Ultimate SEO Dashboard

Mixing again two of my favorite topics, SEO and Dashboarding but this time I would like you to help me create a very specific dashboard for SEO that I'll create and share with everybody, free to download from this page once it is ready to go.

Download the SEO dashboard: Matching Google WMT & Analytics keywords. First version.

What Analytics is got to do with SEO

There are two ways SEO and analytics interact. You do your stuff and wait to see what happens. I already explained to you how to do it with a dashboard to measure SEO performance. Post-action use of web analytics data flow.

The other way round, pre-action use of data. Besides a general strategy you might have for a SEO campaign, best practices and such things we all know, in a daily basis work you have to dig deep into data to find underperforming areas, discover unsuspected trends, outliers, correlations or any other pain point to heal as soon as possible. Then you make decisions, what is going to be your next actions, implement them and back to performance evaluation.

Objectives of the dashboard

The goal here is to create a dashboard going further than Google Analytics interface goes for SEO purposes or make scrutinize data easier for us. Not reinventing the wheel, just a free tool where you can do some simple settings, hit 'refresh' button and ready for surgery.

Data sources

In SEO world data sources for analysis are not limited to Google Analytics, or any measurement tool you installed. We have some other like… ranking reports? To say the truth it is pretty hard to drive clear conclusions from them due to their inconsistent accuracy. It is part of the game, we know. To spice up everything a bit more some keywords are now reported as not provided lately.

Google Analytics, not perfect but probably the best tool we have now to get hands dirty and successfully connect some dots so data from this tool is what we are going to be using. Its popularity is also going to help to make the dashboard useful for a larger audience.

Tools involved and limitations

It makes no sense at all having to do all this manual work: export data from Google Analytics, import it to a spreadsheet (data layer), do some math (analysis layer), and then create charts and tables (presentation layer).

We have a fabulous plugin that, using GA API, solves and automates the two first layers leaving everything ready for the presentation one in Excel: http://excel.nextanalytics.com

The advantage is that GA API is more flexible while pulling data from dimensions and metrics than the regular GA interface. The disadvantage is that the latest features and integrations in GA are not yet available via API like data from Webmaster Tools recently integrated added to the mix.

In any case, if someone comes with relevant data from other tool or service, rankings exported in CSV format to be imported to Excel for example, that could be integrated it would be welcome of course.

Wait, did I put together in the same sentence 'relevant' and 'rankings'? My apologies, it won't happen again.

Want to help creating your SEO dashboard?

It's simple:

• Write down there in the comments what would you like to have in the dashboard
• Contribute with your opinions to improve any ideas from others

I'll be moving the finest ideas here at the reportlets section.

Of course all contributors will be listed here and in the dashboard itself, authorship must be credited conveniently.

Reportlets

Here we a couple for an start:

Keywords to landing pages
List of pages (landing ones) receiving traffic from organic, obviously, + keywords + metrics like bounce or conversion rates.

This would help us check what keywords are driving traffic to what pages and how they contribute to conversions helping you guess where is the gap between your initial keyword research, content optimization and what is really happening with the visitors' keywords.

Landing pages not receiving organic traffic
A must have classic including some metrics. Any page with a decent conversion rate but receiving thin or not organic traffic at all?

Want to become a dashboard master?

You know, SEO consultants have to be like the Renaissance men, whose expertise spans across different areas. Analyze web traffic data and represent it in an insightful way is one of them.

There are many more but If you want to start somewhere mastering the noble art of dashboards here you have some resources

Chandoo Advanced Excel website is the place for almost daily pilgrimage.

Microsoft Excel dashboards & reports by Michael Alexander & John Walkenbach is THE book for your first dashboarding steps.

Why not? My presentation From KPIs to dashboards.

Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data & Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis by Stephen Few are books teaching you coloring numbers. In better words Visual Intelligence made right.

Google Analytics Data Export API: Reference, Query Explorer and Official group. Understanding how queries work will help you tame the learning curve with other software based on the API.

NextAnalytics does not only provide the tool previously described, also tons of ready to use dashboards and widgets.

Thanks in advance.