When it comes to quickly prototyping SEO workflows, Google Sheets can be a powerful ally. It’s particularly useful when I need to collaborate with other team members on projects that require rapid iteration and data collection.
One of my go-to tools in Google Sheets is the =ImportXML() function. This little formula has saved me countless hours by allowing me to pull in live data directly from web pages.
Here’s the basic syntax:
=IMPORTXML("https://www.website.com/your-web-page", "XPATH to Scrape the page")It’s as simple as that. With this, you can fetch almost any data from a webpage using the proper XPath expression.
Mastering XPath
The tricky part of this process is often working with XPath—a language used to navigate XML documents. XPath allows you to select specific elements from a webpage.
If you're not familiar with XPath, there's an excellent guide from Builtvisible you can check out here.
But to give you a head start, here are some common XPath examples:
//title – Pulls the page title
//meta[@name='description']/@content – Pulls the meta description
//h1 – Pulls all H1 headers (yep, all of them)
//h1[1] – Pulls just the first H1 header
//div[@id='div-id-name-here'] – Pulls the content from a specific <div> by ID
Once you’ve mastered XPath, you can extract just about any piece of information from a webpage and manipulate it inside Google Sheets.
Why Use ImportXML?
There are countless use cases for this method in SEO workflows:
Scraping on-page SEO elements to quickly audit sites
Monitoring competitors’ meta tags and headings
Gathering structured data for quick analysis
I often use =ImportXML() during the early stages of process design, especially when I’m building a workflow that requires frequent collaboration or iteration. Having real-time data from web pages directly in a Google Sheet means I can get everyone on the same page.
Some Words of Warning
Fetching pages and crawling using Sheets like this isn't always the most scalable method. For example some websites block this kind of activity OR if you need to do more than 100-200 pages at a time you may find sheets itself stops after a while.
If you need to run these checks over thousands of pages or are behind bot detection you may find that Screaming Frog with custom extractions can work better - but this is good for smaller projects!
Give it a Try!
Want to give it a go? Here’s a Google Sheet template with the formula pre-loaded so you can try it for yourself.
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