Excel for SEO: 10 formulas to work smarter

Most people think SEO lives in dashboards. They copy-paste data from GA4, fire up Looker Studio, and call it reporting. But here’s the truth: dashboards don’t do the thinking for you, they limit your data analysis abilities, and they definitely can’t solve messy, fragmented SEO data. 

That’s where Microsoft Excel (and Google Sheets) steps in. Not as a fallback tool, but as the engine room of strategic SEO work powering smarter audits, cleaner reporting, faster decisions, and clearer priorities.

Better data means better content marketing, more effective keyword research, and smarter digital marketing.

Think of your SEO stack like a meal you’re preparing:

• Dashboards are the plating: they’re polished and visually appealing, but only show the final presentation, not the process or complexity of the recipe or the overall effort that went into creating the meal.
• Crawlers and tools are your raw ingredients: essential, but unrefined and often inconsistent. They need cleaning, chopping, and combining before they’re useful.
• Excel is the prep station, the knife, and the recipe: it’s where real SEO work happens. You manipulate, transform, and synthesize raw inputs into something actionable, strategic, and ready to serve up in your SEO reports.

And yet, Excel often gets treated like an outdated tool. It’s pushed aside for a sleek UI, forgotten until a dashboard breaks, or misunderstood by SEOs who never learned what it can really do.

That’s exactly what this guide is here for.

You won’t just get formulas (although those are useful!). You’ll get real Excel workflows, built for real SEO problems:

• Merging messy exports from GA4, GSC, and SEO tools
• Cleaning crawl data at scale (without losing your mind)
• Building traffic forecasts and scoring models with simple formulas
• Automating recurring tasks like redirects and metadata audits
• Creating tools your team can reuse, expand, and rely on

Whether you’re technical or not, Excel gives you the power to take control of your SEO data and stop waiting on someone else to pull the numbers or clean the exports. 

This guide walks you through six workflows and 10 high-leverage formulas to help you analyze faster, prioritize smarter, and make SEO decisions with less guesswork. 

6 Excel workflows that make SEO easier

These six use cases show exactly what you can do with Excel: merging exports, cleaning crawl data, and building dashboards, forecasts, and reports that actually work.

1.   Custom data manipulation & cleaning

Raw SEO exports are rarely clean. Screaming Frog gives you every crawlable URL but also a dozen columns you don’t need. Google Search Console data often comes with blanks or odd formatting. Keyword tools may export inconsistent encodings. If you’ve worked with SEO data, you know the drill.

Meanwhile, dashboards like GA4 or Looker Studio are built for visualization, not for cleaning up your data. They’ll show you exactly what’s in your dataset: errors, gaps, duplicates, etc. If your data is messy, you’ll be the one explaining inconsistencies or misleading trends to stakeholders.

What you can do with Excel 

Excel gives you control. You can clean, reformat, and reshape your data exactly how you need it, either by hand or with repeatable logic. Whether you’re stripping UTM parameters, fixing UTF-8 encoding issues, or aligning inconsistent labels, Excel makes it all manageable. And if you use Power Query, it becomes scalable.

Example: Cleaning a messy Screaming Frog export

You’ve crawled a site and exported 10,000+ URLs. The sheet includes:

• Extra tracking parameters (?utm_source=)
• Blank titles or meta descriptions
• 3xx and 4xx status codes
• Characters like  or — in your title tags

In Excel, you can:

• Remove noise: Use Power Query to filter out 3xx/4xx pages or blanks
• Fix characters: Use =CLEAN(TRIM(A2)) to clean spacing and encoding glitches
• Replace malformed text strings: Use Find & Replace or SUBSTITUTE() to fix things like — → —
• Flag SEO issues: Add a formula to check title length
  =IF(LEN(B2)>60, "Too long", "OK")

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Pro tip: Build this once in Power Query, then reuse it for every new crawl. Just drop in the CSV and click “Refresh.”

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2. Combining multiple data sources

SEO requires stitching together insights from a variety of platforms: Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Semrush, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, and more. But these tools rarely speak the same language. That’s where Excel becomes essential.

