SEO Keyword Ranking Report Template for Data Studio (Demo)

An SEO keyword ranking report shows which search queries a site appears for in Google, at what average position. With how many impressions and clicks. A good one also shows how each of those positions moved since the last period.

Which of those queries were worth having. Search Console holds every one of those numbers. What it does not do is arrange them so that somebody can decide something from them.

That arrangement is our keyword ranking report template: 19 pages built on Data Studio (formerly Looker Studio), connected to your own Search Console property, for $129 paid once.

This page walks the template page by page: what is on each screen, and which question that screen answers. Every page below is the report running live on a demo property, which the live demo opens with no account and no sign-up. You can have it open in another tab and click the same pages while you read.

What Search Console gives you, and what the report adds

Everything a keyword ranking report needs starts on one screen. The Performance report in Search Console shows every query your site appeared for, with four metrics: impressions, clicks, click-through rate and average position. It is first-party data, it is free. The positions in it are the ones Google measured rather than a tool's estimate of them.

Two things about that screen decide how a report has to be built. Both are documented by Google rather than discovered by us.

The first is the definition of position. Google's own words: position is "a relative ranking of the position of your link on Google, where 1 is the topmost position". The metric shown is the average, "which averages the position value for all impressions (because the position of the link will be different each time it is seen).".

So a query that reads "7.0" was not at position 7. It was at a spread of positions whose impression-weighted mean is 7, and the screen never shows the spread. Every page of the template is built knowing that.

The second is the size of the table. The interface exports at most 1,000 rows, while the Search Console connector for Data Studio, the one the template runs on, reads up to 50,000 rows per day per site per search type. That difference is why a report built from a downloaded CSV and a report built on the live connector are not the same report, even on the same property.

Drag the date picker back as far as it will go and it stops at 16 months, on either route. That makes year on year the longest comparison any report on this data can make, ours included.

What the template adds is not more data. It is the classification. Every query arrives sorted by brand, by length, by intent, by topic and by position band, on every refresh, with no tagging by hand and no spreadsheet in the middle.

The 19 pages at a glance

The left rail of the report is the table of contents, grouped the way somebody reads a property: the summary, then the keywords, then the search performance.

The same row of filters runs across the top of all nineteen: the date range with the period it compares against, the Search Console property the report is reading. The segments that narrow the screen. Pick a fortnight, a device or a segment once, and the page you are on obeys it.

The keyword ranking report format: the six sections, in order

Before the tour, the shape. A keyword ranking report that answers questions rather than listing rows has six sections. The template puts each one on its own page or group of pages.

First, the four Search Console metrics with their change against the previous period. Second, branded queries separated from generic ones. Third, the count of queries in each position band: 1 to 3, 4 to 10, 11 to 20, and 21 and beyond.

Fourth, the queries that improved and declined most since the comparison period. Fifth, queries by search intent. Sixth, queries grouped by topic.

Some people call the result a keyword rankings and visibility report, because those six sections together are what visibility in search actually means: not one position, but how many queries sit where, for what, and which way they are moving. Search Console itself calls none of this anything. It calls it the Performance report and hands you the table.

Page 1: the whole property on one screen

The Overview is the page a client opens first and often the only one they open. It carries the four Search Console metrics, each with its change against the previous period, plus the count of keywords the property ranked for, a daily chart of clicks, a panel that says how many of those keywords sit in the top three, the top ten and the top twenty. Breakdowns by device and by country.

One card on this page is read backwards from the rest. The report labels it so nobody gets it wrong: average position going up is a worse position, because a bigger number is further down the page.

The three big cards are also the fastest way to learn what the report is for. Impressions, clicks and click-through rate can point in directions that look like a contradiction and are not: a property can lose impressions at positions where nobody was clicking anyway, keep every click it had. Watch its rate climb while it shrinks. Page one raises that question. The other eighteen pages are where it gets answered.

Pages 2 to 4: brand queries apart from generic ones

The first thing the report does to the query table is split it in two: the queries that contain your name, and the ones that do not. The split has a name of its own, brand versus generic keywords. It is the page we would keep if we had to drop the other eighteen.

Page 2 puts the two sides next to each other: impressions, clicks, click-through rate and average position for each, a pie that splits the keyword count between them, an impressions chart with both series on the same axis. A table of every query with its side. Underneath each card sits a button that takes you to that side on its own, which is pages 3 and 4.

Pages 3 and 4 are not that page with a filter on it. Each is a small report about one half of the site. It is laid out the same way every segment page in the template is: five figures at the top with their movement against the previous period, a sentence printed on the page that defines what the segment is, a chart of the segment day by day against the previous thirty days, a panel that writes the reading in words. A full table of every query in that half with its impressions, its clicks, its rate and a coloured bar for its position.

The definition printed on the page is the part that earns its place in a meeting. A client who has never thought about the difference reads "brand keywords are search terms that include your business name" on the same screen as the number. And a client who asks how the SEO is going apart from people typing the company name has a page to be shown, not a filter somebody builds while they wait.

