Metadata optimizations. Hate it or love it â it’s a primary responsibility of SEO. And for SEOs that use Google Sheets or Excel in organizing their recommendations (most of us), there are three simple XPath formulas that you can use to make the process go by much faster.
Ready to work smarter instead of harder? Read on to learn more.
Stop Copy And Pasting The “Before” Metadata. Use Xpath To Auto-Populate It Instead.
Imagine the scenario: You’ve run the Screaming Frog SEO Spider crawl, identified the pages you want to optimize, and listed them neatly in column A of Google Sheets. Before crafting your recommended changes, you’ll also need to outline the pages’ current metadata (to showcase the before and after differences/improvements made).
Instead of laboriously copying and pasting the current title tags, meta descriptions, and H1 tags into your Google Sheets document for every page, you can use XPath queries to scrape your website and dynamically pull them into your document.
The bonus? These formulas automatically update. So you can track when your recommendations are complete.
Without further ado, check out the copy-and-paste-able formulas below:
How To Pull Title Tags Into Google Sheets:
=IMPORTXML("URL","//title")How To Pull Meta Descriptions Into Google Sheets:
=IMPORTXML("URL","//meta[@name='description']/@content")How To Pull H1 Tags Into Google Sheets:
=IMPORTXML("URL","//h1")Wrapping Up
Want to learn more about how XPath formulas work? Check out this great video tutorial I found here. Don’t forget to bookmark this post to refer to in the future!
