Hello Excellers and welcome back to another blog post in the #formulafriday series. Today I want to share with you a really useful Excel formula that I use all of the time. It is the LEN formula. I use LEN to help in my SEO preparations to create the correct length of title and meta descriptions. This being so important to meet search engine character counts.
The LEN Excel Function
This function is used to return the length of a specified text string. ie it counts the number of characters in the piece of text.
Syntax of the formula is
=LEN(text)
Where text is The text for which to calculate the length.
Check SEO Preparations Using the LEN Function
So, as an example, let’s say that Google allows 70 characters for your Title and 155 characters for your Meta Description.
We can use Excel to count exactly how many characters we are typing and warn us if we go over that limit. How cool is that?.
In the following formula, I have used the IF and the LEN formula to get Excel to warn me if the number of characters is too long. To also indicate if it is under the threshold of the number of characters. It will also count how many characters I have typed.
Let’s take a look.
The logic of this formula is –
If the length of D3 is greater than 70 characters then return “Too Long”. If however it is not over 70 characters return the number of characters typed. The formula is repeated with the threshold of characters set at 155 for the page description.
A useful tool for SEO- Or has many others uses- what would you this formula for?.
If you want more Excel and VBA tips then sign up to my Monthly Newsletter where I share 3 Excel Tips on the first Wednesday of the month and receive my free Ebook, 30 Excel Tips.
If you want to see all of the blog posts in the Formula Friday series you can do so by clicking on the link below.
How To Excel At Excel – Formula Friday Blog Posts.
