15 Google Sheets Formulas for SEO to Know

If you’ve been doing SEO for a while, Google Sheets might be the integral tool of your work.

And it is more powerful than you think.

From cleaning messy keyword lists to auditing meta titles, a few simple formulas can replace hours of manual work — once you understand how they work.

Here, we’ll go through 15 Google Sheets formulas every SEO should know, and more importantly, why and how they work.

Text and String Functions for SEO

These formulas deal with text; things like meta titles, keywords, or descriptions.

They help you analyze, clean, and format your data quickly.

1. To Count Characters

Formula:

=LEN(A2)

How it works:
The LEN() function counts the number of characters (letters, spaces, punctuation and everything) inside a cell.

Example:
If A2 = Best SEO Tools 2025, the result is 20.

Use it for:
Checking whether your meta titles or descriptions fit within Google’s recommended character limits (around 60 for titles, 160 for descriptions).

2. Remove Extra Spaces

Formula:

=TRIM(A2)

How it works:
The TRIM() function removes unwanted spaces at the beginning and end of text, and between words if there are multiple spaces.

Example:
If A2 = " SEO Basics ", the result will be SEO Basics.

Use it for:
Cleaning up imported keyword lists or content exports that contain extra spaces.

3. To Change Text Case

Formulas:

=LOWER(A2)
=UPPER(A2)
=PROPER(A2)

How they work:

LOWER() converts text to lowercase.
UPPER() converts text to uppercase.
PROPER() capitalizes the first letter of each word.

Example:
If A2 = seo CHECKLIST

LOWER → seo checklist
UPPER → SEO CHECKLIST
PROPER → Seo Checklist

Use it for:
Keeping brand names, headings, or product titles consistent.

4. Convert Keywords into URL Slugs

Formula:

=SUBSTITUTE(A2, " ", "-")

How it works:
The SUBSTITUTE() function replaces one piece of text with another.
Here, it replaces every space " " with a dash "-".

Example:
If A2 = seo checklist 2025, the result is seo-checklist-2025.

Use it for:
Creating clean, SEO-friendly URL slugs directly from keyword lists.

URL Analysis Formulas

URLs can tell you a lot — domains, paths, protocols.

These REGEXEXTRACT Formulas help you break them apart easily.

5. Extract Domain Name

Formula:

=REGEXEXTRACT(A2, "https?://([^/]+)")

How it works:
REGEXEXTRACT() uses regular expressions to extract specific text.
This pattern finds whatever comes after https:// or http:// until the first /.

Example:
If A2 = https://example.com/blog/seo-guide, the result is example.com.

Use it for:
Grouping backlinks, sorting pages by domain, or cleaning crawl exports.

6. Extract URL Path

Formula:

=REGEXEXTRACT(A2, "https?://[^/]+/(.*)")

How it works:
This skips the domain and captures everything after it: the URL path.

Example:
https://example.com/blog/seo-guide → blog/seo-guide

Use it for:
Auditing site structure or mapping URL hierarchies for SEO sitemaps.

7. Identify Secure vs Non-Secure URLs

Formula:

=IF(REGEXMATCH(A2, "https://"), "HTTPS", "Not Secure")

How it works:
REGEXMATCH() checks if the text matches the pattern. In this case, whether it contains "https://".
IF() then returns a message depending on whether that’s true or false.

Example:

https://example.com → HTTPS
http://example.com → Not Secure

Use it for:
Finding non-secure pages after an HTTPS migration.

Keyword and Data Cleaning Formulas

Handling large keyword datasets? These are your go-to formulas for cleaning and sorting.

8. Extract Unique Keywords

Formula:

=UNIQUE(A:A)

How it works:
The UNIQUE() function removes duplicate entries from a column.

Example:
If Column A contains:

seo tools  
seo tools  
keyword research

The result will be:

seo tools  
keyword research

Use it for:
Cleaning keyword lists, backlink domains, or content topics.

9. Split Keyword Groups into Rows

Formula:

=ARRAYFORMULA(TRIM(SPLIT(A2, ",")))

How it works:

SPLIT() breaks text wherever it finds a comma.
TRIM() cleans extra spaces.
ARRAYFORMULA() applies it across multiple cells automatically.

Example:
If A2 = seo, marketing, analytics
The results will be:

seo  
marketing  
analytics

Use it for:
Turning comma-separated keyword groups into clean, separate rows.

On-Page SEO Checks

These help you check if your meta tags follow SEO best practices, quickly.

10. Title Length Check

Formula:

=IF(LEN(A2)>60, "Too Long", "OK")

How it works:
LEN() counts characters, and IF() tests if that number is greater than 60, then labels it.

Example:
If A2 = Best SEO Tools and Strategies for 2025 and Beyond, the result is Too Long.

Use it for:
Spotting title tags that might truncate in search results.

11. Meta Description Length Check

Formula:

=IF(LEN(B2)>160, "Too Long", "OK")

How it works:
Checks if the meta description exceeds 160 characters.

Use it for:
Optimizing meta descriptions to fit within Google’s snippet limits.

Backlink and Internal Linking Formulas

These come in handy when analyzing backlinks or checking internal link consistency.

12. Count Backlinks or References

Formula:

=COUNTIF(A:A, A2)

How it works:
COUNTIF() counts how many times a value appears in a range.

Example:
If A2 = example.com and it appears 5 times in column A, the result is 5.

Use it for:
Finding how often a domain or page repeats in your backlink report.

13. Identify Duplicates

Formula:

=IF(COUNTIF(A:A, A2)>1, "Duplicate", "Unique")

How it works:
Checks if a value appears more than once.
If yes → “Duplicate”, otherwise → “Unique”.

Use it for:
Auditing duplicate backlinks, canonical URLs, or meta titles.

Automate SEO Checks with IMPORTXML

Google Sheets can actually pull live data from websites using IMPORTXML().

14. Scrape Meta Titles

Formula:

=IMPORTXML(A2, "//title")

How it works:
IMPORTXML() takes a URL and an XPath query.
"//title" fetches the page’s <title> element.

Example:
If A2 = https://example.com/blog/seo-guide, the result is that page’s title tag.

Use it for:
Creating live title tag audits, no crawling tools required.

15. Scrape H1 Headings

Formula:

=IMPORTXML(A2, "//h1")

How it works:
Same as above, but fetches <h1> tags instead of titles.

Use it for:
Checking H1 consistency across your site to identify missing or duplicated headings.

Wrapping Up

These 15 Google Sheets formulas can make your SEO workflow faster and more reliable.

To summarize:

Use text functions (LEN, TRIM, PROPER) to measure and clean your text.
Use URL functions (REGEXEXTRACT, REGEXMATCH) to analyze URLs.
Use data cleaning formulas (UNIQUE, SPLIT, ARRAYFORMULA) to manage large datasets.
Use audit formulas (IF, LEN) to check meta tag lengths.
Use automation formulas (IMPORTXML) to fetch live data from sites.

Once you get comfortable with these, you can combine them to build SEO dashboards or audit templates that automatically update whenever new data is added.

Start with a few, test them on your keyword to understand them first, and you’ll start experiment more formula like these for your SEO workflow.