Excel has well on its aficionados to implement a number of advanced and automated features in terms of SEO. But did you know that Google Sheets, the table from the Mountain View firm, also has a number of advantages to argue if you want to process certain data to track your natural listing? Here is an overview of its main possibilities …
The Google Sheets tool offered by Google (equivalent to an online Excel version) can be used to work on its natural referencing, and this in many ways. The advantage of this tool is that it is available online, or00f9 wherever you are, and that it is free. Although spreadsheets can show their limits on large files, this tool still allows you to process data from sites that are not too large.
We will review the different possibilities offered by Google Sheets, and see how to take advantage of it for SEO: extracting elements online, URL monitoring, redirect testing, or connecting APIs to analyze and process KPIs SEO.
Google Spreadsheet, functions and scripting language
First of all, you should know that the functions integrated in Google Sheets are partly variants of Excel, but some of them are not available in Excel (or then via the SEOTools for Excel tool), and allow you to connect external URLs directly to retrieve items.
Among these functions, we can cite IMPORTHTML, IMPORTXML for scraping, but also other functions which can help in processing data and URLs such as REGEXEXTRACT which allows you to manipulate a string of characters via regular expressions.
Fig. 1. Google Sheets function to extract HTML elements on web pages.
To go further, scripts can be integrated into Google Sheets to access advanced functions, and to connect APIs.