Use case: Merging SEO intelligence

Say you’re running a technical audit. You want to find pages that:

• Appear in GSC with high impressions
• Are missing metadata (from your Screaming Frog crawl)
• Have few or no backlinks (from Ahrefs or Semrush)

Good luck stitching that together in GA4.

Sure, dashboards might offer integrations, but not with row-level precision or true flexibility. Excel gives you full control to built a list of URLs that’s actionable.

What you can do with Excel

Excel lets you manually join datasets using XLOOKUP, INDEX/MATCH, or Power Query. That means:

• Merging data by canonical URLs or slugs
• Normalizing inconsistent headers and formats
• Filtering for overlaps and gaps (e.g., high-impression pages with no links)

Example workflow

1. Import your exports

• GSC: URLs + impressions/clicks
• Screaming Frog: URLs + metadata
• Semrush: URLs + backlink counts

2. Standardize URLs

• Remove parameters: =LEFT(A2,FIND("?",A2&"?")-1)
• Convert to lowercase: =LOWER(A2)

3. Use XLOOKUP to merge

=XLOOKUP([@URL], GSC!A:A, GSC!C:C, "Not Found")

• Add impressions, CTR, and backlink data to your crawl

4. Filter for opportunities

• Pages with high impressions, low CTR, missing meta tags? Prioritize.
• Pages with strong backlinks but low clicks? Investigate indexing issues.

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Pro tip: Save the combined dataset as your SEO source of truth. Refresh it monthly, and your audit process becomes plug-and-play.

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3. Advanced formula logic & modeling

SEO isn’t just reporting. It’s decision-making at scale. Whether you’re estimating the ROI of a keyword cluster or prioritizing tech fixes across thousands of URLs, raw data needs interpretation. Excel’s formula engine helps you build that logic.

While SEO tools collect and visualize data well, they rarely support flexible modeling. Want to know which pages generate the most revenue per visit? Or estimate traffic loss from low-ranking keywords? Most platforms can’t. Excel can.

What you can do with Excel

By combining the below functions, you can turn a static sheet into a live decision engine:

• IF() for decision trees
• XLOOKUP, INDEX/MATCH for enrichment
• SUMPRODUCT() or ARRAYFORMULA() for scoring
• Named ranges and custom formulas for reusability

Example: Build a keyword ROI score

Let’s say you want to score keywords not just by volume, but also by ranking and intent. Use this formula:

=0.5 * Search_Volume + 0.3 * CTR + 0.2 * (1 – Rank_Position / 100)

High volume → more traffic
High CTR → stronger intent
Low rank → higher upside if improved

Sort your keywords by this score to prioritize the ones with the best potential ROI.

Other use cases:

• Cannibalization detection: Use COUNTIF() to flag duplicate keyword targets
• Revenue estimation: Multiply organic sessions × CVR × AOV
• Migration modeling: Predict traffic shifts from category or URL changes

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Pro tip: Use named ranges in your formulas. It makes models easier to maintain, audit, and scale.

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4. SEO audits & content inventory management

Whether you manage a massive enterprise site or a blog with hundreds of posts, organizing your URLs is a job in itself. Crawl reports are useful, but without structure, they become just another spreadsheet. SEO audit tools generate data but not decisions. They don’t tell you which pages to keep, improve, redirect, or delete. 

Excel turns audit outputs into an actionable inventory.

What you can do with Excel

Centralize performance, metadata, and crawl signals:

• Add custom tags like “Update,” “Delete,” “Redirect”
• Use conditional formatting to flag:
  • Thin content (<300 words)
  • Missing H1s or overlong titles
  • Pages with no traffic or backlinks

Once tagged, your audit becomes a live roadmap for pruning, updating, and planning.

Example: Build a content tracker

1. Start with a Screaming Frog export

Export “All URLs” with word count, title tag, canonical, etc.

2. Add GA4 or GSC data

Use XLOOKUP to enrich content with impressions, clicks, and conversions. 

3. Tag status manually

Create a dropdown with “Keep,” “Update,” “Redirect,” “Remove.”

