Using Your Excel Skills to Boost SEM

My wife and I had used Excel for a number of years to run our day-to-day business tasks. As the business grew and we added an SEO team to our staff, it made sense to use Excel to monitor keywords, personalize pitches and analyze data for the campaigns we took on. But I was truly intrigued when our in-house guru began relying on Excel to drive our SEO in some very powerful ways.

Excel for Website Diagnostics

For instance, he began using Excel to not only analyze and present campaign data, but to diagnose client websites that were losing click-through traction. He takes data he’s extracted from software we use to detect problems and exports them to Excel, where he uses its functions and formulas to identify the problem and fix it. And then he discovered how to do it without ever leaving Excel.

Using Excel to Accelerate Onpage and Off page SEO Tasks

My guru also turned me on to a tool developed by Niels Bosma, called SeoTools for Excel, an add-on that enables Excel to fetch website data quickly and easily, cutting the time it takes to perform daily-grind SEO tasks in half. In addition to scraping websites for data at the click of a button, this powerful tool allows us to conduct on-page analysis and debugging, monitor campaigns and export data from Google Analytics and create our own scorecards and reports—without ever leaving the database. We like anything that saves us time to nurture existing and new business.

SEO Optimization Company - What about those Basic Excel Skills?

I get into discussions all the time about what tools are best for analyzing data—and for me, it’s still Excel. Yes, there are a lot of sites hawking free tools that promise to take a heavy load of data and analyze it for you, but I’m not ready to turn my campaign over to just anyone. Excel has been around for decades. People know it. People understand it. And people trust it.

Not everyone needs to analyze a website. Sometimes you just want to monitor your own campaign. So what Excel skills do you need to add to your toolbox to create a comprehensive overview? Here is what many SEM professionals recommend. And I agree. If you haven’t already, be sure you familiarize yourself with how to:

• Format a table, a basic skill on which many secondary skills are built
• Create a chart to present data visually
• Use complex functions and create your own to customize your data searches
• Create and use pivot tables to analyze and summarize data across large sets of data
• Use advance filters to access targeted data quickly

If all this seems a bit too ominous, Himanshu Sharma provides a comprehensive cheat sheet on the SEO Takeaways site, and John Gagnon recently published a post with some pretty nifty Excel plug-ins to help ease your analytic experience.

At the end of the day it’s what you’re analysis says that counts. How you get there is a matter of personal preference and skill.

James Ussery is CEO of Machus Corp., a white label online marketing provider, with expertise in Web design, SEO and Web applications.

Author Bio:

Machus Corp., A technology solutions company based in Coppell, Texas, provides SEO services , Search Engine Optimization , Internet Marketing Services, Pay Per Click, Web Design and Development Services.