Slug generator in Excel: SEO-friendly URLs

Human-readable URLs, or slugs, are an important element of SEO and user experience. The main requirements for a slug are simplicity, clarity and universality. That’s why most websites around the world use plain Latin letters, digits and hyphens in their addresses.

Diacritics (there are about 1,000 of them), Cyrillic and other non-Latin characters can cause encoding problems: in the address bar, “crème-brûlée” turns into “cr%C3%A8me-br%C3%BBl%C3%A9e”. For sites with large organic traffic, especially international ones, this matters: a universal URL is clear to everyone and works correctly anywhere in the world.

The slug generator in the !SEMTools add-in for Excel automates creating such URLs from page titles or keywords, solving the main problems that come up along the way.

A slug formula in Excel 365

Let’s start with what a formula can do. In Excel 365, the built-in REGEXREPLACE function (in Excel 2010–2021 it’s available with !SEMTools, even in the free version) turns a title into a slug in one formula:

=LOWER(REGEXREPLACE(TRIM(REGEXREPLACE(A1,"[^A-Za-z0-9]+"," "))," ","-"))

The inner REGEXREPLACE replaces every run of characters other than Latin letters and digits with a space, TRIM removes the spaces at the edges, the outer REGEXREPLACE turns the remaining spaces into hyphens, and LOWER converts everything to lowercase.

The first two rows are fine. The third shows the limit of this approach: letters with diacritics are not Latin letters for the regex, so they are cut out and break the words. Adding a SUBSTITUTE for each of the thousand such characters is not realistic. And the formula keeps noise words, place names and repeats, which make the URL longer. That’s where the tool comes in.

Main tasks when generating slugs

Creating human-readable URLs means transliterating non-Latin characters and characters with diacritics and removing punctuation and special characters, all for long lists at once.

Transliterating diacritics and other alphabets

Many languages use characters with diacritics, like ñ, ç, å, ü, which don’t fit standard URLs either. The problem is made worse by their variety: there are about 1,000 such characters. The slug generator converts them to Latin letters (ñ → n, ç → c, ü → u), so “Café & Crème brûlée” becomes “cafe-creme-brulee”, and the URLs work correctly for most languages of the world.

Cyrillic is transliterated too (я → ya, ц → ts), following the rules commonly used for SEO. Without that, a Cyrillic URL has to be converted to percent-encoding or Punycode, which makes it long and unreadable.

Removing punctuation and special characters

Punctuation such as commas, brackets, quotes, exclamation marks, as well as special characters like currency symbols and emoji, can cause errors when loading pages. They often occur in page titles and, if not removed, get into the URL automatically.

As with diacritics, there are thousands of such characters, and you can’t remove them all with a simple replacement. The Remove punctuation tool in the Remove characters menu deletes them all at once.

Slug generation: what not to forget

In recent years, search engines have learned to simplify how URLs look in results. A URL like

https://www.example.com/category/subcategory/some-product-with-a-detailed-description-and-specs

may appear in search results as example.com › category › some-product. It helps focus attention on the key information, but relying solely on automatic algorithms is not recommended. Optimizing URLs yourself keeps the structure under your control and the address relevant for both search engines and users.

Removing noise words (stop words)

Noise words like “how”, “to”, “the”, “best”, “buy” often get into URLs because addresses are generated from titles. For example, “How to Choose the Best Fridge” becomes /how-to-choose-the-best-fridge.

Such words add no value for search engines; they only make the URL longer and harder to read. Removing them makes the address shorter and focused on the key elements: /choose-fridge. To remove your own list of stop words from all titles at once, use the Delete list of words procedure.

Removing place names

Place names like “Boston” or “New York” are often added to titles to localize content. In “Apartment repair in Boston”, the city matters if the content targets a regional audience. But if the site already uses a subdomain (boston.example.com) or a folder (example.com/boston), repeating the place name in the URL is redundant.

The Delete cities (toponyms) tool removes place names automatically, together with the prepositions before them, like “in Boston”. The address becomes universal: /apartment-repair.

Remove place names with prepositions first, and only then without them. Otherwise, extra prepositions may remain in the middle and at the end of phrases. And keep the place names where they really add value or help segment the content.

Removing repeated words

Repeated words are a common problem when URLs are generated from keyword-rich titles. For example, “Apartment repair: quality apartment repair in Boston” turns into:

/apartment-repair-quality-apartment-repair-in-boston

Such a URL is redundant for both users and search engines. The Delete repeated words procedure keeps only the first occurrence of each word, and the URL becomes:

/apartment-repair-quality-in-boston

Letter case

The source phrases may contain both lowercase and uppercase letters. The tool keeps the original case by default. If you need everything in lowercase, change the case before generating, or on the finished list of URLs.

URL length

Overly long addresses can be cut off in search results, losing important parts. If the steps above haven’t shortened the phrases enough, use the procedure to delete words by position: it shortens the phrase, and the future slug with it, to the length you need. To check the length, count the characters in the cells.

Summary

I hope you found what you were looking for on this page. The REGEXREPLACE formula is enough for plain English titles. For real-life lists with diacritics, other alphabets, noise words, place names and repeats, the !SEMTools slug generator and the cleanup procedures turn a whole column of titles into clean URLs right in place.