In a world of advanced SEO platforms and AI-powered dashboards, Excel might seem like an old-fashioned choice. Yet for many SEO professionals, Excel remains one of the most reliable and cost-effective tools in the toolbox. It is not just a place for storing lists of data. Excel can help you analyse, clean, organise and visualise information in ways that directly support SEO decision-making.
Because SEO often involves working with large amounts of data, from keyword research to technical audits, Excel is perfectly suited to help make sense of it all. It allows you to filter, compare, and manipulate figures quickly, without needing to write complex code or rely entirely on expensive platforms. The following are some of the things you can use Excel in your everyday SEO work:
1. Organise Keyword Research Data
Keyword research is one of the most common areas where Excel proves its worth. Once you have gathered keywords from tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or SEMrush, you can use Excel to sort and filter the data. This makes it easy to group similar keywords together, find search terms with the highest potential, and remove any that are irrelevant.
You can create columns for keyword, search volume, competition level, and ranking difficulty, then use Excel’s sorting functions to find the best opportunities. Conditional formatting can highlight high-value keywords in green and low-priority ones in red, making visual analysis quicker.
2. Track Keyword Rankings Over Time
Excel is also a helpful place to track keyword rankings over time. By setting up a spreadsheet with your keywords in one column and weekly or monthly ranking positions in the following columns, you can spot trends and changes.
Using Excel’s chart functions, you can create line graphs that show how a keyword has moved in the rankings. This visualisation can help you see whether your optimisation efforts are paying off or if further adjustments are needed.
3. Analyse your Backlink Profiles
Backlinks are a major factor in SEO performance, and Excel can help you manage backlink data from tools like Ahrefs, Moz or Majestic. By importing backlink lists into Excel, you can analyse the sources, anchor text, and domain authority.
You can filter to find high-quality backlinks, identify spammy ones that might harm your rankings, and track new links over time. This makes it easier to see which link-building campaigns are working and which need improvement.
4. Perform Site Audits
Technical site audits often involve hundreds or thousands of URLs, each with its own data points like status codes, page titles, meta descriptions and load times. By exporting this data from crawling tools like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb into Excel, you can sort and analyse it more effectively.
For example, you could filter all URLs with missing meta descriptions or sort by load time to find the slowest pages on your site. With Excel’s functions, you can also create summary tables that count how many issues exist in each category, giving you a clear overview of what needs fixing.
5. Analyse Competitor Data
Excel is not just for working on your own site. It can also be used to analyse competitor data. By importing competitor keyword rankings, backlink lists or content performance figures, you can compare them directly to your own.
This side-by-side analysis can reveal gaps where competitors are ranking but you are not, or where they have earned valuable backlinks that you might be able to target. Excel’s pivot tables make it easy to summarise this data for quick decision-making.
6. Manage Content Calendars
SEO and content marketing are closely connected, and Excel can be a simple yet effective tool for managing content calendars. You can create a spreadsheet that lists upcoming articles, target keywords, planned publication dates, and assigned writers.
By adding a status column, you can track whether each piece of content is in planning, writing, editing or published stage. Conditional formatting can highlight overdue tasks, helping to keep the content process on schedule.
7. Monitor Site Performance Metrics
Excel can also help you store and compare performance metrics from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and other analytics platforms. By regularly exporting data such as organic traffic, bounce rate, and conversion rate into Excel, you can create month-by-month comparisons.
Charts and graphs can show trends over time, making it easier to present results to stakeholders or clients. This can be particularly helpful when you need to demonstrate the impact of specific SEO changes.
8. Clean and Prepare Data
Raw SEO data often comes with errors, duplicates or irrelevant information. Excel offers a range of functions to clean and prepare this data before you analyse it. The “Remove Duplicates” function can clear repeated entries, and text functions like TRIM, LEFT, RIGHT and FIND can help tidy up messy data fields.
You can also split data into multiple columns for easier sorting. For example, if you have a URL list, you can separate the domain from the rest of the path to analyse sections of your site independently.
9. Use Formulas for Deeper Insights
One of Excel’s greatest strengths is its formula capabilities. You can use formulas to calculate click-through rates, percentage changes in traffic, or keyword opportunity scores.
For instance, if you have a column for search volume and another for conversion rate, you can create a formula to multiply them and find the keywords most likely to bring valuable traffic. These custom calculations can give you insights that generic SEO tools may not provide.
10. Automate Repetitive Tasks
Although Excel is not an automation tool in the same way as dedicated software, it can save time through features like macros. A macro records a sequence of actions, allowing you to run them again with a single click. This is useful for repetitive SEO tasks such as cleaning imported data or formatting reports.
Even without macros, using Excel templates can speed up your work. Once you have created a useful spreadsheet layout for tracking rankings, analysing backlinks or managing content, you can reuse it for future projects.
11. Combine Excel with Other SEO Tools
Excel works best when used alongside other SEO tools. Many platforms allow you to export data in CSV format, which opens directly in Excel. This means you can pull in keyword data from SEMrush, crawl data from Screaming Frog, and performance metrics from Google Analytics, then combine it all into one master spreadsheet for analysis.
This approach allows you to find connections between different data sources. For example, you could match a list of slow-loading pages from your site audit with traffic data to see if site speed is affecting performance.
12. Visualise SEO Data
Presenting SEO data in a clear, visual format helps others understand the insights. Excel’s charts, graphs and conditional formatting options can turn raw numbers into compelling visuals.
You might create a bar chart showing which content categories bring the most traffic, or a line graph tracking your site’s average ranking position over time. Colour-coded heat maps can make it easy to see which keywords are performing best and which need improvement.
13. Maximise Excel’s Value in SEO Work
The key to getting the most out of Excel is to treat it as a flexible, customisable workspace for your SEO data. Instead of relying entirely on automated dashboards that limit what you can see, Excel gives you control over what data to analyse, how to format it, and how to interpret it.
While advanced SEO tools have their place, they often cannot match Excel for adaptability. It can handle everything from a quick keyword sort to an in-depth technical audit report. If you learn how to use functions, pivot tables and charts effectively, you can uncover insights that others might miss.
In 2025 and beyond, the marketers who combine the power of modern SEO tools with the flexibility of Excel will have an edge. Excel is not just a spreadsheet program, it is a quiet but powerful ally in the ongoing effort to improve search performance.