How to Create an SEO Report in Excel

Tracking your SEO performance can feel scattered, but building a central report in Excel brings everything into focus. Building a custom report puts you in control, letting you visualize the metrics that matter most to your business. This guide will walk you through exactly how to create a comprehensive SEO report in Excel, step-by-step, from picking your metrics to building insightful visualizations.

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What is an SEO Report (and Why Bother With Excel)?

An SEO report is a document that tracks key metrics related to your website's search engine performance. It helps you understand what's working, what's not, and where to focus your efforts. These reports are essential for communicating progress to team members, clients, or stakeholders and making data-informed decisions.

While there are dozens of automated dashboard tools, using Excel has some distinct advantages:

• Total Customization: You aren't limited by a tool's pre-made widgets. You can report on any metric from any source and display it exactly how you want.
• Accessibility: Nearly everyone has access to Excel or a free alternative like Google Sheets. No special software is needed.
• Deeper Learning: Building a report from the ground up forces you to get your hands dirty with the data. This process often reveals insights you'd otherwise miss.

The main drawback is that it's a manual process. You'll need to export data regularly and update your spreadsheet. But for a weekly or monthly snapshot of your SEO health, it's an incredibly powerful method.

Step 1: Choose Your Key SEO Metrics

Before you even open a spreadsheet, you need to decide what to track. A report filled with vanity metrics is useless. Focus on data points that align with your business goals, whether that's generating leads, selling products, or increasing brand awareness. Organize your metrics into logical categories.

Audience & Engagement Metrics

These metrics tell you how many people are finding your site through search and what they do once they arrive. You can find this data in Google Analytics.

• Organic Sessions: The total number of visits from organic search. This is your top-line indicator of SEO traffic.
• Organic Users: The number of unique individuals visiting from organic search.
• Top Landing Pages by Organic Sessions: Which pages are driving the most search traffic? Tracking this shows you which content is your strongest SEO asset.
• Bounce Rate / Engagement Rate: Are people sticking around or leaving immediately? In GA4, a low Engagement Rate is the new Bounce Rate.

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Visibility & Ranking Metrics

This data tells you how visible you are in search results for your target keywords. Your primary source for this is Google Search Console (GSC).

• Total Clicks: The number of times people clicked on your site from a search result.
• Total Impressions: How many times your site appeared in search results. A great leading indicator of visibility.
• Average Click-Through Rate (CTR): The percentage of impressions that resulted in a click (Clicks / Impressions).
• Average Position: Your average ranking position across all your keywords.
• Keyword Rankings (Top Queries): Which specific search terms are driving clicks and impressions?

Conversion & Business Metrics

This is where SEO connects to business results. This data is also found in Google Analytics, provided you have conversion tracking set up.

• Organic Goal Completions: The total number of conversions (e.g., form fills, downloads, purchases) from organic traffic.
• Organic Conversion Rate: The percentage of organic sessions that result in a conversion. This proves the quality of your traffic.
• Organic Revenue: For e-commerce sites, this is the most important metric of all.

Step 2: Gather Your Data by Exporting from Source

Once you know what you need to track, it's time to collect the data. The best practice is to download your data as a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file, which Excel opens perfectly.

Exporting from Google Analytics 4

For traffic and conversion data:

1. Log in to your GA4 property and go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.
2. Change the primary dimension to "Session default channel group". Then, filter the report to only show "Organic Search".
3. Choose your desired date range. Align this every time you report (e.g., the 1st to the 31st of the month).
4. In the top right corner, click the "Share this report" icon (a box with an arrow) and choose Download File > Download CSV.

Exporting from Google Search Console (GSC)

For visibility and keyword data:

1. Log in to Search Console and navigate to the Performance report.
2. Select your date range to match what you used in Google Analytics.
3. Ensure the "Queries" tab is selected to see keyword data. If you want landing page data, click the "Pages" tab.
4. Click the Export button in the top right corner and choose a CSV format.

Step 3: Build Your SEO Report Template in Excel

This is where everything comes together. A good structure is key to a report that's easy to update and understand.