4. Filter for patterns

Thin + zero traffic? You’re likely to remove it.

High traffic + outdated metadata? Prioritize for updates.

5. Sort and export

Use filters and sorting to create a sprint-ready action plan.

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Pro tip: Create a second tab to track ownership and progress. Add “Owner,” “Status,” and “Due Date” columns. Now you’ve got a lightweight content ops board.

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5. Ad hoc analysis & prototyping

Not every SEO question needs a dashboard. Sometimes you just need to test an idea, spot a pattern, or validate a hunch. Excel gives you a fast-thinking environment that tools like Looker Studio can’t match.

Let’s say you’re:

• Checking if branded traffic is cannibalizing non-branded
• Exploring why a URL lost rankings
• Estimating potential from a featured snippet
• Testing an internal linking tweak

Excel makes it easy to prototype before investing in formal reports.

What you can do with Excel

Think of Excel as your SEO whiteboard:

• Paste exports from multiple tools
• Build quick tables to compare assumptions
• Run formulas to test or debunk ideas
• Use basic visuals to support your thinking

Example: Branded vs. non-branded split

1. Export GSC query data (90 days)

2. Classify queries

=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("yourbrand", A2)), "Branded", "Non-Branded")

3. Build a pivot table to compare clicks/impressions by category.

In 5 minutes, you have a branded vs. non-branded view: no SQL, no BI dashboards.

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Pro tip: Use conditional formatting to flag anomalies like pages with high impressions and low CTR, or those with sharp drops week-over-week.

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6. Client & stakeholder reporting

Even the best SEO strategy falls flat if stakeholders can’t follow it. Dashboards often confuse non-marketers. Excel helps you translate technical results into business insights with clarity.

What you can do with Excel

With Excel, you control the narrative:

• Highlight wins and explain gaps
• Annotate trends with notes and context
• Customize reports to match stakeholder language
• Use simple formatting to keep it skimmable

Example: Monthly SEO summary

1. Import key metrics from GSC, GA4, and your keyword tool

• Sessions
• CTR
• Rankings
• Conversions
• Backlinks

2. Add a takeaway summary

• “+18% Month on Month (MoM) in organic traffic”
• “New product hub brought 2,100 clicks”
• “Homepage dropped to #6 for target keyword”

3. Create two clean views

• Metric table with deltas and targets
• Top 10 pages and top 10 keywords

4. Use simple visuals

• Color codes
• Arrows
• Sparklines

5. Add a next steps list

• Fix title tags for Product X
• Resolve broken links on /pricing
• Merge duplicate blog content

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Pro tip: For multi-channel brands, keep separate tabs for Organic, Paid, and Referral, but keep the format consistent to build trust.

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Top 10 tricks to get the most from Excel

These 10 formulas do the heavy lifting behind the scenes: flagging metadata issues, merging datasets, creating content at a scale, and more. They’re fast, reusable, and built to handle real SEO tasks at scale.

1. Power Query for large data sets

When you’re handling full-site crawls, backlink audits, or multi-tool exports, Excel’s built-in ETL tool, Power Query, is your secret weapon.

Power Query lets you:

• Import and transform large datasets with no VBA
• Clean columns, fix formatting, and merge tables
• Refresh everything with one click for repeat use

Example: Merge Screaming Frog + GSC

1. Go to “Data” > Get & Transform > “From Workbook”
2. Load your Screaming Frog export (e.g., crawl.xlsx)
3. Remove irrelevant columns (e.g., “Last Modified”)
4. Add a second query with your GSC export
5. Merge both tables on the URL column
6. Expand to include GSC metrics (e.g., Clicks, CTR)
7. Load results into a new worksheet

You now have a dynamic dataset you can refresh any time your source files update.

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Pro tip: Use parameters in Power Query to create reusable SEO templates. This is the foundation of scalable audit frameworks.

