Dashboard

Summary#

Dashboard is the screen Metric Vault opens on. It gives you a three-metric snapshot of any domain in a few seconds, and below that a rollup of your own analysis history for the website selected in the website switcher — how much you have run on it, your average score, your best pages and what happened most recently. Switch website and the page redraws from that website's history.

Purpose#

Two questions get asked more than any other when you open an SEO platform: is this domain worth a full report? and what has already been done here? Dashboard answers both on one screen. The Quick Preview settles the first without committing you to reading a forty-section report. The Intelligence Overview below it answers the second from your own runs, so the numbers are yours and not a demo.

Overview#

Under the Command Center strip the Intelligence Overview heading opens the page, and beneath it four cards sit in a two-by-two grid.

The top row is what you run. Run Analysis points at the website you have connected: its button reads RUN ANALYSIS · <your domain>, so one press opens the full Domain Overview report on it without typing anything. Beside it, the 8-Second Quick Preview probes any domain you type. You type a domain, press Probe · 6 reports, and Metric Vault runs Domain Overview against live Google data and renders three numbers from it: keywords ranking, monthly organic visits and traffic value. A Open full report in Domain Overview button hands the same cached data to the full tool.

The bottom row is what has already been found for you: Opportunities This Week and a Daily Briefing.

Everything below the grid is the rest of the Intelligence Overview, built entirely from your saved runs. Before you have run anything it is a set of honest empty states telling you what will appear. As you use the product it fills with counts, score bands, daily activity, your top-scoring domains and a recent-events list. Both populate once Metric Vault knows a primary domain for you. The briefing is recomputed once per day per target and never charges a credit, so reloading the page does not cost anything.

Benefits#

• Decide whether a domain deserves a deep report before you read one.
• See your team's actual usage without opening a reporting screen.
• Hand a probe straight to Domain Overview with no second charge for the same cached data.
• Start any tool from one place: the quick-analysis chips, the welcome buttons and the command palette all launch from here.

Use Cases#

• Qualifying a prospect. A sales call is in ten minutes and you want the prospect's organic size. Probe the domain and read three numbers.
• Checking a competitor before a meeting. Probe, then hand off to Domain Overview only if the numbers justify the reading time.
• Reviewing team activity. Open the dashboard and read Analyses Run, Activity — Last 7 Days and Recent Activity to see what the workspace has been doing.
• Finding your best-performing brand. Top Domains ranks your highest-scoring analyzed brands without you filtering a report.
• Restarting after a break. The Recent Activity list and the Library link tell you where you left off.

Requirements#

• A signed-in Metric Vault account. Signed out, the app shows the sign-in gate instead of the dashboard.
• To use the Quick Preview probe: a paid plan and at least 6 credits available. The screen itself opens on any plan.
• Nothing else. Charts and KPIs need no integration — they are drawn from your own saved runs.

Permissions#

Cost#

Opening the Dashboard is free. Nothing on it charges until you press a button that runs a tool.

A probe is a real Domain Overview run, so a cached copy may serve it without a new provider call — the credit is still charged. See Result caching and freshness and How credits work.

Navigation Path#

Dashboard → Get Started → Dashboard

It is the default view, so signing in lands you here. From anywhere else, click the Get Started icon at the top of the left rail, or press Ctrl + K and type Dashboard.

Inputs#

The probe always measures Google · US · Desktop. It does not follow the country picker in the topbar; run Domain Overview itself if you need another market.

Step-by-Step Guide#

1. Sign in. You land on Dashboard.
2. Type a domain into the field marked e.g. nike.com, or click a try chip.
3. Press Probe · 6 reports, or press Enter. The button reads Probing… and a skeleton appears with the line Fetching live Google data….
4. Read the three KPI tiles and the top-ranking-keyword row.
5. Press Pin as primary if this is the domain you work on. Other tools then pre-fill with it.
6. Press Open full report in Domain Overview to move to the full tool.
7. Scroll down to the Intelligence Overview to read your own history. Use REFRESH to re-read it. To analyze your own site instead of a typed one, press RUN ANALYSIS on the Run Analysis card: it opens the full Domain Overview report on the website you have connected, for the same 6 credits it always costs.

To see the report shape first, press See example instead of Probe. It renders a stored snapshot and charges nothing.

Reading the Results#

The Command Center strip. The bar at the very top shows the session marker, a STATUS LIVE dot and an UPDATED timestamp. It confirms the page is current; it carries no measurement.

The probe panel. A successful probe replaces the skeleton with a result card:

