How to Build a Technical SEO Dashboard Using Google Data Studio

  Modern SEO demands a lot from marketers, and successful strategies are often highly dependent on third-party tools and the powerful data they provide. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all of the information that tools offer, and find it difficult to distill the data down into actionable insights.

How to build a technical SEO dashboard
Image credit: Hack Capital on Unsplash

Even the most experienced technical SEO professional needs to have a manageable amount of information to be able to implement a reliable, data-driven strategy.

The domain of technical SEO pro is rife with a whole host of different SEO tools, all proclaiming to offer crucial insights into the technical health of your website. DeepCrawl, Screaming Frog, Botify, OnCrawl, Sitebulb… the list goes on.

It’s easy to rack up a substantial monthly expenditure on these tools alone. And the further you take your analysis, the more necessary tools become. Carrying out tasks like log file analysis can be done manually using a Google Sheet, but it’s far easier to draw on tools like Logz.io, Loggly, or Splunk.

The downside of using multiple tools (aside from the financial impact) is that it can be tricky to extract the data from the individual silo of each tool. This often leads to a disjointed workflow and makes it hard to understand how your day-to-day efforts are actually impacting your core KPIs.

While technical SEO experts can easily see the value of investing in tools like this, it can be challenging to convey this to key stakeholders.

For someone with a limited understanding of SEO, it can be difficult to understand exactly what the investment is going towards. So when it comes to getting sign off for budgets, being able to visualize and effectively demonstrate the impact of these tools is crucial.

That’s where Google Data Studio (GDS) comes in. Making good use of custom data connectors makes it possible to visualize almost any combination of data required, which can then be used to tell a story.

For example, it can be highly impactful to connect the dots between the technical metrics you have control over (e.g. crawling and indexing optimizations) and the wider KPIs from the rest of your marketing team (e.g. organic visibility, traffic acquisition, revenue, etc).

Google Data Studio offers the capability to match these data points together and get a much clearer picture of what is actually going on.

This post is sponsored by Better Proposals. Sign up by March 15th 2020 and choose either one month for free or double your proposal allowance:

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5 Types of SEO Audits for B2B Organizations

The term “SEO Audit” can be quite nebulous. I’ve seen all types of SEO audits from colleagues and competitors, offering a range of assessments and areas of focus. While some of these SEO audits could certainly be scrutinized, many have been quite thorough and impactful.

Of course, B2B marketers have differing expectations of an SEO audit as well. While almost every audit addresses SEO best practices, more challenging issues arise when tackling the expectation of strategic direction.

To that extent, SEO auditing can fail to deliver the right expectations or miss the mark with client objectives.

Fortunately, most organizations realize there are fundamental issues that can be uncovered in SEO auditing, regardless of scope. By resolving these issues, B2B organizations may realize significant long-term gains in organic search performance.

But, B2B marketers do not always need to invest significant dollars in SEO auditing at the start. There are several specific types of SEO audits that require little cost OR involvement from a vendor or agency.

Before your organization makes a decision to engage a vendor in their SEO programming (even KoMarketing!), consider these five types of SEO audits first, to determine if there are easy wins and immediate opportunities to improve performance.

As highlighted in recent coverage here at KoMarketing, anonymous data collected from 100,000 websites by SEMrush showed that 50 percent of websites face issues with duplicate content.

How can your organization make sure you are on the right side of that 50 percent benchmark?

Here are a few suggestions.

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5 Types of SEO Audits for B2B Organizations

The term “SEO Audit” can be quite nebulous. I’ve seen all types of SEO audits from colleagues and competitors, offering a range of assessments and areas of focus. While some of these SEO audits could certainly be scrutinized, many have been quite thorough and impactful.

Of course, B2B marketers have differing expectations of an SEO audit as well. While almost every audit addresses SEO best practices, more challenging issues arise when tackling the expectation of strategic direction.

To that extent, SEO auditing can fail to deliver the right expectations or miss the mark with client objectives.


Fortunately, most organizations realize there are fundamental issues that can be uncovered in SEO auditing, regardless of scope. By resolving these issues, B2B organizations may realize significant long-term gains in organic search performance.

But, B2B marketers do not always need to invest significant dollars in SEO auditing at the start. There are several specific types of SEO audits that require little cost OR involvement from a vendor or agency.

Before your organization makes a decision to engage a vendor in their SEO programming (even KoMarketing!), consider these five types of SEO audits first, to determine if there are easy wins and immediate opportunities to improve performance.


The Duplicate Content Audit

One of the first aspects of a website to audit for SEO is associated with website copy. The key is to ensure the same copy is not accessible from multiple web addresses.

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The Scope of SEO and Digital Marketing Expertise

earch rankings matter. Organic search accounts for a third of all traffic to B2B websites on average, according to HubSpot. That figure is closer to 40% for small companies, and almost 50% for industrial / manufacturing firms.

