Tag Archives: excel training

How Excel can help you build a successful SEO campaign

Keywords

When discussing SEO, it’d be impossible not to mention keywords. And with this, there are two sides to the story. Firstly, which keywords to settle upon and secondly, tracking their effectiveness.

Deciding which keywords to run with is a big decision. It needs to fit in with both your business goals and marketing strategy, leaving no room for error. Using an Excel spreadsheet as a tool to track your keyword ideas in conjunction with a combination of free and paid online tools, you’ll be able to save both time and money in the long term.

Two of the most popular tools include, Google Keyword Tool & Google Trends. Use the aids to provide insight as to the search volumes of your terms (both local and worldwide) and also to help with variations upon your keywords (e.g. if your main term is “Light Bulbs” you could find alternatives such as “Halogen Bulbs”, “Energy Saving Light Bulbs”).

Add your findings to your spreadsheet using columns

Keyword
Local Search Volume
Worldwide Search Volume (if relevant)
Competition (Low, Medium, High)
Trend (You can calculate this however you wish)
Additional Notes

This will give you a quick indicator as to which keywords your company should target. By using sorting and filtering you should start to see some patterns. Put simply, high competition and low search volume is more often than not, worth being left alone.

Once you’ve decided upon your specific search terms, you’ll need to track these too. Again, free tools are great. Rank Checker will provide you with a quick breakdown of where you appear in the three major search engines. Create a new spreadsheet, with the columns;

Keyword
Month
Google Rank
Yahoo Rank
Bing Rank

I’d recommend doing a separate spreadsheet for each month, then you can always cross reference these in the future to analyse trends specific to your website. Alternatively, you could have one page for each, Google, Yahoo & Bing. Knowing which keywords are effective will provide you with insight as to where to channel your paid and organic campaigns.

Directories

If you’re a business with an emphasis on SEO (which to be honest, who isn’t these days?), you’re likely interested in spreading a wide net for your content. Submitting your posts to directories is a great way to increase the reach of your content, but merely submitting them shouldn’t be the end of it.

Measuring the effectiveness of an action or process is key, and there is no simpler or more effective method than creating an Excel spreadsheet. First, you’ll need to find those directories, if you haven’t already. A quick Google search will provide you with a comprehensive list for your specific needs. Once you’ve got the list, create an Excel document with columns for:

Directory Name
Date Link Submitted
Date Link Confirmed
Pricing
Additional Info

Knowing where and when you submitted a post to a directory will save you time (and money) in the future, reducing the occurrence of duplication and ineffective listings. (If you are worried you have entered something twice, have a look at this post describing how to deduplicate data). It always pays to include an additional info column to remember login details and the like.

Expenses

Budget / Money

Tracking your spend makes simple accounting sense. Excel is a fantastic way to note down where your SEO budget is going. From paid directories to PPC campaigns and everything in between. Your spreadsheet may include the following columns:

Expense
Average Monthly Cost
Annual Cost
Additional Notes

Now, this document in itself provides little more insight than where your money is going. However, when analysed in conjunction with conversation rates for example, Excel will allow you to decipher the exact effectiveness of a campaign per cost. It’s also a great “go to” document when making budgeting decisions.

Competitor Analysis

Of course, in order to stay one step ahead of the competition, you need to know what they’re up to. That’s just common sense, right?

Again, there are plenty of tools out there to help you track the numbers of backlinks to your site, paid and unpaid. Open Site Explorer is a handy tool to quickly scan a webpage and offers insight to domain authority, page rank and the links from other sites to your page.
Further to this, you can do exactly the same for your competitors. Where are their links coming from? Why aren’t these sources linking to you? You’ll soon be able to see what their site offers which yours doesn’t.

To make things easier to analyse trends, use your spreadsheet. See if there’s one domain that favours your content across any number of posts. For this you can add as many or as little columns as you desire, but you may wish to include;

URL
Total Links
Linking Root Domains
Page Authority
Domain Authority
Facebook Shares
Tweets
Google +1’s

It goes without saying that a link from a site with a higher domain authority will increase the likelihood of your content reaching a greater audience. The more links and shares that you receive can only be beneficial too for spreading your word.

