How to create a Google Analytics SEO dashboard
You want to see your most important SEO data every time you login into Google Analytics. (read full post - https://goo.gl/kwSjqd)
Sign up for our Free Google Analytics Mini-Course - https://goo.gl/9GnLyk
But, you don't have time to dig through your analytics reports every day.
One way to solve this problem is to build a Google Analytics SEO dashboard.
Dashboards are great because they are easy to access and easy to share. You can even import public dashboards into your account. One click, and you can import a pre-made Google Analytics SEO dashboard!
The hard part of this process is building, or finding, the right SEO dashboard. The reason this is difficult is that Google withholds some of your best SEO data.
But there are solutions. In this video and post, we will work through how you can build an SEO dashboard for your needs. We'll take a look at the SEO related reports inside of Google Analytics. And we'll look at tools outside of Google Analytics that can help us get back some of the SEO data Google won't give us.
Google Analytics SEO dashboard question
This post is inspired by a question from one of our Analytics Course students, Zoe.
Let's answer Zoe's question, and see how we can create an SEO dashboard.
Before we get to the potential solutions, let's get the bad news out of the way.
Google doesn't make SEO reporting easy
Google is not excited about helping us with our SEO reporting. Maybe we can talk about why Google Analytics is not as SEO friendly as it could be in another post. For now, just understand that there are no ready-made SEO reports in Google Analytics.
Not to be a downer, but there's also another big problem with Google's SEO data.
Keywords not provided
The biggest problem with SEO reporting in Google Analytics is the lack of keyword data.
Anyone who works in SEO knows that keywords still run the show.
The most common SEO equation work likes this:
Find a good keyword, create great content about that keyword...Get loads of new search traffic.
Using Google Analytics to help us with SEO would be so much easier if Google shared our keyword data.
But, Google Analytics keyword reports are mostly useless.
As you can see from the report below, almost 97% of the keyword data is "(not provided)!" Like I said, useless.
Where else can we look to get our Keyword data back?
Google Analytics Search Console reports
Most Google Analytics users have turned to the Search Console reports for their SEO data.
You can find your search console reports under the acquisition tab in your Google Analytics account.
Queries report
The queries report can help us see which keywords people are using to get to our website. But, this report still lacks a lot of data.
The queries report gives us some information about how people find our website. But it doesn't tell us what people do on our website. There are no columns in this report for conversions or user behavior. So we are still missing a lot of the information a good SEO report should include.
Landing page report
The landing page report allows us to see how each page on our website is performing. This report displays data about search volume, user behavior, and conversions for our web pages.
The landing page report can be a very useful source of SEO information.
However, for most websites, the data in the landing page report is dominated by the homepage. This isn't necessarily a bad thing.
You want searchers to find and enter your site through your homepage. The problem is that a powerful homepage limits what we can learn about SEO in our landing page report.
Analyzing landing page reports
We can draw some inferences about our keywords using the landing page report. We can look at our best performing content, and relate it to the main keywords on that page. The landing page report also includes columns for user behavior and conversions.
The landing page report gets us closer to the answers we need, but we're still missing a lot of SEO data.
Looking at our Google Analytics reports helps us get a better idea of the quality of the SEO information available. Now that we know what we have to work with, we can try to tie that information together in a dashboard.
Building a Google Analytics SEO dashboard
Trying to build a new SEO dashboard in Google Analytics can be a bit troublesome. Many of the SEO metrics we want in our dashboard are unavailable. Google will not let us ad keywords or queries into our dashboard.
Once again, the functionality that Google removed is causing problems for our SEO analysis.
Importing a pre-created dashboard offers us a quicker solution to this problem.
Importing SEO Dashboards - (read full post - https://goo.gl/kwSjqd)