But does SEO still matter? Some are asking the question in the wake of this story from just last month: “Google confirms core search ranking algorithm update…but says there is nothing webmasters can do to fix their sites if they dropped in rankings.”

Yeah, it still matters. Now, just as pursuing a post-high school education doesn’t guarantee you a financially rewarding career, search engine optimization efforts can’t guarantee high rankings. But both are still the smart path to take.

Okay, but do keywords still matter? That seems to be a pretty common question. Again, the short answer is “yes.” While Google’s algorithm has gotten much better with semantic search—basing search results on searcher intent, context, and synonyms—keyword phrases are still the basis of search, whether entered on a keyboard or by voice.

So while “keyword stuffing” is a practice long dead and buried, it’s still important to have keyword phrases show up in your URL, headings, meta title, and page text.

And actually, given all the changes Google and other search engines have made to combat manipulative black hat SEO practices, one “keyword” now matters possibly more than any other for SEO.

That word is “authentic.”

No, not authentic in some squishy philosophical sense, but rather as in terms of being real and genuine—in three specific ways.

Authentic Expertise

Google and other search engines seek to display the “best answer” for every query near the top of their search results. That’s why Wikipedia pages often rank highly: they are viewed as highly credible and generally accurate because they are written by subject matter experts, then reviewed and edited by other subject matter experts.

Content that is original and reflects deep subject matter knowledge will (almost) always outrank incoherently organized content cobbled together by duplicating ideas from various sources.

Authentic Language

Every profession, every industry, every niche has its own unique vocabulary. For example, the acronym CFD of course refers to a Contract for Difference among financial traders. But means something entirely different (computational fluid dynamics) to design engineers.

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PPC Optimization: 4 Proven Tactics to Boost Your Sales Conversions

Every digital marketer goes through this phase. You create an AdWords account, you develop a great strategy, and you start investing in powerful keywords. But here’s the issue — you don’t receive a good ROI.

Why not? Most beginning PPC marketers don’t know how to optimize their strategy for sales. PPC campaigning is more difficult than you think; PPC marketing is very complex and encompasses many success factors.

Does this mean you give up?

Definitely not! In order to see PPC results, you need to know which strategies work. If you need help with PPC optimization, here are 5 strategies that work.

1.Market to All Stages of the Sales Funnel

Many PPC marketers make the same mistake. They only focus on attracting new customers. They don’t target their marketing to every aspect of the sales funnel.

Here are the stages of the sales funnel:

Awareness

Interest
Evaluation
Engagement

Commitment (or the purchase phase)
How do you tailor your PPC campaign to touch every aspect of the sales funnel?


Pay attention to customer behavior, research keywords that embody each of these stages, and create your ads for each of these buyers.

2.Use the Best Keywords

When using paid keywords, you need to ensure you’re using the best-performing keywords. SEO marketers don’t use any keyword to optimize their content, right?

Neither should a PPC marketer.

How do you find PPC keywords? Similar to the way you do keyword research for SEO. Find keywords with a high search volume but low difficulty and low competition.

3.Use Ad Extensions

Do you focus so much time on ad creation, yet you’re not satisfied with the lack of room you have for information?

Google allows you to use ad extensions to incorporate all of the information you need. You should take advantage of these extensions.

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What Wikipedia Doesn’t Tell You About SEO Techniques

Have you ever found yourself sucked into a Wikipedia rabbit hole, going from one topic to another?

If you haven’t, I suggest the buttered cat paradox.

With its plethora of useful (and useless) information, Wikipedia has become a prime source to learn about new topics. Unfortunately, since readers can edit pages with whatever they’d like, many people often receive incorrect or misleading information.

Take the search engine optimization Wikipedia page for example. It is littered with myths and some facts, but fails to correctly explain what SEO is to readers.

In this blog we will dive into the deeper aspects of SEO techniques and what Wikipedia is leaving out.

So What Does Wikipedia Say About SEO?
According to Wikipedia, search engine optimization is:

The process of affecting the visibility of a website in search engine’s unpaid results by optimizing a website’s content, HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords, remove barriers to indexing, and promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links.

Essentially to Wikipedia, it’s all about keywords, indexing, and links.

And while those items play a role in improving a site’s SEO value, they aren’t the only things that make a difference. But hopefully, as we continue through this page, it will explain that, right?

What’s missing? – Being indexed on search engines is an important aspect of SEO as our main focus is to increase organic visibility. As professionals, we know that indexing is a combination of different techniques, yet Wikipedia only mentions one, submitting an XML sitemap.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, SEO requires planning, strategic execution of different tactics, and continuous analysis in order to be fully beneficial. While submitting an XML sitemap helps search engines know when something has changed and how often the search engine should check for changes, it hasn’t been proven to affect search rankings on its own.

So yes, Wikipedia is right, an XML sitemap is useful for indexing, but wrong in that it is the only thing needed.

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