing pages are successful in generating goal completions.
This simple Google Analytics Traffic Growth dashboard template helps you dig deeper into your website traffic. With a streamlined overview of your most important metrics, you can easily discover which traffic sources, referrers, and social media platforms drive the most users to your website, and which devices they use to engage with your pages.
With our Google My Business dashboard template, you can learn if your SEO efforts are paying off in terms of bringing traffic to your website through organic search. By tracking useful metrics available in this dashboard, you can answer important questions like which sources drive the most searches for your business or how many people in total viewed your listing.
This Google Analytics Content Analysis dashboard template allows you to track and measure content performance and gain insights that will help you to improve your content strategy. By learning how your visitors engage with your content, you can discover your top-performing pages and find out where your most active visitors are located.
With this Google Search Console dashboard template, you can track your average Google search position by page on your website, as well as the number of impressions and clicks. That will help you determine which page has the best chance to rank at the top position, so you can come up with an actionable plan to make it happen.
If you’re not sure which metrics you should add to your SEO dashboard, have no time to build it from scratch, or want to recreate old reports in your new Databox dashboard, we’re here to help.
Databox offers a free SEO dashboard setup service—our expert will build you a free, customized dashboard in 24 hours, while highlighting the key functionalities you may want to use to examine your SEO performance. You’ll get invaluable guidance on what KPIs and metrics to track and advice on how to structure your dashboard, tailored to your industry and provided by our team of professionals.
How to get started?
Tired of chasing your data through several dashboards and never knowing where’s what? Spending hours choosing the appropriate visualizations to make the dashboard neat and understandable? Stressing about what metrics to choose, but always feeling like something’s missing?
Not anymore. We mastered the art of building beautiful and digestible dashboards so you can skip right to the part where you analyze your data and draw conclusions that will help you improve your SEO strategy.
Connect your Databox dashboard with over 70 data sources and use pre-built templates and customization to bring your SEO reporting to the next level and easily gain valuable insights into your keyword ranking, traffic, and more.
Want to rank better? Create your free Databox account and get started right away.
Stefana Zarić is a freelance writer & content marketer. Other than writing for SaaS and fintech clients, she educates future writers who want to build a career in marketing. When not working, Stefana loves to read books, play with her kid, travel, and dance.
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