Combined, brand and generic are one number and a story that sounds fine. Separated, they are a brand people search for by name and an SEO position that may not have started yet. This are two different jobs for two different teams.

The split is not a filter you apply by hand every month. It is built into the report. The only thing you touch is the list of words that count as your brand: your company name, the ways people misspell it, your product names. You type them once, on screen, and every page of the report obeys them from then on.

That list is the one part of the setup that needs your judgment rather than ours, and it repays the attention. The names people type wrong, the product that has a name of its own, the brand that is also an ordinary word: each of those changes what the branded side is measuring. We have written up the three ways it goes wrong, and what to do about each, in the SEO dashboard guide.

Page 2 also carries a Smart Interpretations panel. This reads the period and writes the direction of each side in two lines: stable, improving or declining, in words, on a screen somebody can read without opening a chart. It is the report describing its own numbers, not an opinion about them. It rewrites itself every time the page refreshes. What it is and what it does not do has its own page.

Pages 5 to 7: short queries apart from long ones

The second classification sorts the table by how much the person typed. One to three words is a head term; four or more is a long-tail keyword. Page 5 puts the two sides next to each other exactly as the brand page does: four metrics each, a pie of the keyword counts, an impressions chart with both series, its own Smart Interpretations panel, and a button into each side.

Pages 6 and 7 follow the segment layout described above, with one thing the other segment pages do not have: a breakdown by exact word count. One row for one-word queries, one for two, one for three, each with its impressions, its clicks and its rate. That row is where "short tail" stops being a category and becomes a decision, because a property carried by two-word searches and one carried by three-word searches want different pages written for them.

Those pages answer a question that gets assumed far more often than it gets checked: whether the longer queries on this property really do convert better than the short ones. On some sites they do and on others they do not. One averaged number for the whole table can never tell you which kind of site you have. Two pages side by side can, in about fifteen seconds.

Pages 8 to 12: what each query was asking for

The third classification reads each query for the kind of question it is and files it as informational, navigational, commercial or transactional. It runs on every refresh, over every query, without anybody tagging anything.

Page 8 holds the four counts with their change, a donut of the distribution, a chart of each intent over time. Two things that are easy to miss and do most of the work. The first is a bubble chart that plots every query by its average position against its click-through rate, sized by volume: the queries that are ranking but not being clicked separate themselves from the ones that are doing their job. The second is a table of every query with its intent, its impressions, its clicks, its rate and its position, filterable by text.

Pages 9 to 12 give each intent a page of its own, built exactly as the brand and generic pages are, with one chart added: every keyword of that intent plotted by impressions. The heavy queries separate themselves from the tail without sorting anything.

Each of those four pages also prints its own definition. The informational page says it shows the searches of people looking for answers, tutorials or general knowledge, which it calls early-stage research. That sentence is there so the page can be sent to somebody who does not work in SEO and still land. Four intents, four pages, four definitions already written: that is four conversations you do not have to have again next quarter.

That is what makes a position mean something. A transactional query at position 12 and an informational query at position 12 are the same row in Search Console and two different problems in the report: the first is revenue on page two, the second may be perfectly fine where it is. A property that sells nothing will show two intents empty, and that is the classification working rather than failing.

Page 13: queries grouped into the topics the site is about

The fourth classification groups queries by topic, which is what keyword clustering means here: the site's subjects, named the way the business names them, with every query filed under one of them.

Three things sit on the screen above, and a fourth below it. A list of the clusters with the count of keywords in each. A funnel that turns those counts into shares.

The topics the site is actually visible for stand apart from the ones it merely touches. A weekly stacked chart of how many queries each cluster held. This is where a content team sees a subject gaining ground before any single keyword does.

And, further down the same page, a performance table with impressions, clicks, click-through rate and average position per cluster. This is the row a content team is judged on.

There is also a row named Uncategorised, and it is the most useful row on the page. Anything the report cannot file under a topic is, by definition, a subject nobody at the site has named yet. Sorted by impressions it becomes a list of things Google already shows the site for, that nobody has written for.

The table under the chart is where a topic gets checked query by query, and it is there for a reason. Every clustering scheme has edges: the same search typed two ways can land in two different topics. Both totals above are then off by the difference. What matters is having the screen that shows it to you, and being able to adjust the topic without opening anything technical.

Pages 14 to 17: which page of Google each keyword sits on

The fifth classification takes the average position of every query and drops it into a band. The result is the keyword ranking distribution, the chart most reports replace with a single number. The term itself is defined in our glossary entry for the keyword ranking report.

The template uses four bands: Top 3 for positions 1 to 3, Top 10 for 4 to 10, Top 20 for 11 to 20. The rest for 21 and beyond. In plain terms, the first three results, the rest of page one, page two, and everything after.

Page 14 shows the four counts, each with how many keywords it gained or lost against the comparison period. A chart of how those four bands have moved day by day. That chart is the one to put in front of a client who wants to know whether the work is landing: a band that thickens over a quarter is progress that no single keyword can show on its own.

