How to Create Free SEO Reports with Databox
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important investment for all businesses. Compared to other online marketing channels, the website traffic that is generated by SEO is significantly cheaper and longer-lasting. It is common for many Internet websites to get over 50% of their traffic through organic search.
While highly impactful, evaluating SEO performance is more challenging than other marketing initiatives. Below, we'll introduce the four must-have SEO analytics reports, and share how you can use Databox as a free SEO reporting tool.
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How to Monitor Your SEO Performance
Monitoring your SEO performance is more complicated than other marketing channels. In addition to understanding the search keywords your website is ranking for in Google search results, you'll want to measure the impressions and clicks you receive from organic search, keep an eye on your backlink profile, and perform technical audits of your website.
To further complicate things, the data you'll need to fully understand how well your website is doing on Google and Bing is stored in several SEO tools with varying levels of user friendliness. Here are the common SEO tools that we recommend using to capture the data you'll need:
- Google Search Console (free)
- A backlink monitoring tool like Ahrefs or alternative
- A keywork rank tracking tool like AccuRanker or SEMrush
- A website crawler like Deepcrawl
The Four Must-have SEO Reports
There are four must-have reports that you'll need to monitor your SEO performance. The four reports are:
- Performance in Organic Search: This report tells you how many impressions and clicks you are generating with SEO. It will also tell you your best performing web pages and search keywords.
- Backlink Monitoring: This report will help you understand how well your website is doing in terms of backlinks, along with corresponding linking domains and anchor terms.
- Keyword Rank Tracking: This report will keep track of how well you are ranking for your most important search keywords. You can also track changes in your keyword rankings.
- Site Audits: This report will tell you how well your website is technically built for SEO. For example, do you have the right title tags, canonical tags, page speed and internal linking.
Creating a Free SEO Analytics Report with Databox
There are many tools you can use to create SEO reports. Like any other set of KPIs, having well-designed, easy-to-access reports is critical for staying on top of your SEO performance. One lightweight, free solution that we use at SoftwarePundit is Databox. Below, we'll provide an overview of Databox, it's pricing, how to create reports in Databox, and examples of the SEO reports you'll need.
What is Databox?
Databox is a business analytics platform that allows people with no technical coding experience to easily create visual performance reports. Databox has developed over 70 1-click integrations with commonly used tools such as those below. For each of these tools, it is extremely simple to import data into databox and build a custom performance dashboard that can be accessed through a secure URL. If you pay for a subscription, you can combine data from multiple data-sources to calculate advanced performance metrics.
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Ahrefs
- SEMrush
- Salesforce
- Stripe
- Hubspot
How Much Does Databox Cost?
Databox offers four plans that are priced based upon the number of data sources you integrate, and the number of dashboards you want to create.
- Free: Databox offers a free plan for $0 that includes 3 data sources and 3 dashboards.
- Basic: The Basic plan is $59 per month for 10 data sources and 10 dashboards.
- Plus: The Plus plan is also $59 per month for 10 data sources and 10 dashboards. This plan allows you to build your own queries, calculate more complex metrics and integrate with your own databases.
- Business: The Business plan is $299 per month, and includes 50 data sources and 50 dashboards.
How to Create a Databox Report
Creating reports in Databox is extremely simple and does not require the ability to code. You can create numerous dashboards in Databox in two simple steps.
Step 1: Connect a Data Source to Databox
The first step to create a report in Databox is adding a new data source. As you can see in the image below, Databox has pre-built integrations with over 70 data sources. To add a new data source, simply find the right external tool and click its logo. Databox will then walk you through the steps of integrating the data source.
Step 2: Create a Databox Databoard
Once you've connected your data source, the next step is to create your databoard, or report. To do this, you navigate to the databoard section of the tool and click the "New Databoard" button. Databox allows you to use pre-built report templates, or build your own report from scratch.
Databox has pre-built datablocks for each integration. These are the metrics that you can use to populate your report. For example, the Ahrefs integration comes with datablocks for backlink count, new backlinks, linking domains, and Ahrefs rank. You can customize your report with these datablocks using Databox's drag-and-drop editor.
Here's what the databoard editor looks like:
What Free SEO Reports Should I Create with Databox?
The Databox free plan can be used to create three reports. While you can leverage this plan for many purposes, we recommend testing it to monitor your SEO.
Below, we'll share how you can use Databox to create three of the must-have SEO reports:
- Performance in Organic Search (completely free)
- Backlink Monitoring (free with existing Ahrefs subscription)
- Keyword Rank Tracking (free with existing AccuRanker or SEMrush subscription)
Using Databox to Monitor Your Performance in Organic Search
Monitoring your performance in organic search is critical. If you're investing in SEO, you should know how many impressions and clicks your website has on Google Search, how your performance is changing over time, and how well your top performing pages and keywords are doing. The report outlined below will tell you all this information, and allow you to filter results by specific time periods (i.e last 7 days, 28 days, month-to-date, etc.).
To create a Databox dashboard with this information, all you need to do is to connect Databox and Google Search Console. After you do this, we recommend adding the following datablocks to your Databox report:
- Impressions
- Clicks
- Click-through Rate
- Average Position
- Pages by Click-through Rate
- Impressions & Clicks by Queries
- Impressions & Clicks by Pages
- Impressions Growth by Queries
- Impressions Growth by Pages
- Click Growth by Pages
Using Databox to Monitor Your Backlink Profile
We recommend integrating Databox with Ahrefs to create a report for your backlink profile in a few minutes. As mentioned above, this report will be used to measure how well your SEO efforts are doing in terms of generating new backlinks, and to understand the SEO authority of your website and individual web pages.
Databox comes with numerous metrics that you can easily pull into your report. The datablocks that we recommend using are:
- Website Audit Overview
- Ahrefs Rank by Page URL
- Backlinks by Referring Domain
- Referring Domains by New and Lost
- Backlink Profile
- Backlinks by Anchor Phrase
Here is what the report will look like once you're finished:
Using Databox to Monitor Your Keyword Ranking
We recommend using your third Databox report for keyword rank tracking. To do this, you'll integrate Databox with AccuRanker or SEMrush. If you're interested in an in-depth overview of keyword rank tracking, check out this intro to keyword rank tracking.
If you've chosen to integrate with SEMrush, we recommend using the following datablocks:
- Visibility Trend
- Overall Average Position
- Top Keywords by Position
- Rankings Distribution
- Keywords in Top 3
- Keywords in Top 10
- Average Position by Competitor
Conclusion
Measuring your SEO performance is complicated. You need to track your organic search performance, backlink profile, keyword rankings, and technical website performance.
Fortunately, Databox has integrations with most of the popular SEO tools, and allows you to create clean, digestible dashboards with one click. Even better, Databox offers a free plan that you can use to create three reports that provide necessary insight into your SEO performance. While you aren't able to drill down into Databox reports, and more complex reports require a paid subscription, we believe these free reports are a fantastic option to improve the way your company evaluates its SEO performance.