The Scenario
You are an international SEO strategist at an agency with four client websites: a UK e-commerce brand, a US SaaS company, an Australian services firm, and a German tech startup. Each client wants to understand where their referring domains come from by country, so you can all make intelligent international link-building decisions.
You have all four domains in an Excel workbook. The strategy presentations are in two weeks.
The bad version of this project:
- You open Semrush and pull the referring domains by country report for Client 1
- The report shows 40+ countries and exports to CSV
- You paste it into a tab, label it
- You repeat for three more clients
- You now have four tabs with different sort orders and inconsistent country code formats
- Some tabs have two-letter codes, others have full country names, depending on which export button you clicked
- You spend Friday afternoon normalizing country names across four tabs before you can build any comparison.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads the domain list and pulls the referring domains by country data from Semrush for each domain, assembling it all into one structured tab with consistent formatting.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each domain in column A of the Domains tab, fetch the Semrush referring domains by country report and write each country and referring domain count as rows in a new tab called GeoBacklinks. Include a Domain column and expand all country codes to full country names.
SheetXAI pulls the geographic distribution for all four domains, normalizes the country names, and writes a single GeoBacklinks tab with everything labeled.
What You Get
A GeoBacklinks tab with:
- Column A — Domain — which client this row belongs to
- Column B — Country — full country name
- Column C — ReferringDomains — number of unique linking domains from that country
Filter by Domain, sort by ReferringDomains descending. The top countries for each client reveal where their link profile is anchored and where the gaps are. A UK brand with 80% of referring domains from the US has a geographic mismatch. A German startup with almost no US referring domains has an English-language link-building opportunity.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Geographic backlink reports need adjustment when clients have specific targeting requirements.
When you want to compare each client's top 5 countries side by side
A flat list of all countries per domain is hard to compare. You want a pivot view.
After building the GeoBacklinks tab, create a pivot-style summary in a new tab called GeoSummary. For each domain in column A, show the top 5 countries by referring domain count. Use countries as rows and domains as columns.
When a client wants to measure their English-speaking market penetration specifically
Your UK e-commerce client targets English-speaking markets: UK, US, Australia, Canada, Ireland. They want to know the percentage of their link profile from those five markets.
For the domain in A1 of the Domains tab, fetch the Semrush referring domains by country report. Calculate the percentage of total referring domains from UK, US, AU, CA, and IE combined. Write this "Target Market Coverage" percentage at the top of the GeoBacklinks tab. Then write the full country breakdown below.
When you want to flag clients with high concentrations from low-value markets
You want to flag any client with more than 15% of referring domains from specific markets that historically correlate with lower link quality.
After building the GeoBacklinks tab, check if any domain has more than 15% of referring domains from the countries in this list: [specific countries]. If so, write a flag in a RiskFlags tab noting the domain and the percentage.
When the full geo-diversity audit needs distribution data, coverage scores, and strategic recommendations in one pass
The client presentation needs data and a point of view.
For each domain in column A of the Domains tab, fetch the Semrush referring domains by country report and write into the GeoBacklinks tab with Domain, Country, and ReferringDomains columns. Then in a GeoStrategy tab, write a 2-sentence recommendation for each client: which geographic market is underrepresented given their target audience, and what type of outreach would address the gap fastest.
The pattern: the data pull, the coverage analysis, and the strategic recommendation all come from one prompt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and put your client domains in column A of any Excel workbook, then ask it to build the geographic backlink distribution. The Semrush integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For more Semrush workflows, see how to pull a 12-month backlink history trend in Excel or the Semrush in Excel overview.