1. Create Separate Tabs for Raw Data

Keep your report organized by separating your raw data from your summary dashboard. Create a new Excel workbook and create tabs like:

• Dashboard: This will be your main summary view with key numbers and charts.
• GA_Data: You'll paste your exported Google Analytics data here each month.
• GSC_Data: You'll paste your exported Google Search Console data here.

Separating the data this way keeps your dashboard clean and ensures you don't accidentally delete a formula while pasting new information.

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2. Import and Clean Your Data

Open the CSV files you downloaded and copy-paste the data into the corresponding tabs in your report workbook. Once pasted, select all your data in a sheet (Ctrl+A) and format it as a table (Home > Format as Table, or Ctrl+T). Using tables makes formulas much easier to write and manage.

Delete any columns you don’t need. For instance, the GA4 export has many columns, you might only need "Session default channel group," "Sessions," "Engaged sessions," and "Conversions."

3. Design Your Dashboard Tab

Click over to your "Dashboard" tab. This is your canvas. Set up a simple header with the report period (e.g., "Monthly SEO Report: October 2023"). Then, create sections for the key metrics you chose in Step 1. A typical layout might have a KPI summary at the top, followed by charts and tables below.

Step 4: Use Excel Formulas to Pull in Your Data

Now, you'll use formulas to automatically pull the key numbers from your raw data tabs onto your Dashboard. This is what connects everything.

Using SUMIFS to Tally Metrics

The SUMIFS formula is perfect for adding numbers that meet specific criteria. For example, to get your total organic sessions, go to a cell on your Dashboard and type:

=SUMIFS(GA_Data[Sessions], GA_Data[Session default channel group], "Organic Search")

This formula looks in your GA_Data tab, finds all rows where the "Session default channel group" is "Organic Search," and sums up the "Sessions" column for those rows.

Using VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP for Specific Data Points

VLOOKUP or the more modern XLOOKUP are great for pulling related data. For instance, you could create a small table on your dashboard to track your top 5 keywords. In the first column, you'd type the keyword. In the next column, you can use a lookup to pull its clicks from your GSC_Data sheet.

=XLOOKUP(A5, GSC_Data[Query], GSC_Data[Clicks], "Not Found")

This formula looks for the keyword in cell A5 within the "Query" column of your GSC_Data sheet and returns the corresponding value from the "Clicks" column.

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Creating Summary Tables with PivotTables

PivotTables are the fastest way to summarize large datasets. Let's create a "Top 10 Landing Pages" summary:

1. Go to your GA_Data sheet. Click anywhere inside your data table.
2. Go to Insert > PivotTable.
3. For the location, choose "Existing Worksheet" and select a cell on your "Dashboard" tab.
4. The PivotTable Fields pane will appear. Drag "Landing page" to the Rows box and "Sessions" to the Values box.
5. Excel will instantly generate a summary table. You can then filter it to show just the "Top 10."

Step 5: Visualize Your Data with Charts

Numbers are great, but charts tell a story. Select the summary data on your Dashboard and create simple, clear charts to visualize trends.

• Line Charts are perfect for showing performance over time. Plot your monthly organic sessions to see your growth trajectory.
• Bar Charts are excellent for comparisons. Use one to show your top 5 landing pages by sessions or your marketing channels' traffic contribution.
• Pie Charts can quickly show a "percent of whole" breakdown, like the device category split (Desktop vs. Mobile vs. Tablet) for your organic traffic.

To create a chart, simply highlight your summary data (e.g., your PivotTable of landing pages), go to the Insert tab, and choose your preferred chart type. Position and format these charts on your dashboard to create an easy-to-read, professional-looking report.

Final Thoughts

Building an SEO report in Excel gives you a customized, powerful way to track performance by pulling data from multiple sources into one view. By starting with clear goals, using simple formulas to summarize data, and creating clean visualizations, you can turn endless rows of data into actual, actionable insights for your business.

Of course, the process of manually exporting CSVs and updating your spreadsheet every week or month can be a huge time-sink. That's why we built Graphed. We connect directly to your Google Analytics, Search Console, and other marketing tools, allowing you to instantly build real-time, automated SEO dashboards just by asking questions in plain English. This frees you from the reporting grunt work so you can spend your time on strategy, not spreadsheets.