Google Docs allows you to pull in data from APIs from sites like SEOMoz. This quick tutorial will show you how to create a simple SEO competitive dashboard to keep an eye on the SEO metrics of your main competitors.
Step 1
Click on this link to open the Google Doc template by Chris Le based on Tom Anthony’s code.
SEOMoz API for Google Docs
Step 2
Go to File and Make a Copy so that you can edit the document.
Step 3
Click on the Settings tab and enter your SEOMoz API key information.
You can get your API key information at http://www.seomoz.org/api/keys (you need to register for a free account at SEOMoz).
Step 4
Enter your competitors’ URLs in column A.
Step 5
Add an Equal Sign in front of the formula.
Presto! The Google Doc will automatically populate the cells with the latest SEO metrics about your competitors from SEOMoz including number of links, MozRank (a number that emulates Google PageRank), Domain Authority (link authority across the whole site) and Page Authority (link authority on just the homepage).
You can take a look at this Google Doc periodically to get a high level view of how you are doing versus your competitors on these SEO metrics.
You could gain insights from the dashboard by comparing your domain authority across your competitors. If your domain authority is much lower than your competitors it may mean that you are getting outranked for important keyword phrases because your competitors have a higher quantity of quality links. You may want to invest part of your marketing budget towards closing the gap and earn more links to your site so that you can start outranking your competitors and increase traffic to your site.