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2. Conditional formatting for quick SEO wins

Manual audits don’t scale. Conditional formatting lets you spot SEO issues instantly, with color-coded logic, and it helps you:

• Surface long or missing metadata
• Highlight poor performance metrics (e.g., high bounce rate)
• Prioritize fixes at a glance

Example: Flag metadata problems

1. Select the “Title” column
2. Go to “Home” > “Conditional Formatting” > “New Rule”
3. Enter: =LEN(A2)>60 → flag long titles
4. For missing meta descriptions: =ISBLANK(B2)
5. Layer color codes:
   • Red = Missing
   • Yellow = Too long
   • Green = OK

Bonus rules:

• High bounce rate: =C2>0.7
• Low CTR: =D2<0.02

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Pro tip: Use Data Bars or Color Scales to visualize key SEO metrics without building full charts.

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3. LEN + IF for metadata audits

One of the easiest SEO wins is cleaning up title tags and meta descriptions. But reviewing these manually is tedious, especially when you’re auditing hundreds or thousands of pages. That’s where combining LEN (length) with IF logic comes in.

Using Excel formulas, you can automatically flag metadata that’s too long or completely missing without needing an external SEO tool.

Use case: Flag metadata issues at scale

Let’s say your crawl export includes these rows:

URL	Title	Meta description
/products/lipstick-guide	Lipstick Guide for Every Skin Tone	Learn how to choose the perfect lipstick shade.
/products/gloss-without-description	Best Lip Gloss for Shine	Missing meta description
/products/lipstick-title-too-long	This Title Is Way Too Long for Google…	Find the best gloss that pops without the smudge.

Example formulas:

• Flag long titles: =IF(LEN(B2)>60, "Too Long", "OK")
• Flag missing descriptions: =IF(C2="", "Missing", "OK")
• Combined check: =IF(C2="", "Missing", IF(LEN(C2)>160, "Too Long", "OK"))

Your results column might look like this:

Title status	Meta description status
OK	OK
OK	Missing
Too long	OK

Bonus tip: Combine with conditional formatting

After adding your formula columns, use conditional formatting to color-code the results:

• Red for “Missing”
• Yellow for “Too Long”
• Green for “OK”

This makes it easy to prioritize pages during content audits or site migrations.

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Pro tip: Want a fast overview? Use a pivot table to count how many rows fall into each metadata status category.

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4. TEXTJOIN for programmatic SEO content

If you’ve ever worked on product pages, city/location pages, or any large-scale content project, you know how repetitive SEO tasks can get. That’s where TEXTJOIN becomes a secret weapon for scaling content programmatically in Excel.

TEXTJOIN:

• Speeds up templating for H1s, titles, meta descriptions
• Reduces errors in bulk content creation
• Saves hours on programmatic SEO builds

Example: Combine product attributes

Say you’re building product titles from these columns:

• B: Product type (“Concealers”)
• C: Brand (“Dior”)
• D: Color (“Fair”) 

Brand (C)	Color (D)	Product type (B)
Dior	Fair	Concealers
Huda Beauty		Cream Concealers
Nars	Tan	Stick Concealers

Here’s the formula to combine these values into a consistent title:
=TEXTJOIN(" ", TRUE, C2, D2, B2) 

Your output will be:

Page title

Dior Fair Concealers

Huda Beauty Cream Concealers

Nars Tan Stick Concealers

TEXTJOIN skips empty cells automatically, and you don’t need to apply any extra logic.

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Pro tip: Wrap your formulas in PROPER() for clean formatting:
PROPER(TEXTJOIN(" ", TRUE, C2, D2, B2))

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5. VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP to enrich SEO data

Bringing data together from multiple sources is one of the most powerful things you can do in Excel. Whether it’s marrying crawl data with Google Search Console (GSC) performance or adding backlink metrics from Semrush, lookup functions like VLOOKUP and XLOOKUP make it easy to enrich your data at scale.

