Best SEO KPIs and Dashboards to Analyze Performance Like A Pro

Best SEO KPIs and Dashboards to Analyze Performance Like A Pro

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is both an art and a science. Getting the science bit right requires constant monitoring and optimization. That often means monitoring a lot of SEO metrics. 

This is especially important if you operate an enterprise website or a multi-topic website with multiple SEO indicators. After that, you need to compare performance changes over time to see how your SEO strategy is doing. 

That all seems like a lot of work. But a good SEO dashboard can simplify the process.

What is an SEO dashboard?

An SEO dashboard is an analytical screen for visualizing, analyzing, and presenting organic search performance at a glance. SEO dashboards present an overview of your most important  SEO metrics, enabling you to quickly identify what needs your attention.

A robust SEO dashboard can help you:

  • Get a bird’s-eye view of your SEO data to avoid overwhelm
  • Get real-time SEO performance data, so you can respond to changes accordingly
  • Choose the SEO KPI format that works for you, such as line graphs and charts
  • Customize the dashboard with metrics that suit your needs, including deeper insights like your content’s topical authority
  • Display SEO performance changes by the hour, daily, weekly, etc
  • View the top-performing keywords, landing pages, and more
  • See SEO performance by campaign, teams, or role
  • View SEO campaign results unified across multiple data sources and integrations
  • View urgent updates to help your team identify potential issues, such as reducing traffic, increasing bounce rate, and conversion rate optimization issues.

Now, here’s the thing. 

Your SEO dashboard is only as good as the metrics and KPIs you track. So, what metrics should you monitor in your SEO reporting tool? 

What SEO KPIs Do SEO Professionals Track On Their SEO Dashboards? 

Your organic search goals will determine which SEO KIPs and metrics to include in your dashboard.

The following metrics and KPIs are typically available in many SEO reporting dashboards.

  • SEO Traffic: This is a summary of your organic traffic. You can see how many people are visiting your website, where they’re coming from, whether they have increased or decreased over time, and more. You can use this information to determine where to focus your SEO efforts to maximize ROI or generate new traffic. 
  • Link Building Metrics: Track backlink gains and losses. Analyze your backlinks profile, including backlink amount, quality, history, source, and placement vs. previous periods.
  • Keyword Ranking Change: Keep track of a keyword’s rank over time in relation to your website’s organic visibility. For example, does the keyword’s ranking align with your site’s overall ranking, or is it following its own course?
  • Top Organic Keywords: See which keywords are driving the most organic visits to your site. Then explore related keywords or keyword stacks in order to generate even more organic traffic.
  • Organic Conversion Rate: Measure the number of organic visitors who are taking a specific action, like making a purchase or subscribing to your newsletter. 
  • Core Web Vitals: Access SEO insights based on sub-metrics like page speed, mobile-friendliness, HTTPS/safe browsing, and visual stability. Find your website’s Core Web Vitals under the “Enhancements” tab in Google Search Console. 
  • Organic Sessions: Analyze what percentage of your website visitors are coming from organic searches. By evaluating what you’re getting, you can determine whether you need to re-focus your SEO campaigns. 
  • Landing page conversions: Track what visitors click on, their source, and their actions on different landing pages. Analyzing those pages can help you figure out what works, so you can replicate it elsewhere. 
  • Organic Bounce Rate: View the number of organic visitors who leave your site without visiting more than one page. If you have a high bounce rate, you might need to add more and relevant internal links to help visitors explore related pages. 
  • Click-Through Rate: CTR refers to the number of people clicking on links to your website from the SERPs. You can use this not only to see how your content is performing on results pages, but also to get an idea of how appealing to searchers.
  • Reviews: Track what your customers are saying about you, including new reviews, total reviews by site, and average rating. Then see if you need to kick-start an online reputation management campaign to protect your brand.      

You can still customize your SEO dashboard to display other metrics, such as the number of indexed pages, ranked keywords by position or page, the share of organic traffic, and keyword density by page.

Check Your Backlinks

Get an Instant Insight Into Who Links to Your Site

That brings us to the next question.

SEO Dashboard Checklist: What to Look for in an SEO Dashboard

Customizable SEO Dashboard

You want to be able to choose only the metrics and KPIs you want to monitor and share with clients or your team. Being able to display different metrics as your needs evolve is also important. You’ll also want to choose how your data displays; line graphs, charts, tables, histograms, etc. 

Data Sources

You want an SEO reporting dashboard that integrates with as many credible SEO data sources as you need. A good dashboard can display data from over 70 sources, including Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Ahrefs. Then, you want to be able to merge data from different sources in a single screen to see how, say, your SEO and paid search strategies are working together. 

CSV File Support

If you have or plan to use quite a bit of custom data sets, you’ll want to pick an SEO reporting software that will let you upload the data in CSV format and seamlessly visualize the data for you.

Widgets

You want to be able to combine, filter, and visualize backlinks, rankings, on-page SEO analytics, local SEO, site audits, and more. Widgets can help you organize your data by resizing, moving, and coloring it however makes the most sense to your team.

Client Login

If your customers want to access real-time or the latest SEO data on their schedule, a tool that provides such a portal can help. Then you can provide clients with their own logins to the dashboard and let them choose what metrics to view. You can impress them further by adding personalized notes, achievements/milestone reminders, and more.  

Competitor Analysis

This feature enables you to see what strategies your competition is up to directly in your dashboard. You can view competitors’ data for entire websites, pages, or a specific keyword you are tracking.

Mobile-friendliness

A fully interactive mobile SEO dashboard will ensure that both your clients and team access the insight they need, wherever they are.

