6 Excel Functions that every SEO Expert must know

A good SEO professional knows his data well and also knows how to simplify it. When you are working on huge Excel sheets, you can’t do all the things manually. If you try, you will end up wasting a lot of time and doing wrong calculations and therefore Excel has some very interesting functions that can be very helpful to SEO professionals. The list goes as below:

CONCATENATE function in Excel

CONCATENATE function helps you to combine strings of different cells. This function proves to be very useful to the SEO professionals as you can easily combine the pieces of URLs (see image), can create sitemaps, can create link building queries etc.

Find Duplicates and Remove Duplicates in Excel

When you are working on too many keywords, there may be instances where you add certain keyword that already exists and that is where the Find Duplicate function of Excel will help you the most. Find duplicate function will help you to highlight the duplicate values in your data, so if there are any duplicate keywords, you can easily highlight it by using this function. You can get the Find Duplicate option in conditional formatting.

If you think that there are too many duplicates and deleting them will take too much of time then you can use Remove Duplicate function of Excel which will remove all the duplicates at one go. Like we had 2 duplicate values in the above example, so next we delete those duplicates using the Remove duplicate function and you will see that only 14 unique values are remaining.

Pivot Table in Excel

Working in the field of SEO, you will often come across excel sheets that can scare you as they contain huge data. Analyzing so much of data at a time can create a lot of confusion. Pivot table helps you to break down the data into smaller part which makes it easier to deal with it. With the help of Pivot Table you will be able to see only the data that concerns you. You can also manipulate the data and include the metrics that you want.

PROPER function in Excel

PROPER function in Excel capitalizes each word in a string. This function can be of great help when you are creating the page titles. So you can just write your page titles without worrying about the Caps lock key and at the end, use the PROPER function and you will see that your data looks perfect.

LEFT, RIGHT, MID function in Excel

In the CONCATENATE function above, we saw that how we can join the pieces of URL but what if you want to separate the URL into pieces. With the help of LEFT, RIGHT and MID function you can exactly do that. These functions help you to extract leftmost, middle or the rightmost characters from a string.

LEN function in Excel

Whether you are creating a meta description or title, making sure that it does not exceed the character limit is a task. You can’t check again and again and that is why the LEN function in Excel is very handy. LEN function helps to find the length of a string i.e number of characters in a string. So you can easily make sure that characters in your title are not more than 60 and characters in your meta description are not more than 160.

You can learn to use CONCATENATE, PROPER, LEFT, MID, RIGHT, LEN and many more text functions here

So that was the list of the functions that we feel are very important for SEO experts, if you think that we missed out something, feel free to mention it in the comments box below.