What it solves:

• Merges disparate SEO data sources into a unified view
• Saves time compared to manual copy-pasting or reformatting
• Enables smarter analysis by centralizing performance metrics

Example: Add GSC clicks to crawl URLs

You have:

• Sheet 1 (crawl export): URLs in column A from a Screaming Frog export

  A (URL)

  /products/lipstick-cream

  /products/beauty-tools

  /guides/skincare-strategy

• Sheet 2 (GSC export): URLs in A, Clicks in B from a Google Search Console export

  A (URL)	B (Clicks)
  /products/lipstick-cream	125
  /guides/skincare-strategy	89

To get insights and merge the crawl data with clicks, use either VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP.

VLOOKUP:

=VLOOKUP(A2, 'GSC Export'!A:B, 2, FALSE)

VLOOKUP searches down the first column of a range and returns a value from the right. It doesn’t support left lookups.

XLOOKUP:

=XLOOKUP(A2, 'GSC Export'!A:A, 'GSC Export'!B:B, "No data")

XLOOKUP is available in the newer version of Excel and is more flexible. It searches in any direction, handles missing values more gracefully, and doesn’t require column index numbers.

This is your output, after applying the formula in your crawl sheet:

URL	Clicks
/products/lipstick-cream	125
/products/beauty-tools	No Data
/guides/skincare-strategy	89

Other ideas:

• Match backlinks from your preferred tool to your indexable URLs
• Add rankings (from keyword tools) to your content inventory
• Pull in canonical tags, crawl depths, or hreflang data from other crawls
• Combine GA4 session data to correlate content performance with on-page metrics

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Pro tip: Wrap your lookup inside IFERROR() to handle missing matches and keep all your exports in named sheets or ranges for easier maintenance over time:
=IFERROR(XLOOKUP(A2, GSC!A:A, GSC!B:B), "0")

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6. Pivot tables for cannibalization & page type analysis

Pivot tables are your data storytelling engine. They’re your go-to tool when you need to make sense of large, granular SEO exports fast. Instead of drowning in data, you can zoom out to uncover patterns and take action.

What they solve:

• Detect keyword cannibalization
• Compare performance across content types (e.g., blog vs. product pages)
• Summarize engagement metrics by folder or category
• Align stakeholders with digestible visual summaries

Example 1: Spot keyword cannibalization

Imagine you’ve exported keyword rankings from Semrush or Ahrefs. Each row includes:

• Column A = Keyword
• Column B = URL
• Column C = Position

Keyword	URL	Position
best lip balm	/blog/lip-care-guide	3
best lip balm	/blog/tinted-lip-balm-review	7
best lip balm	/resources/lip-balm-comparison	9

Your goal is to identify keywords appearing on multiple URLs. To do so, you can easily use pivot tables.

1. Select your table
2. Go to Insert > PivotTable
3. Drag Keyword into Rows
4. Drag URL into Values (set to “Count”)
5. Add a filter for keywords where count > 1

Now you can instantly see which keywords have multiple URLs competing for visibility.

Keyword	Count of URL
best lip balm	3

In our example, the keyword “best lip balm” is ranking with three different URLs, which means there’s a risk of cannibalization.

Example 2: Analyze performance by page type or folder

You’re tasked to compare performance by page category (e.g., Blog vs. Product vs. Docs), starting with this information:

URL	Sessions
/blog/lip-care-guide	1200
/product/hydrating-gloss	950
/help/lipstick-return-policy	300

If you want to know how blog posts perform vs. product pages vs. help docs:

1. Add a helper column to classify the page type

=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("/blog/", A2)), "Blog", IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("/product/", A2)), "Product", "Help")

2. Create a pivot table

• Rows = page type
• Values = sessions or any relevant metric

Output

Page type	Total sessions
Blog	1200
Product	950
Help Center	300

You can now confidently say that blog pages are driving the most sessions. This will be useful for allocating content resources.

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Pro tip: Use slicers to make your pivot tables interactive. Slicers are clickable filters you can add to a pivot table to dynamically control what data is displayed. No formulas or dropdown menus required—it’s one of the fastest ways to make reports more engaging and client-friendly.

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7. Regex in Excel (via Power Query or VBA)

SEO is full of messy strings, like URLs with tracking junk, raw HTML tags, or inconsistent folder structures. Regular expressions (regex) let you extract or clean those patterns at scale.

