A What question

What dashboards does an SEO company provide?

3 min read Cites 2 sources

An SEO company can provide a dashboard: a page you can open at any time that pulls figures from Search Console, Google Analytics, and any rank tracking into a single view, so you can see how organic search is doing between reports. A useful one answers a single question within a minute, whether things are getting better or worse and where, and then lets you look deeper. Beyond its design, two things matter: whose accounts it draws from and lives in, and whether its figures are labeled well enough that you read them correctly.

What it should show

The top of the dashboard should give the headline: organic clicks, the inquiries or sales that came from organic visits, and the change against a comparison period, both the previous period and the same period a year earlier, so seasonal swings are not mistaken for progress or decline. Below that come the searches and pages behind the change, from Search Console, and the landing pages that led to key actions, from Analytics. A technical section can follow, with indexing and page experience figures for the people who need them.

Why two figures may not match

Search Console counts some figures differently depending on how they are grouped, and a dashboard that places them side by side can look inconsistent. Google’s help on common tasks in the Performance report explains that on the Pages tab “the table data is aggregated by page, which means totals may differ from the property-level totals shown in the chart.” A good dashboard labels which figures are site totals and which are sums of pages, so a gap between them is not read as an error or a loss.

Recent days can also be incomplete, because data takes time to process, so a dashboard should show when its figures were last updated and avoid treating the latest day as final.

Where it is built and who owns it

Dashboards can be built in Google’s free reporting tool, Data Studio, which connects to Search Console and Analytics, or in a company’s own platform. What matters more than the tool is ownership. If the dashboard draws from your own accounts, through access you granted, the data behind it stays with you when you change companies. If it, and the data it stores, sit entirely inside the company’s platform, both may disappear with the contract. Ask which applies, and whether you can keep a copy of the dashboard and its data sources if you leave.

What a dashboard cannot do

A dashboard shows what is happening, not why. It does not replace the report that explains changes and the reasoning behind next steps, and a crowded dashboard can make the important figure harder to find. Ask the company which three or four figures the dashboard is built around and why those, and judge it by whether you can answer the headline question without help.

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