• Header — the favicon, the domain, a Verified badge when the payload came from DataForSEO, then Google · US · Desktop and Pulled <time>. If the Verified badge is missing, the numbers did not come from measured provider data and should be treated as indicative.
• Keywords ranking (On Google US) — how many terms the domain ranks for. Context is everything here: a local business with 200 is healthy, a national retailer with 200 is in trouble. Compare it against a known competitor rather than against an absolute.
• Monthly visits (Organic, per month) — estimated organic sessions. A number far below the keyword count usually means the rankings are deep on page two or worse, which is a rankings problem, not a content problem.
• Traffic value (Equivalent ad spend / mo) — what buying that traffic would cost. This is the number to quote to a budget holder. A high traffic value on modest visits means the keywords are commercially expensive, which is a good sign for revenue and a hard sign for competition.
• Top ranking keyword — a colored rank pill and the monthly search volume. The pill is green at positions 1 to 3, purple to position 10, gold to position 30 and grey beyond. Green means defend it; gold means one focused push could move it onto page one.
• The insight line — states what share of the domain's estimated organic traffic comes from its single best keyword, and labels the profile concentrated in one keyword (30% or more), driven mainly by the top keyword (10% or more), or spread across many keywords. Concentration is fragility: one algorithm change takes most of the traffic with it. Both figures are estimated traffic from the same provider response, so a site with a long tail reads in single digits rather than being pinned near 100%. When the result came from the AI-estimated path, which returns a search volume per keyword and no traffic, the line says the concentration is not available instead of dividing by volume, which measures something else.
• Organic traffic trend — a sparkline of up to twelve months with a percentage delta. When there is not enough history it says Not enough monthly history yet to chart a trend for this domain. — that is an absence of data, not a decline.
• The footnote — Live Google data, not estimates — the full report uses the same figures. A recent-probes row below records your last few probes so you can jump back to one.

If the provider has nothing, you get an honest empty card rather than an invented number: No real DataForSEO ranking data for "<domain>" yet. with suggested established domains to try.

The KPI row. Four tiles, all computed from your saved runs:

Each tile carries a delta and a sparkline slot that fill once there is enough history.

The three charts.

• Score Distribution — how your analyses spread across score bands. A left- heavy chart means most of your portfolio is weak and technical fixes will pay first. Empty state: "Run an analysis and your scores will spread across bands here."
• Activity — Last 7 Days — analyses per day on a rolling week. Use it to see whether the work is steady or crammed into one day a week.
• Avg Score by Type — the average score per analysis category. The lowest bar is where to spend the next hour.

Top Domains and Recent Activity. Top Domains ranks "Your highest-scoring analyzed brands". Recent Activity lists "Your last ten analysis events" — the fastest way to reopen something a colleague ran this morning.

Opportunities and the Daily Briefing. Until Metric Vault knows a primary domain, Opportunities reads Enter a primary domain to unlock weekly opportunities. and the briefing shows Establish Your Online Presence Today with four suggestion pills. Pin a domain from a probe and both start populating. The briefing meta line counts changes detected in the last 24 hours and URLs monitored.

Welcome block. Until you have run anything, a Welcome to Metric Vault panel offers Start with Domain Overview and Try Keyword Explorer. It disappears from usefulness once your history fills the page above it.

Examples#

Screenshots#

Tips#

• Pin your own domain the first time you probe it. Several tools pre-fill from the pinned target afterwards.
• Use See example to show a colleague what a report looks like without spending anything.
• The probe and the full Domain Overview share the same cached data, so opening the full report straight after a probe is fast.
• Ctrl + K from anywhere returns you to a tool faster than the rail does.
• The export row on this screen exports the overview, not a tool result. Export a tool result from that tool's own screen.

Best Practices#

• Probe before you commit. Six credits for a probe and six for the full report is twelve; probing first tells you whether the second six is worth spending.
• Treat Avg SEO Score as a trend line for your portfolio, not a grade.
• Check Activity — Last 7 Days before a weekly meeting; it is a truthful record of what was actually run.
• Set a primary domain early. Opportunities and the Daily Briefing stay empty without one.
• Read Recent Activity before starting work, to avoid re-running something a teammate ran this morning.

Common Mistakes#

• Expecting the probe to follow the country picker. It always measures Google US on desktop. Use Domain Overview for other markets.
• Reading the placeholder numbers as data. The session marker and the timestamp in the top strip are chrome, not measurements.
• Assuming the probe is cheap because it is small. It is a full Domain Overview run at 6 credits; only the rendering is small.
• Treating an empty chart as a bug. Empty states here mean you have not run enough yet, and they say so.
• Using Avg SEO Score to compare against other companies. It only averages domains you have analyzed.

Limitations#

• The probe is fixed to Google, United States, desktop.
• Every chart and KPI is built from your own saved runs, which are kept for 90 days. Older activity ages out of these views.
• Recent Activity shows the last ten events only. The full record is in the Library.
• Opportunities and the Daily Briefing need a primary domain and monitored URLs; without them they stay in their empty state.
• The trend sparkline needs at least two months of provider history.
• The probe reports three metrics. Everything else Domain Overview measures — backlinks, competitors, countries, SERP features — is only in the full report.

Troubleshooting#

FAQs#

Does opening the Dashboard cost anything? No. Only Probe · 6 reports charges, and it charges 6 credits because it runs Domain Overview.

Why is the probe six credits when it shows three numbers? Because it runs the full Domain Overview behind the scenes. The three numbers are a summary of a much larger payload, and pressing Open full report in Domain Overview shows you the rest without paying again for the same cached run.

Can I change the country the probe measures? Not on this screen. The probe is fixed to Google US on desktop. Open Domain Overview, set the country picker, and run it there.

Whose numbers are in the Intelligence Overview — mine or my team's? They are drawn from the analysis history attached to your account. Shared workspace behavior is covered in What teammates share.

How long do the dashboard numbers keep their history? Saved runs are retained for 90 days, so the charts describe roughly the last quarter of work. The Library holds the same records — see Saved Work.

What is the difference between REFRESH and RUN ANALYSIS? REFRESH, in the Intelligence Overview heading, re-reads your saved history and redraws the page. RUN ANALYSIS, the first card in the grid, opens the full Domain Overview report on the website you have connected. It names that domain on the button, and asks you to connect a website first when none is connected.