Posted by TheMozTeam
This blog post was originally published on the STAT blog.
We asked SEO Analyst, Emily Christon of Ovative Group, to share how her team makes keyword rank reporting easy and digestible for all stakeholders. Read on to see how she combines the power of STAT with Google Data Studio for streamlined reporting that never fails to impress her clients.
Why Google Data Studio
Creating reports for your clients is a vital part of SEO. It’s also one of the most daunting and time-consuming tasks. Your reports need to contain all the necessary data, while also having clear visuals, providing quick wins, and being easy to understand.
At Ovative Group, we’re big advocates for reporting tools that save time and make data easier to understand. This is why we love Google Data Studio.
This reporting tool was created with the user in mind and allows for easy collaboration and sharing with teams. It’s also free, and its reporting dashboard is designed to take the complexity and stress out of visualizing data.
Don’t get us wrong. We still love our spreadsheets, but tools like Excel aren’t ideal for building interactive dashboards. They also don’t allow for easy data pulls — you have to manually add your data, which can eat up a lot of time and cause a lot of feelings.
Data Studio, however, pulls all your data into one place from multiple sources, like spreadsheets, Google Analytics accounts, and Adwords. You can then customize how all that data is viewed so you can surface quick insights.
How does this relate to keyword reporting?
Creating an actionable keyword report that is beneficial for both SEO and your stakeholders can be a challenge. Data Studio makes things a bit easier for us at Ovative in a variety of ways:
Automated data integration
Our team uses the STAT API — which can be connected to Data Studio through a little technical magic and Google Big Query — to pull in all our raw data. You can select what data points you want to be collected from the API, including rank, base rank, competitors, search volume, local information, and more.
Once your data is collected and living in Big Query, you can access it through the Data Studio interface. If you want to learn more about STAT’s API, go here.
Customization
Do you care about current rank? Rank over time? Major movers – those that changed +20 positions week over week? Or are you just after how many keywords you have ranking number one?
All of this is doable — and easy — once you’re comfortable in Data Studio. You can easily customize your reports to match your goals.
“Our team uses the STAT API — which can be connected to Data Studio through a little technical magic and Google Big Query — to pull in all our raw data.” — Emily Christon, SEO Analyst at Ovative Group
Custom dashboards make reporting and insights efficient and client-facing, transforming all that raw data into easy-to-understand metrics, which tell a more compelling story.
How to build your custom Google Data Studio
There are a myriad of ways to leverage Google Data Studio for major insights. Here are just a few features we use to help visualize our data.
Keyword rank
This report gives you a snapshot of how many keywords you have in each ranking group and how things are trending. You can also scroll through your list of keywords to see what the traffic-driving queries are.
One cool feature of Data Studio when it comes to rank is period over period comparisons. For example, if you set the date range to the previous week, it will automatically pull week over week rank change. If you set the date range to the previous month, it pulls a month over month rank change.
At Ovative, we do weekly, monthly, and yearly keyword rank change reporting.
Keyword look-up tool
If you notice that traffic has declined in a specific keyword set, pop down to the keyword look-up tool to track rank trends over time. This view is extremely helpful — it shows the progress or decline of rank to help explain traffic variability.
Campaign or priority tracker
To support newly launched pages or priority keywords, create a separate section just for these keywords. This will make it easy for you to quickly check the performance and trends of chosen keyword sets.
What’s next?
Google Data Studio is only as powerful as you make it.
The STAT API integration in Google Data Studio represents one page of our typical client’s reporting studio; we make sure to add in a page for top-level KPI trends, a page for Search Console keyword performance, and other relevant sources for ease of use for ourselves and the client.
Want more?
Want to dive deeper into STAT? Got questions about our API? You can book a demo with us and get a personalized walk through.
You can also chat with our rad team at MozCon this July 15–17 to see how you can go seriously deep with your data. Ask about our specialty API — two additional services to give you everything a 100-result SERP has to offer, and perfect if you’ve built your own connector.
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