More people these days are discovering all the many benefits of tracking SEO with Excel. So much so that two established SEO experts have recently written articles about it – from two entirely different sides.
First, Ann Smarty at SearchEngineJournal .com published a blog on how she considers Microsoft Excel to be “the ultimate SEO and productivity tool.” In her article, “Using Excel for SEO – the Grand Collection of Tips,” she adds that while she’s no expert at Excel, she understands it enough to never want to be without it. She shares with readers the most useful tips that she has collected for combining Excel and SEO.
Smarty’s first tip is a reminder that you can export any data to Excel, from virtually any format. From Backlink data to information from Yahoo Site Explorer or Google analytics, all of this information can be transferred onto an Excel spreadsheet for immediate comparison. Smarty also provides information on how to export files from each of these formats, and even provides a link to six more ways to export backlink data to Excel.
For her second tip, Smarty says she likes to use Excel for keyword research. It allows her to create pivot tables for easy rearrangement of keywords. She provides a link to a systematic tutorial on how to make a pivot table with “drag and drop” capability, that allows for various comparisons and analyses. She then uses the “Find and Replace” feature to help her visualize keyword patterns. Her illustrated example demonstrates how to find the most frequent modifiers in any set of statistics as illustrated below:
- “Use CTRL+F (“Find and Replace” feature);
- Click “Find and Replace” tab;
- Type the word you think may be frequently used with your core term,
- Click “Options” button;
- Choose to “replace with” format;
- Click “Patterns” tab;
- Choose the color you want to highlight the cell containing the word:
- Click OK and then “Replace All”;
- You should then see how many times the word was used, plus the cells containing it will be highlighted.
Smarty finishes her list of tips by showing how she uses Excel to help her handle URL manipulation tasks. She provides separate instructions for extracting URLs from a list of linked words and for activating URL lists. She says this becomes particularly handy when exporting large amounts of data from hundreds of URLs.
In another recent article at SearchEngineJournal.com, “Use Excel to Plan Meta Tags, Titles and URLs for SEO,” Loren Baker at SearchEngineJournal.com shares a tip from a reader who stresses the importance of differentiation in meta descriptions, and how Excel can help you keep track of your titles, file names, keyword descriptions and more. He also stresses the value of the LEN() function, which can provide the character counts of any cell in your Excel document. Baker provides a screen shot of a typical SEO page layout, and instructions on how to set up your columns for best use.
Meanwhile, from the analytical side, Yaov Ezer at SearchEnginePeople.com recently blogged about the ease with which you can use Excel to track your position on Google over time. He provides a detailed, illustrated example based upon a study he performed for Webmaster World.
Ezer points out that while you can spend a lot of money for commercial products to help you track positions, both time and cash can be saved by simply using Excel. To demonstrate, Ezer uses information culled from his friends at WebmasterWorld.com to conduct the test. He then provides a link to an illustration represented in his column, so that you can actually create the same macro and perform the same test that Ezer did. He provides easy-to-follow instructions for performing the test, and lets you know what you should be seeing when you enter all of the info.
Ezer also goes into detail explaining how the macro works. “Essentially what we are doing here is ‘scraping’ the search result, then looking within the returned content for specific strings (our links),” he says.
If you like using the macro, Ezer’s article includes all of the code you need to make it run automatically whenever you open a designated file.