Regex:

• Strips tracking parameters (like utm_source)
• Extracts metadata from HTML
• Normalizes slugs, folders, or anchor text
• Automates cleanup for large, messy exports

Excel doesn’t support regex in regular formulas, but you can still avail of its power using:

• Power Query (no code required)
• Lightweight VBA macros (for advanced cases)

Example 1: Strip UTM parameters with Power Query

Say you’ve exported URLs like:

https://example.com/product?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc

To remove everything after the ?:

1. Go to Data > Get & Transform > From Table/Range
2. In Power Query, add a new Custom Column
3. Use this formula:
   Text.BeforeDelimiter([URL], "?")
4. Click Close & Load

You now have a clean URL column, perfect for merging data or canonical audits.

Example 2: Extract canonical tags with VBA

If you’ve exported raw HTML and want to grab <link rel=”canonical”> tags:

1. Press Alt + F11 to open the VBA editor
2. Insert a new module and paste:
   
   Function ExtractCanonical(inputText As String) As String
  Dim RE As Object
  Set RE = CreateObject("VBScript.RegExp")
  RE.Pattern = "link rel=""canonical"" href=""([^""]+)"""
  RE.IgnoreCase = True
  RE.Global = False
  If RE.Test(inputText) Then
ExtractCanonical = RE.Execute(inputText)(0).SubMatches(0)
  Else
ExtractCanonical = ""
  End If
End Function
   
3. Next, use this formula in Excel:
   
   =ExtractCanonical(A2)

In this way, you’re pulling canonical URLs directly from crawl HTML.

Other SEO regex use cases:

• Extract slugs: /category/product-name/ → product-name
• Remove trailing slashes and parameters
• Normalize folder structures
• Clean raw anchor text
• Identify tracking junk (e.g., sessionid, gclid, ref=)

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Pro tip: Use regex101.com to test and debug your patterns. It saves time and helps validate your logic before bringing it into Power Query or VBA.

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8. Forecasting organic traffic with FORECAST.ETS

Ever wondered how your organic traffic might trend next quarter or whether a seasonal dip is just normal behavior? 

Excel’s FORECAST.ETS() function makes it easy to predict future SEO performance like traffic, clicks, or conversions directly from historical data. No Python, R, or fancy BI tools required.

Why it’s helpful:

• Predicts future trends using past performance
• Helps you plan content, resourcing, and seasonal strategies
• Allows you to set better KPIs for upcoming quarters
• Builds trust with leadership using data, not gut feel

Example: Forecast monthly organic sessions

Let’s say you’ve exported organic sessions from GA4 for the last 12 months, by week or month.

Step 1: Format your data

A (Date)	B (Sessions)
Jan 2024	5,200
Feb 2024	6,100
—-	—–
December 2024	7,800

Step 2: Apply the formula

To forecast January 2025’s traffic, use this formula:

=FORECAST.ETS(DATE(2025,1,1), B2:B13, A2:A13)

Then drag it down for February, March, April, etc.

Step 3: Visualize the result

Build a line chart with:

• Your actual traffic (2024 data)
• Forecasted traffic for 2025
• Optional: add upper/lower confidence bounds using FORECAST.ETS.CONFINT()

Now you’ve got a simple SEO forecast model you can share in reports or stakeholder decks.

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Pro tip: Make sure your historical data:

• Uses consistent time intervals (weekly or monthly)
• Has at least eight data points for best accuracy
• Is sorted in ascending date order

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Dig deeper: Your guide to SEO forecasting with Google Sheets

9. Custom scoring models with weighted formulas

Not all pages, keywords, or backlinks are created equal. Some drive more revenue. Some are easier to optimize. Others are high-effort with low reward. 

To make smarter decisions faster, you can use custom scoring models in Excel.

