SEO Report Builder

The SEO Report Builder is free with every account, including the free one. You drag widgets onto a page, click each one to set it up, and send the client a link instead of an attachment.

You will find it in the left navigation as Custom Report Builder. It opens on the report you already have, because every project gets one and it is always the current one.

What It Replaces

If you report to clients or to a boss, you already know the routine: export from Search Console, export from Analytics, paste both into a spreadsheet, rebuild the same chart you built last month, write a paragraph explaining it, save as PDF, attach to an email. Then do it again in thirty days.

This replaces the whole loop with a page you build once. The layout stays put, the numbers move on their own, and the client link stays live until the expiry date you set or until you click to revoke it.

The part people underestimate is the second month. The first report takes the same afternoon it always did; every report after that takes as long as writing the commentary, because the rest is already sitting there.

What Your Client Sees

View report opens the report as a page: a clean white sheet carrying your company name and logo, the widgets exactly where you put them, and a Download PDF button in the corner. Your name and logo come from settings.

Your client sees the same page through the share link, without the download control - that button is on your side of the login, so the printed copy is one you make and send. Nothing on the page asks them to understand your tooling: they read the summary you wrote and look at the numbers.

The Link You Send Them

Sharing is the part that saves the email thread. Set it up on the Project Sharing tab, where a Share Report toggle decides whether the client sees the report alongside the map.

You give the link a readable path of your own, /guest/your-agency/northgate-q3, and an expiry date, so it turns itself off on a schedule rather than when somebody remembers. There is no login screen behind it, so a client opens it mid-call without being asked to create an account.

Delete Share Link revokes it outright. The engagement ends, the link stops working, and nothing you sent last quarter is still readable.

The Numbers Are Never Stale

A report you email is true on the day you send it and wrong by the end of the week. This one is a page, not a file, so it reads the current numbers every time it is opened.

That changes what happens between reports. A client who checks in on the fifteenth sees the fifteenth, and nobody has to ask you for an updated copy or wait for the next cycle.

Building Your First Page

Drag a widget from the Widgets panel on the left onto the page. It lands on a grid, snapped into place, and the tile shows real data as soon as it lands.

Move a tile by dragging it, and resize it by dragging its corner. Tiles cannot overlap each other and cannot run off the edge of the page, so a layout that looks right on screen is a layout that prints right.

Click Save report when you like it. Save is the only thing that makes a change permanent, so you can drag things around freely until then.

The Seven Widgets

Seven widgets cover more than a dozen measurements drawn from your own crawl, Search Console, Analytics, and combinations of the three.

Those sizes are starting points. Each widget has a minimum, a default and a maximum, and you resize inside that range. The minimums exist so a table never gets squeezed to the point where nobody can read it.

Setting Up a Widget

Double-click a tile, or use its Settings button. Every widget takes a title, and most take a metric, so a chart is two clicks and a dropdown rather than a configuration exercise.

The Time Series Graph picks one metric from fourteen, draws it as a line or bars in one of six colors, and can lay the earlier period behind it as a second line. Week over week and month over month are both there.

The Scalar Value Display shows one number large, from eighteen available, including Search Impressions, Conversions, Average Position and Cumulative Layout Shift. Give it a target and it shows the number against the target.

The Donut/Pie Chart splits one thing into its parts, such as page types, traffic sources, indexing status, branded against non-branded clicks, or keyword ranking distribution. The Summary widget carries the reporting period, the headline numbers, and a commentary box for what happened this period and why.

Date Range and Compare

Two dropdowns at the top set the reporting period for the whole report. Date range runs from Last 7 days through Last year, with Last 30 days, Last 90 days, This month, Last month, This quarter, Last quarter and This year in between, plus a custom range. Last 30 days is the default.

Compare sits beside it: none, previous period, or year over year. Both apply to the Scalar and Summary widgets. A graph follows the report's comparison unless you give it one of its own, if you want one tile telling a different story.

More Than One Page

Reports are as long as they need to be. Add page puts a new blank page after the current one, the arrows move between them, and the whole report switches between portrait and landscape with one toggle.

Keep the first page to the numbers somebody will read in ten seconds, and put the detail behind it. A client who wants more will turn the page; one who does not has already got the answer.

Reusing a Layout

Export downloads the report as a configuration file, and Import reads one back in. What travels is the widget setup and its position on the page.

No data goes with it. That is the point: you can build a layout you like for one client, import it for the next, and nothing from the first project follows it across.

Metrics Appear as You Connect

Which metrics you can choose depends on what is feeding the project. Crawl measurements are there as soon as a crawl finishes; the Search Console and Analytics metrics appear once those are connected, and the combined ones once both are.

If a metric you expected is missing, that is usually the answer. What Do I Do Next names which integrations a project is missing rather than leaving you to work it out.

Search Console and Analytics both report on their own delay, so the last day or two of any range can move after the fact. That lag is Google's, not ours.

If Something Looks Wrong

A tile that will not go where you want is usually colliding with another one or reaching the edge of the page, since widgets can neither overlap nor run past the grid. A tile that will not shrink has hit its minimum size.

PDF generation is rare to fail, and retrying usually settles it. The Help icon in the top right of the builder carries the same guidance on the page, support reads every message, and /r/SEOLinkMap is where people compare layouts.