To conclude, there’s a world of data out there which you can analyse. Excel can help you put these into graphs, charts, columns, rows and more to ensure your findings are digestible. It can also help you decide whether a particular SEO campaign has been successful in terms of return on investment and much more. We’ll discuss more of these in further posts, so stay tuned.

Interested in sharpening your own Excel skills so you can build your own SEO spreadsheet management dashboard? Attend an Excel training course from Best STL where you’ll learn about formulas across worksheets and how to manage large lists of data.

Page Break Preview in Excel 2010

To enable Page Break Preview:

Go to the View tab
Click on the Page Break Preview button in the Workbook Views group.

The view of your document will change to something like this:

The blue line(s) represent where the page breaks are. Simply drag them up or down, left or right and position them where you want the pages to break. If the line is dashed, it is a line that Excel has inserted itself. If the blue line is solid, it is one that the user has changed.

To insert a page break manually:

Put the cursor where you would like the break to be
In the Page Layout tab, click Breaks then Insert Page Break.

If you’d like to learn more about page breaks and controlling your Excel printouts, attend our Excel Intermediate training course which run in London and UK wide. You’ll also cover IF functions, conditional formatting and many more interesting topics.

Protecting Excel 2010 documents – options available.

When you have worked hard to set up and create an Excel workbook, which may include 3D formulas, pivot tables and links to other key worksheets, you will want to protect your work from unwanted changes.

Excel allows you to protect your worksheets work and allow editing
It isn’t just about stopping people from making changes to Excel documents. You may want colleagues to enter data, and to focus on that – and not to worry about how the formulas work.

Protecting data to maintain confidentiality
Some worksheets are, by their nature, confidential. Staff salary information for example, occupational health records or commercially sensitive data such as information on competitors or financial data.

Excel has a range of options available to you for protecting your work, from individual cells to worksheets, or workbooks. These options are available in the Review tab, under the Changes section, and in the backstage view.

The Review tab has protection functions for you to apply, depending on your needs..

Protecting your Excel Workbooks

Protection via Read-only status
You can protect your Excel document by making it read-only. Your colleagues or clients can read the document, analyse the data in it, but not edit it, add to it, or change a thing.

Mark as Final
With this option, no-one can edit your document as the features that allow editing, are not available.

Encryption
This protects a document by applying a password system – but be warned, if you have to try and remember fifty squillion different passwords at work, this may tip you over the edge. If you forget the password for your Excel document, you won’t be able to get a reminder. If you use this, find a way to remember your passwords.

Other options for protecting parts of your Excel Workbook

Locking Cells
This feature allows you to protect individual cells – useful for protecting your formulas or links. The rest of your worksheet is unprotected. This option works well where colleagues share a document and are responsible for updating your database, but don’t have the expertise to set up the formulas.

Using permissions
Excel allows you to set up permissions using your Windows accounts and IDs. Here, you can set permissions for certain users only. This option is suitable if your document is in a shared drive and you want to protect sensitive or confidential data.

The backstage view has tools available to protect your work, or set permissions.

Protect your workbook by setting up digital signatures.
In the backstage view you can apply a digital signature, which can be invisible to other users.

You can use one or a a combination of these protection options to protect your worksheet. Protecting your work is included in our Excel training courses.

Speeding up data entry with Excel Shortcuts

I love shortcuts, they save me loads of time by using a couple of keystrokes instead of going to different tabs and menus.

Here are my 10 favourite Excel shortcuts to speed up data entry in Excel.

To undo the last action – use Control + Z no matter what program you are using, this shortcut undoes the last action. Love it!
To add today’s date – use Control + ;
To add the current time – use Control + Shift + :
To edit a cell – use F2
To select a column – use Control + spacebar
To select a row – use Shift + spacebar
To get to the last active cell in your Excel sheet – use Control + End
To move to the first active cell – use Control + Home
To move to the next worksheet – Control + page down
To move to the previous worksheet – use Control + page up

For more time-saving shortcuts and techniques, Excel training can help give you the edge http://www.microsofttraining.net/excel-2007-introduction.php

MS Excel hints, tips, tutorials and discussion

from Best STL: Quality & value training, trusted by thousands of UK businesses