You should never compare fundamentally different types of values on the same chart axis, so let’s create a secondary axis for the ranking values.įirst, you need to select and format the rankings data series. The only remaining challenge is to arrange the rankings in such a way that they make sense, visually. Try filtering out the lower volume terms, at least for the time being. This will improve matters slightly, but there might be a few too many keywords in the chart. Highlight your search volume data (the column you’d like to sort in volume order) and select “ Data > Sort“. It may look a little rough around the edges though, so let’s make it look a lot nicer than this:įirst, we need to organise the keywords by search volume so we can look at our chart as a tail graph. Head to Insert > Column or Bar chart to insert your chart.
You’re now free to clear out any irrelevant data from your table, in my case, low search volme data.įinally, drag down the “Position” values into “Values” and you’ll have a pivot table, with keywords, search volume and rankings ready to build a chart. To create a filter, follow the yellow arrow (in the screenshot above) to the filter drop down and check the “Select Multiple Items” checkbox. This adds a helpful drop down above the Pivot Table, which I can use to filter out the very low search volume values. Having all of your values in a pivot table might not be what you intended, though, which is where the Filters come in.Īs you can see, I dragged the “Position” field into “Filters”. I call this the pivot-table-penny-drop-moment. You’ll very quickly notice that you’ve created a thing of beauty.Ī pivot table with all of the keywords in your list and all of their corresponding search volume values. Provided you’re looking at “Sum of Search Volume” and not “Count of Search Volume”, your table on the left will start to make a lot of sense:
Next, drag and drop your search volume figure into the “Values” box. Start by picking up your keywords by dragging the “keyword” field into the “Rows” box. As you add values, the table on the left begins to form.
The PivotTable Field List uses drag and drop functionality to enable you to populate those little white squares with values. We’re going to look at which items of data should be placed where and you’ll see very quickly how a pivot table works. If you’re new to Pivot Charts, you’re about to experience a bit of a penny drop moment. Add axis fields, values, column labels and filters When you click “OK”, you’ll be presented with a blank Pivot Table “field list” and a Pivot Chart “filter pane” on the right of your screen and a very blank looking space on the left called “PivotTable1”. Head to Insert > Pivot Table and add to a new sheet, just like this: We’re going to add a pivot table to a new sheet. Now we have all of our data nicely arranged in one place, let’s get to the fun part. Name the table something memorable, like “rankings”. Once you’ve got your data, make a Table by selecting the whole dataset (CTRL+SHIFT+DOWN then RIGHT), then CTRL+L creates the table: Amongst other reasons, tables seem to be highly performant, less work for you in this particular use case and they can be fun to name. You don’t have to use tables, but I really like to.
Using SEO Tools for Excel to export data via the SEMrush API.
Follow the links provided and as soon as you have a full data set, return to this post. Should you need to use a separate source of ranking data, then you might need to use VLOOKUP to consolidate your dataset into a single Table. We’re going to grab data via the SEMrush API (using a methodology very similar to this one) which comes ready with rankings and search volume data all in one. At the time, it was my favourite type of SEO chart as it was particularly useful for the keyword research presentations of the day.īack then, we used Google Keyword Tool data and rankings gathered from AWR reports. The chart above shows search volume and ranking position in Google on the secondary axis. The outcome, this type of a rankings distribution chart:
This tutorial teaches you how to make a pivot table in Excel and how to create a pivot chart with the data. That’s except for the version of Excel we’re using and the data sources we’re analysing. It seems that despite the long period of time between 2008 (when this article was originally penned) and today, not a great deal of Excel stuff has changed. For those of you that have been following my work for the past decade (or more), you’ll know that much of my early work was teaching SEO’s how to use Excel.