Using Google Spreadsheets for SEO

I’m a big fan of spreadsheets… mainly Excel which is great for all sorts of SEO activities like monthly reporting, goal setting, keyword research and ontology, and on and on. I’m also a big fan of Excel’s slower, clunky competitor: Google Spreadsheets (GS). Fortunately what GS lacks in the speed department are made up for in the collaboration and live web data departments.  At times GS is slow, loading-forever-copy-and-paste-finicky, but there are some really useful upsides to this tool as well.  Being able to collaborate on docs in real time is pretty awesome.  Another great feature is live the ability to pull in webdata. GS allows for importing of RSS feeds and almost any content via the Import XML function which allows for importing web content via Xpath.

Here are some great Google Docs for SEO found from around the web and listed below. Simply click on FILE>MAKE A COPY to test any of these.


1)  Content Idea Generator

Need help brainstorming? With this document you can see what is popular and being talked about right now across several different types of sites. This can lead to ideas and inspiration of what Ito write about.

2)  Lost Link alerts through Google Docs

From Majestic SEO: “The tool grabs the list of the backlinks you have lost during the previous month. Then it filters the list to harvest the domain names where your links have been deleted.” – See more

3)  SEER Interactive SEO Toolbox

From Chris Le. Chris’s spreadsheet/ tool is great because it allows you to aggregate data from SEOmoz, Google Analytics, Twitter, and more into one Google Spreadsheet

4)  Check On-Page Ranking Factors

From Tedd Nemet:
“Our on-page checking spreadsheet uses the importXML() function in Google Spreadsheets. This very useful function takes two arguments, a URL to a document to be parsed and an Xpath query that tells it which information to import into the spreadsheet.” Learn more here


 

Hopefully some of these gogole docs will inspire your own, custom SEO creations. There is also a very informative post at distilled.net that teaches how to use Xpath to import live content into your GS. Do you have a cool GS for SEO? Tell us about it in the comments below!

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