Search cell contents in Google from Excel

Working with a list of keywords, URLs or product names, and need to check each of them in a search engine quickly? The “Find in Google” and “Find in Yandex” procedures in the !SEMTools add-in open a search for a cell’s contents right from Excel in one click, without copying and switching between windows.

Why search cell contents right from Excel

SEO specialists, marketers and analysts copy data from Excel to the browser manually every day. A few typical scenarios:

• quickly check the SERP for a keyword from your keyword list without leaving the table;
• make sure a URL from the list is indexed (search for it with the site: operator);
• compare how a competitor’s snippet looks in Google and Yandex;
• check brand or navigational queries for a group of clients;
• speed up manual clustering: open the results for several queries in a row.

Instead of switching to the browser, pasting the text and pressing Enter, you just select the cells and choose a command from the context menu.

Searching with a formula

Without add-ins, you can build a search link with the HYPERLINK function and ENCODEURL (Excel 2013 and later), which turns spaces and special characters into a valid URL:

=HYPERLINK("https://www.google.com/search?q="&ENCODEURL(A1),"Google")

Fill it down the column, and each row gets a clickable “Google” link. It works, but each link still has to be clicked one by one, and the helper column has to be created and then deleted. For Bing, replace the address with https://www.bing.com/search?q=.

How the “Find in Google” and “Find in Yandex” procedures work

Both procedures are available in the trial PRO version of !SEMTools. You don’t have to buy a full license: the trial version installs for free and gives full access to the PRO tools.

After installation, two new items appear in the Excel context menu (right-click on a cell or a range). The procedure takes the text of each selected cell and opens a search for it in the chosen search engine, in your default browser.

Supported modes

• One cell: one browser tab opens with a search for its contents.
• A range of cells: a separate browser tab opens for each non-empty cell.

So if you select a column of 10 keywords and choose “Find in Google”, the browser opens 10 tabs, one per query. That speeds up manual SERP analysis a lot.

Step-by-step instructions

Step 1. Install the trial PRO version of !SEMTools

Download the add-in on the download page and connect it to Excel. After that, the !SEMTools tab appears in the Excel ribbon, and extra items appear in the cell context menu.

Step 2. Prepare the list of queries in a column

Type or paste keywords, phrases, URLs or any other text you want to search for into an Excel column. Make sure the cells don’t contain extra spaces: the tool to remove extra spaces helps here.

Step 3. Select the cells

Select one cell or a range. To select non-adjacent cells, hold Ctrl and click them. To select a range, hold Shift and press the down arrow, or click the last cell of the range.

Step 4. Open the context menu

Right-click the selection. Among the !SEMTools items, you’ll see the “Find in Yandex” and “Find in Google” commands.

Step 5. Choose the search engine

Click the item you need. The browser opens tabs with the search results, one for each non-empty cell in the selection.

Practical examples

Example 1. Checking the SERP for a list of keywords

Say you have a list of queries for a new ad campaign, and you want a quick look at which sites rank at the top for each:

Select A1:A4, right-click → “Find in Google”, and the browser opens 4 tabs with the results for each query. Competitor analysis becomes several times faster than typing manually.

Example 2. Checking clients’ brand queries

You manage several clients and want to check quickly how each of them looks in search results: “Acme plumbing reviews”, “Northwind bank mortgage”, “Contoso coffee delivery”. Three cells, three tabs, not a single manual action in the browser.

Example 3. Checking whether pages are indexed

Put site:example.com/page-url in the cells (a formula like =”site:”&A1 builds such queries from a list of URLs) and search them in Google. If the page is in the results, it’s indexed.

Working with ranges: what to keep in mind

• The procedure processes only non-empty cells: empty rows are skipped automatically.
• If you select a large range, say 50+ cells, the browser opens that many tabs. Most modern browsers handle it, but split very large lists into parts. Also keep in mind that search engines may show a captcha after many queries in a short time.
• The procedure takes the text of the cell as is, without any processing. If the cell has a formula, its result (the displayed value) is used.

Common questions

The “Find in Yandex” and “Find in Google” items are not in the context menu

Make sure the trial PRO version of !SEMTools is installed and active, and the !SEMTools tab is shown in the Excel ribbon. If the tab is there but the items are not in the context menu, restart Excel.

Too many browser tabs open at once

Some browsers may block opening many tabs at once, treating them as pop-ups. Allow pop-ups for the search engine in the browser settings, or process the range in small parts.

Extra characters get into the search

If the queries contain extra spaces, line breaks or special characters, clean the data first: use the TRIM function or the !SEMTools tool to remove extra spaces, and the remove characters section for everything else.

If you need to open not searches but the URLs themselves, see how to open all links in Excel at once.

Summary

The “Find in Google” and “Find in Yandex” procedures are a small but very practical tool for everyone who works with keywords, URLs and search analytics in Excel. One click in the context menu replaces repeated copying and typing in the browser.

If, besides searching the web, you need to find cells by content right in the table, see the section on how to find cells by condition. And for working with the text of queries, see the sections on deleting words and changing words in !SEMTools.