The Weekly Google Analytics SEO Dashboard

Here are some things you should check within a Google Analytics SEO dashboard every week.

Why is it important to check Google Analytics weekly?

Sometimes things go wrong with a website. Errors can result from user error, technical issues with your CMS or server, or even from hackers. If you can identify these problems quickly, you can get ahead of them before hurting your SEO campaign.

For example, a CEO got into Google Analytics and accidentally broke the goal one time. He was trying to help, but we lost a month’s worth of conversion data because of his tweak. Had I been checking this weekly, I might have caught this earlier and lost less data.

Sometimes things go right- even when you don’t expect them. If you catch these opportunities early, you might be able to get even more out of them.

For example, I noticed a spike in Direct Traffic on a client’s site. They received a 100-fold growth in direct traffic in 24 hours! It was huge! It turns out that a weekly TV news show covered them the day before, and many people started typing their domain into their browsers (hence Direct Traffic). Once we saw interest, we could turn this into a link from a highly credible website. Good thing I was watching the site!

I will outline key metrics to check weekly in a Google Analytics SEO dashboard to ensure your SEO campaign is on the right path.

What should you expect from this Google Analytics SEO dashboard?

A week is too short a time to identify successes or failures in an SEO campaign. That’s not the purpose here. I’m recommending a weekly check of your Google Analytics account to catch:

• New SEO opportunities, such as new links.
• Did something break on your site? On your server?
• Did someone on your team change something without telling you that could hurt your SEO efforts? Sometimes the SEO team is last to hear about these things.

Most of the time, this will take you only 5 minutes to verify that everything is okay. However, the point is to catch issues early, so this might uncover something that could require significant effort. However, it’s better to see it before that later.

The Weekly SEO Checkup