If you’re already a connoisseur, feel free to hit the menu in the sidebar. If you have no idea why Google docs is the perfect platform for SEO tools, keep reading.

Most digital marketing professionals rely on spreadsheets from simple calculations to complex home-made CRMs.  We live in spreadsheets, whether it’s in Excel or Google docs, they are a marketer’s best friend.

Why Google sheets over Excel?

It’s hard to point out any faults with Excel, it’s reliable, fast, and capable of doing almost anything.  There are reasons for using both, but for the sake of building custom SEO tools, here’s a quick list of things Google sheets does better:

• Cloud based
• Free
• Connects to other Google products we use daily (Google Analytics, Gmail,  Drive) seamlessly
• Provides us with Google apps script (essentially JavaScript) to build custom scripts
• Seamless collaboration & permission sharing with library support and revision history

Excel is amazing, and we won’t detract from that. However, for the purpose of building SEO tools, here’s where it falls behind Google sheets:

• Uses VBA for custom functions / macros which is less documented and harder to learn
• Documentation and support falls short for custom functions (JavaScript is widely covered around the web)
• Not cloud based
• Not free

Need convincing? We’re not surprised..

We’ll show you why Google docs sheets might be your new best friend. We also don’t expect you to warm up to the idea just because we-told-you-so, we’ll show you step by step how to use Google sheets like you use Excel and then take you to the next level.

Brand new to Google sheets?

Start here: https://gsuite.google.com/learning-center/products/sheets/get-started/

Ben Collins just released a great course which you can (and should) enroll for free: https://courses.benlcollins.com/p/apps-script-blastoff/

Excel Junkie?

Get started by understanding some of the difference between common operations in Excel vs Google Docs