The functions on which we’ll be focusing in this lesson are useful for dealing with text manipulation. Lesson 2: More Functions - Text Manipulation Here’s an orange belt that you can print, cut out, and wear around town.
Congratulations, this makes you an orange belt. Thus concludes Lesson 1 of your Excel for SEO training. IFERROR is your method to turn those pesky #N/A, #VALUE or #DIV/0 messages into something a bit more presentable. IFERROR is really simple and will become an important piece of most of our formulas as things get more complex. Use IFERROR to trap and handle errors in a formula. Microsoft Excel Definition: Returns a value that you specify if a formula evaluates to an error otherwise, it returns the result of the formula. Looking to get the count of empty anchor text instances? COUNTIF does the trick. Microsoft Excel Definition: Counts the number of cells within a range that meet the given criteria.ĬOUNTIF is your go-to function for getting a count of the number of instances of a particular string.
This is great for eCommerce sites with a nice URL structure of /category/subcategory/product/. We can now manipulate this data however we see fit. This can be removed with a find and replace now, or dealt with afterward.įormat cells (not necessary for this example) and select a destination (default destination is usually fine) Unlike CONCATENATE, we won’t need a formula to carry out this function.įor our real-world SEO example, let’s take an Top Pages report and suppose that we want to find which subfolders receive the most links. As an SEO, this is the go-to function to separate subfolders or divide up subdomains, root domains, and/or TLD. Text to Column’s functionality is a bit limited, but I find myself using it almost every time I open Excel. Microsoft Excel definition: Distribute the contents of one cell across separate columns Insert a text string by putting it within quotations, as seen here: You may also use the formula to insert text strings before, after, or between other cells. It is most often used to combine two cells into one, as in: Microsoft Excel definition: Joins several text strings into one text string.Ĭoncatenate is a pretty self-explanatory function, but that doesn’t make it any less useful. In this lesson we’ll cover some of the simpler functions available in Excel, and how they’re used in the SEO’s day-to-day tasks. This guide could not have been prepared without the help of some of Richard Baxter‘s awesome blog posts and the official Microsoft Excel Help site. Oh! Before we begin, we must give credit where credit is due.
So if pivot tables, IF statements, absolute references and nested functions make you scratch your head, read on, Aspiring Ninja! I’ll be including real world SEO tasks, ranging from the relatively simple to rather complex, so I hope there’s something for everyone. It is far from an exhaustive look at everything that can be done with Excel, but hopefully a strong foundation for the SEO’s toolkit. With this document I intend to share some of the most valuable a spects of Microsoft Excel for the SEO. This was the position I found myself in not too long ago, and while I’m far from the deadliest ninja in the dojo today, I’ve picked up a thing or two from the brilliant minds around me. Many SEOs are now finding themselves faced with the task of doing fairly complex data analysis to improve their search strategies, and Excel adequacy is not quite enough. They want reliable SEO advice with a strong verifiable foundation, and who could blame them? Additionally, our clients have become wiser and more SEO capable, having been burned in the past by snake oil SEOs. Over the last few years our field has become even more data-driven than in the past thanks to tools like Open Site Explorer, improved Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics, Majestic SEO, Raven, and many others. Excel was not a big part of my past jobs, and I would guess that many SEOs’ past careers did not require anything more than adequacy in the program. Some of these past positions may have required data analysis with Microsoft Excel, but a good many of them did not. SEOs have been getting into our industry from all sorts of past careers - web designers, developers, marketers, business people and those that “just fell into SEO”.
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