White-labeling is another option if you need your dashboard to match your company’s branding. As soon as you configure the dashboard to your liking, you can save it and re-use it again and again.

SEO Dashboard Examples and Templates: 6 SEO Dashboards Every SEO Specialist Can Use Right Away

There are quite a few SEO dashboards available with varying levels of customization. The following five are just a few options you can look into and start using right away.   

1. Linkody – Backlinking Profile Dashboard

1. Linkody - Backlinking Profile Dashboard

Link building is crucial for ranking higher ‌in the SERPs. Yet, attracting and keeping high-quality links is becoming increasingly complex. Linkody’s link building dashboard shows key metrics you need to improve your ranking and attract more visitors to your website.

By analyzing factors like the domain authority, target URL, source URL, and hosting IP of the websites linking to yours, the dashboard can help you analyze your backlink profile. For example, you can see the anchor text used for a link, whether it is a “dofollow” or “nofollow” link, and its relevance to your website. 

The SEO reporting dashboard also shows if Google has indexed the page on which the link appears (non-indexed pages might not improve your rankings), along with its Alexa rank and Majestic score for trust and citation flow. 

You’ll be able to analyze up to 100 links at once using Linkody’s free dashboard (Backlink Checker), while the main dashboard displays more. This means you can immediately see your website’s link building profile when you log in. You can then tell what needs your immediate attention so you can seamlessly manage all your domains and links.

2. OnCrawl – Enterprise Technical SEO Dashboard

2. OnCrawl - Enterprise Technical SEO Dashboard

OnCrawl provides an SEO Crawler, SEO Log Analyzer, OnCrawl Data, and OnCrawl BI on one platform. This gives your enterprise SEO and marketing teams fast access to analyzing your site’s structure, content, and SERPs performance.

Check Your Backlinks

Get an Instant Insight Into Who Links to Your Site

The SEO reporting dashboard presents technical SEO metrics, like crawl ratio, SEO orphan pages, indexable canonical pages, and SEO active pages. The cloud-based SEO crawler can review over 300 million URLs per crawl. You’ll also get access to over 500 charts and 1,200 data points to help you understand your website’s SEO performance in a single place. So this dashboard might be ideal for larger websites with a lot of technical SEO factors to track in one place. 

3. Databox – Blended SEO Dashboards Software

3. Databox - Blended SEO Dashboards Software

Databox’s SEO performance tracking tool lets you measure key SEO metrics and KPIs in real-time. It offers a designer tool for creating your own SEO dashboard. It does not require any coding or design skills. Databox supports many integrations, including Google Analytics, HubSpot marketing, and SQL databases. 

To simplify the setup process, the SEO Dashboard software also includes templates with data from leading SEO tools. Track things your way by customizing the templates. All you need to do is pick a template, enter your data, and the metrics will populate automatically.

4. Klipfolio – SEO Dashboard with SaaS Analytics 

4. Klipfolio - SEO Dashboard with SaaS Analytics 

Klipfolio’s SEO dashboard has what you need if your primary goal is to analyze SEO in relation to revenue. The platform is a hub of business metrics, from monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and goal conversion to insights on privacy consent approvals.

You can still use it to monitor essential metrics and KPIs about your SEO traffic, link building, keyword ranking, and content effectiveness. There are dozens of metrics you can track here, and the dashboard lets you display them in a variety of ways. 

Yet the dashboard provides a holistic view of your SEO performance in one place without overwhelming you.

5. Google Data Studio – All-in-One SEO Reporting Tool for Google Products

5. Google Data Studio - All-in-One SEO Reporting Tool for Google Products

With Google Data Studio, you can create a reporting hub that integrates data from various Google products, such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Ads. 

For agencies and SEO teams wanting the latest on multiple metrics and feedback across different Google products, this can be extremely useful. 

Data Studio is a free tool, fully customizable, and enables easy report sharing. 

6. Whatagraph – Cross-channel SEO Reporting

6. Whatagraph - Cross-channel SEO Reporting

Whatagraph gathers SEO data from multiple sources, like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, Google Analytics, and SEMrush. Based on that data, it auto-generates an SEO analytics report. 

You can then view all relevant SEO data by role, from your SEOs to marketing executives to clients. That insight includes SERP positions, keyword ranking, and landing page conversions, on one screen, in real-time.

You’ll also get over 40 integrations and white-label reporting so you can customize each one to fit your branding.

Takeaway

The best SEO dashboard will help you select the metrics to track according to your goals. You can also use advanced sorting tools and filters to get both overviews and more detailed insights. 

SEO Dashboard FAQs

Here are some answers to frequently asked questions about SEO dashboards.

What is the difference between an SEO dashboard and an SEO report?

Dashboards typically provide quick overviews of live data of day-to-day operations. On the other hand, reports usually contain detailed analyses, covering weeks, months, or years’ worth of data for future planning.

Check Your Backlinks

Get an Instant Insight Into Who Links to Your Site

Are SEO dashboards worth it?

With the best SEO reporting dashboards, you can collect, organize, and display organic search insights based on your business goals. Rather than spending hours manually analyzing mountains of spreadsheet data, your team can quickly gain actionable insights. 

What are some of the best SEO metrics and KPIs to have on your dashboard?

This will depend on your campaign goals. Some of the most important KPIs are daily organic search change, website visitors, pageviews, competition analysis, backlinks reporting, and keyword ranking.


Author Jon Torres

Jon Torres is a digital marketing consultant and business coach. For close to a decade now, hundreds of people have enjoyed the transformational power of Jon’s online business coaching. He’s frequently called upon to consult and coach online businesses, affiliate marketing being his major!