Reading the dashboard
What each number on the dashboard means, and which of them is worth acting on.
solseo.com.au Overview
Sample data
- 17
- 2 to 310
- 4 to 1014
- 11 to 209
- Further back8
| Keyword | Position | Last 30 days | Volume | Top ranking page |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| rank tracker australia ★ priority | 3▲ 1 | soon | /pricing | |
| white label seo reports ★ priorityworking on | 4▲ 7 | soon | /reports | |
| seo audit tool | 7no change | soon | /audit | |
| keyword rank checker AI, not cited | 9▼ 6 | soon | /docs/keyword-rank-checker/ | |
| wordpress seo plugin AI cites you | 2▲ 1 | soon | /plugin |
The four cards
Average position is the mean position across keywords that were found in both periods. Keywords added mid-period are excluded from the comparison on purpose: adding fifty easy keywords would otherwise look like an improvement.
Top ten is a count, not an average, and it is usually the number a client understands fastest.
Clicks and impressions come from Search Console rather than from our own checks. They will not match the position graph exactly and they are not supposed to: one is what Google showed, the other is what people did.
Health score is the audit's number from 0 to 100. Above 80 is green, 70 to 79 is amber, below 70 is red.
The position graph
One line per keyword, or one line for the set, with the axis inverted so that up means better. A gap is a day with no validated check, never a zero. Hovering gives the exact position and the date.
The movers list
Two lists of five: the biggest improvements and the biggest falls between the period's first and last check. Each row carries one sentence explaining what we can see, built only from evidence in the database. When nothing explains it, the sentence says so rather than inventing a reason.
Share of voice
How much of the visible top 20 across your tracked keywords belongs to you against your competitor set. It moves when a competitor gains ground on keywords you both hold, which is often earlier and clearer than your own average position moving.
What to act on
In order: anything red in the audit that touches a page you are tracking, then the movers down, then share of voice. A single day's movement on one keyword is noise most of the time.
What these numbers will not tell you
Why a competitor is winning. Share of voice tells you that they are. What they did about it is a question for their page, not for our chart.
Whether a page is any good. Nothing on this screen reads your writing.
Whether a drop is yours or the market's. This is the one people get wrong most often. A phrase where everybody moved is a result page that changed shape, and there is nothing on your site to fix. Check the competitor positions on the same keyword before you go looking for a cause in your own pages.
A reading order that works
Open it once a day, not five times.
- The audit score, and only if it moved.
- The movers down, and only the ones on pages you care about.
- The movers up, because knowing what worked is worth as much as knowing what did not.
- Everything else, weekly rather than daily.
Set alerts for the things that should interrupt you, then close the tab. A dashboard that is open all day is a dashboard that is producing decisions out of noise.