They:

• Prioritize work based on potential value
• Help defend decisions with data (not gut feel)
• Make opportunity analysis repeatable and transparent

Example: Prioritize keywords by opportunity

Imagine you have this dataset:

Keyword	Search volume	CTR	Rank
Best red lipstick	2,900	0.08	5
Best lipstick for dry lips	720	0.05	9
Long-lasting lipstick	3,600	0.04	11

You want to build a formula that scores each keyword based on:

• How much traffic it could bring (volume)
• How likely users are to click (CTR)
• How far down the SERP it currently ranks (rank position)

Here’s a simple one that weights each factor:

=0.4 * Volume + 0.3 * CTR + 0.3 * (1 – Rank/100)

How the formula works:

• Gives 40% weight to volume (more searches = more potential)
• Gives 30% weight to CTR (indicates intent)
• Gives 30% weight to rank (the closer to position #1, the better)

By applying this formula to our dataset, this is the final output with scores:

Keyword	Volume	CTR	Rank	Score formula	Result
best red lipstick	2,900	0.08	5	=0.4*2900 + 0.3*0.08 + 0.3*(1 – 5/100)	1,234.5
best lipstick for dry lips	720	0.05	9	=0.4*720 + 0.3*0.05 + 0.3*(1 – 9/100)	295.6
long-lasting lipstick	3,600	0.04	11	=0.4*3600 + 0.3*0.04 + 0.3*(1 – 11/100)	1,260.3

You can now sort by the score to prioritize high-opportunity keywords.

Modify it for different use cases:

• Add a column for conversion rate to prioritize bottom-funnel terms
• Swap in backlink count to evaluate authority
• Use for pages instead of keywords by combining GA4 data with crawl exports

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Pro tip: Create a separate “Weights” tab and reference the weights dynamically (e.g., =Weights!B1). This way, you can change the strategy without rewriting every formula. It’s perfect for working on multiple campaigns.

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10. URL deconstruction and rebuilding

Whether you’re planning a site migration, fixing broken links, or cleaning up messy parameters, you’ll often need to take URLs apart and put them back together. Excel gives you the tools to do this efficiently, especially when working at scale.

What it solves:

• Identifies URL patterns across large datasets
• Helps clean, standardize, and structure messy URLs
• Supports redirect mapping and link restructuring

Example: Analyze and clean up URL structures

Let’s say you have this URL:

https://example.com/blog/how-to-apply-lipstick?utm_source=google&utm_campaign=spring

You want to:

1. Remove tracking parameters
2. Extract the slug /blog/how-to-apply-lipstick
3. Remove trailing slashes
4. Rebuild clean redirects

Step 1: Remove UTM parameters

=LEFT(A2, FIND("?", A2 & "?") - 1)

This removes everything after ?, leaving:

https://example.com/blog/how-to-apply-lipstick

Step 2: Extract slug

=MID(A2, FIND("/", A2, 9), LEN(A2))

This extracts everything after the domain: /blog/how-to-apply-lipstick

Step 3: Remove trailing slash

=IF(RIGHT(A2,1)="/", LEFT(A2,LEN(A2)-1), A2)

This will normalize inconsistent URLs (e.g., removes / at end).

Step 4: Build redirect map

Let’s say:

• Column A = Old URL
• Column B = New slug (e.g., /blog/how-to-apply-lipstick)
• Column C = New domain (e.g., https://example.com)

To rebuild:

=C2 & B2

Final output:

https://example.com/blog/how-to-use-excel

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Pro tip: Use Excel 365’s TEXTSPLIT() to break URLs into components like domain, folder, and query string for advanced cleanup, categorization, or migration planning:
=TEXTSPLIT(A2, "/")

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Start applying these Excel workflows today

Excel isn’t just a reporting tool. It’s a decision engine. When used correctly, it turns raw SEO exports into smart, scalable strategies. Whether you’re building redirect maps or forecasting organic growth, these workflows make your analysis faster and your recommendations stronger.

Next step: Pick a live SEO task you’re working on this week, maybe a metadata audit or a site migration, and apply one of the formulas or models covered above. Not only will your new Excel spreadsheet save time, it’ll level up how you present your work to clients, devs, or stakeholders.

If you’re new to SEO, this overview breaks down the core concepts. Want to dive deeper? Start with technical SEO fundamentals or explore on-page optimization tactics to pair with your Excel workflows.