📘 This article provides information on using the Goal-Based Guidance pages in ActionBoard to help you understand how the prioritized actions relate to SEO goals. ActionBoard is part of Botify's Intelligence Suite, available with all Botify plans.
Overview
ActionBoard's Goal-Based Guidance pages can help you easily find, understand, and act on your most relevant priorities in Botify, bringing additional returns on your investment. These Goal-Based Guidance pages combine data from multiple locations throughout Botify into one location within ActionBoard and are correlated to higher-level SEO goals. Seeing how ActionBoard's prioritized actions relate to higher-level goals allows you to quickly understand how the actions will help to improve each SEO issue.
Before You Begin
You should understand the following before using Goal-Based Guidance pages:
Some are based on log data, and therefore, some pages may not be available if we do not have your log data.
Guidance pages that are based on landing pages require log data with visits, and these pages are available starting with 8th November 2022 crawls.
If you do not have RealKeywords in your Botify plan, you will not be able to see the data from the guidance page charts.
Navigating Goal-Based Guidance Pages
Access the Goal-Based Guidance pages by navigating to Intelligence > ActionBoard > Guidance Pages Overview or navigate directly to a specific theme:
About the Goal-Based Guidance Pages Overview
The Overview page provides a snapshot of all issues affecting your SEO in the current period. Each card links to the goal-based guidance page and displays the target goal. Read more about targets in the Interpreting Goal-Based Guidance section.
Cards on the Overview page are summaries and links to the associated guidance pages. The following are included in each summary:
Favorites: Click the star to identify the goal as your favorite, which displays it at the top of the page in a new "Favorite Guidance Pages" group. Favorites are unique to your user account. Click the star again to remove a favorite designation.
Progress Indicator: Up/down arrows indicate an increase/decrease across the compared crawls.
Target Indicator: Whether the goal target was achieved during the selected period.
Expand/Collapse: Display or collapse the goal card.
Goal Summary: The key recommendations or objectives for the goal and a link to the goal-based guidance page.
Trend chart: Trend of the goal's main KPIs over the 14 months preceding the selected crawl.
Goal-Based Guidance Themes
There are currently two SEO-themed goals on which most of the ActionBoard guidance pages are focused:
Crawl Budget Optimization
This goal is focused on ensuring landing pages are all crawled quickly and regularly by Google and other search engines. Optimizing your crawl budget is the key to maximizing the resources allocated to crawling your site.
The following goal-based guidance pages support the Crawl Budget Optimization goal:
Landing Page Crawled: Are bots crawling a majority of your landing pages?
Sitemaps: Are your Sitemaps helping search engines to discover all your landing pages?
Bad HTTP Status Code: Is your crawl budget wasted on pages with bad HTTP status codes?
Internal Linking - Discovery: Are your indexable pages discoverable through internal linking?
Bots Performance
The Bots Performance goal is focused on evaluating whether bots can discover your content fast enough and, if they cannot, then determining the step in the crawl process where the issue is occurring.
The following goal-based guidance pages support the Bots Performance goal:
Server Performance: Is your server responsive enough for bots?
Loading Performance: Can bots download your content fast enough?
Rendering Performance: Can bots render your content fast enough?
Content Quality
The Content Quality goal evaluates whether your page content is unique and relevant to drive traffic and improve bots' discovery of more unique pages to improve your rankings.
The following goal-based guidance pages support the Content Quality goal:
Thin Content: Does your site have too many pages with little or no value to users?
Duplicate Content: Is the same or similar content affecting your rankings?
Internationalization: Can search engines direct users to the regional version of your pages?
Titles Optimization: How well do your page titles match user intent?
Core Web Vitals
The Core Web Vitals goal evaluates your site's user experience according to the Core Web Vitals scores from the Chrome User Experience (CrUX) report.
The following goal-based guidance pages support the Core Web Vitals goal:
Speed (LCP): Are your pages loading fast enough to provide a good user experience?
Interactivity (FID): Does poor page interactivity make your pages unusable?
Visual Stability (CLS): Do your pages minimize layout shifts?
Interpreting Goal-Based Guidance
Each goal-based guidance page includes an audit, related education, and relevant actions, as shown below:
KPI: The key performance indicator for the current goal is displayed as a ratio of the pages affected by the metric displayed to the total number of site pages.
Chart by Segment: This chart can help visualize the issues by page type. If you have RealKeywords in your Botify plan, click on the chart to see the URLs in the Keywords Explorer.
Target: The target is a goal ratio for the KPI. The default target is displayed here with an indicator of achieved or not achieved, and the goal can be positive (higher than 90%) or negative (lower than 5%). Refer to the About Default Targets section below for more information.
Education: The education cards provide additional insight to help you interpret the information in the KPI and chart, including background information on why the issue is important. Expand the cards to display more.
How the guidance relates to the higher-level goal(s): This card reflects the target status and explains how the actions provided below can help to improve the higher-level SEO goal.
Actions: Where applicable, the ActionBoard actions relevant to the scenario with High and Medium priorities are grouped by higher-level goals. Click on an action to be redirected to the URL Explorer to investigate further. Click the action header bar to read educational content on the themes.
About Default Targets
The default target goals for each goal-based guidance page are based on benchmarking across all Botify customers of various sizes and industries. This means that the default targets may not be relevant for all customers (e.g., crawl budget should be close to 100% for a small website but not necessarily for a large website).
For most goal-based guidance pages, the default targets were derived with the ambitious goal of approximately 25% of our total customer base reaching these targets. If you find a default target unacceptable, click the Edit Target link in the KPI card to set a new target that is more relevant to your business.
Read next: