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The Builtvisible cheatsheet of excel formulas for SEOs
February 7, 2020

In this blog post we outline 15 ready-to-use Excel formulas that make manipulating cell content, whether it is text or number, easier and faster.
And to kick-off 2020 properly, we have a little gift to share with the SEO community and everyone else interested: a Googlesheet that regroups formulas, processes and shortcuts that we, SEOs, use heavily to process data faster.
15 Excel formulas covered include:
- Extract anything before or after the 1st occurrence of a character
- Extract anything before or after the 2nd occurrence of a character
- Extract anything after the second to last occurrence of a character
- Extract anything before or after the 3rd occurrence of a character
- Extract a piece of text located in the middle of a string
- Extract text between the 2nd and 3rd occurrence of a character
- Extract anything after the last instance of a character
- Remove duplicates from one or multiple columns and return ONLY a unique list of values in a specific column
- Count the number of characters (not words!) in a cell
- Count the number of words (not characters!) in a cell
- See if a cell contains *any* question words
- Classify your values (e.g. “Low”, “Medium” and “High”)
- Count the number of keywords displayed in a row which are mapped to a page
- Return the first non-blank cell in a row
- Fix non-blank cells that appear as blank cells
Hopefully these formulas are useful to you and help you process your data in a much faster, clearer and easier way. You can also find all formulas from this post and my previous one on a Googlesheet available here, something that was requested from multiple readers.
And of course, if you use any formulas that are more advanced or better composed, please let me know in the comments. I’d love to hear them!