This is why the bands exist at all. An average position in the thirties can be a handful of queries on page one and everything else far behind it. Every query sitting flatly in the middle. The average is identical. The four cards are not, and they take a second to read.

The lower half of the page is the sixth classification, and the one clients ask for by name: what changed. For every query, the report puts its average position now next to its average position in the comparison period, sorts by the difference. Paints the difference green or red. Improved Keywords on the left, Declined Keywords on the right, with a search box to find a specific query in either.

The comparison window is a decision, not a setting anybody should have to think about twice. The template ships comparing against the previous quarter, because that catches the slow slides and ignores last week: positions wobble from one day to the next without anything having changed on the site. A table that flags that wobble every Monday gets ignored by Tuesday.

Pages 15, 16 and 17 take one band each and give it a screen: the keywords on Google's first page, on the second, on the third. Each is laid out like the other segment pages. Each adds the one number that matters here: how many keywords the band held, day by day, against the previous thirty days.

That daily count is the one to put on a wall, because it answers the only question a client ever really asks, which is whether this is working.

Page 16 is the one an SEO opens on a Monday morning. A keyword on page two needs a handful of places to reach page one, where the clicks are. This is the screen that lists every query in that position.

One thing these pages cannot fix, and neither can any other report on this data: the band is assigned to the query, and the query already arrives averaged. Something that spent half the month at position 2 and half at 38 lands in Top 20 with an average of 20. Nothing in Search Console shows that it was never actually there. That is the cost of Google's own definition, and we would rather say it here than let you find it later.

Pages 18 and 19: where the impressions came from, and how the property has moved

Page 18 is Location: the same four metrics broken down by country. A property that looks flat in total can turn out to be growing in one market and sliding in another. It is also the page that explains a sudden change in average position more often than any other, because the same query ranks differently in different countries and the property average moves when the mix does.

Page 19 is the Growth Timeline: the whole window on one chart, as far back as Search Console holds it. Pages 1 to 18 compare this period against the last one, which is the question a month asks. This one shows the shape of the whole 16 months, which is the question a year asks. It is the page to open when somebody wants to know whether any of this has been working.

What happens on your property on day one

Nothing in the report needs to be built, configured or explained to anybody. It arrives finished.

That is the whole of it. The reason the demo matters: the report you open before paying is the same file that will be reading your own property afterwards. Not a video of it, not a tour, not a cut-down version.

The template is $129, paid once. It is the right choice in two situations: you report on more than one property and want the same report on each. You would rather spend your afternoons on the SEO than on the layout.

Two things come with it that usually are not included. Updates for life at no extra cost, so a page we add next year arrives in your copy too. Support by email until the report is running on your own property.

This is the day something goes wrong if it is going to: a property verified the wrong way, a data source that will not connect, a brand list that catches more than it should. And the demo is the same file you would be buying. The report you pay for is the report you already read.

The middle number is the one to read. A rating says the job was done. People ordering again say it was done well enough to repeat, which is the only part an agency is really buying.

One of the repeat buyers puts it in a line: "Excellent Google Looker Studio design and customization service. Used multiple times now and always an awesome experience." To be straight about what that is, though: those are reviews of the work, not of this template. Kodalogic builds dashboards to order as well as selling them ready-made. The reviews come from that side of the business. They are all on the reviews page, every one, including the two-word ones. The no-refund clause is in the terms, section five, in the same words.

The keyword ranking report, page by page, is on its own page with the live demo embedded. the template itself is here. Scheduling it to arrive by email is a separate guide, because it is the same for any Data Studio report. connecting Search Console is another, for the people who like to know what happens underneath.

What this report does not settle

Two questions need a different tool, because the data is not in Search Console at all. A competitor's position is the first: Search Console reports only on properties you own. A keyword the site has no impressions for yet.

A position on Bing, is the second: Search Console reports what happened, not what would happen. For those, a rank tracker is the tool with the answer, and it is a subscription per client. For everything on the nineteen pages above, it is a second copy of numbers Google already gives you for free.

The largest limit inside the report is the one in the first section: every position here is an impression-weighted average. The bands are bands of averages. A query filed as Top 10 may have been on page three for half the period.

The second is that per-query clicks never add up to total clicks. Google withholds a query from the table when it was not issued by more than a few dozen users over two to three months. Counts its clicks in the totals anyway. Every rate on every page describes the itemised table rather than the whole site. This is worth saying out loud in a client report before somebody notices and asks.

And three things the report does not cover. It does not measure what the clicks did after they arrived, which is Google Analytics 4. The Web & SEO template is the one that puts the two sources side by side.

It does not compare two sites, because Search Console cannot. And the intent and cluster rules are ours: they run from day one without being touched. On your property they will misfile some queries.

The Uncategorised row is the screen that tells you which ones and lets you name a topic they belong to. That is tuning, not setup, and it is a quarterly job rather than a daily one.

What is left is the trade the price describes. Search Console already holds the answer and hands it over for nothing, in one table nobody can read out loud. The nineteen pages are that table already split, already classified and already written up, on the day you buy it rather than the month you get around to building it.