The Scenario
You are an SEO manager at a SaaS company. Quarterly content planning is on Thursday. You have 150 target keywords in column A of an Excel workbook, collected from the product team, the sales team, and your own research. Before you can prioritize a single one, you need to know the search volume, CPC, and keyword difficulty for each.
It is Tuesday afternoon.
The bad version of this week:
- You open Semrush's keyword overview tool and start typing keywords one at a time
- You export a CSV every 10 keywords because Semrush's UI batching is limited
- You paste 15 separate CSVs into a staging tab, align columns, delete duplicate headers
- You VLOOKUP results back against your original list in the Keywords tab
- You realize the columns are in the wrong order for the scoring model your head of content set up in the ScoringModel tab
- You rearrange it all by hand at 11 PM on Wednesday.
The fast version is one prompt Tuesday morning.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads the keyword list and pulls the Semrush data directly, writing results back into the columns your team expects.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each keyword in column A of the Keywords tab, fetch the Semrush US keyword overview and write search volume, keyword difficulty, CPC, and competitive density into columns B through E. Use batch requests where possible to handle all 150 rows efficiently.
SheetXAI reads column A of the Keywords tab, batches the API calls, and fills columns B through E for all 150 rows. The workbook is ready before the planning session starts.
What You Get
A fully enriched Keywords tab with:
- Column B — Search Volume — monthly US search volume per keyword
- Column C — Keyword Difficulty — Semrush's 0–100 difficulty score
- Column D — CPC — cost per click in the US market
- Column E — Competitive Density — paid search competition level
All 150 rows filled in one operation. No CSV assembly, no VLOOKUP, no staging tab.
From here, your ScoringModel tab can reference the data immediately. Sort, filter, flag quick wins — the structure your team set up in advance works without reformatting.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Real keyword lists have formatting problems. SheetXAI handles cleanup and enrichment in the same prompt.
When keywords have trailing spaces or inconsistent capitalization
You collected keywords from three different tools and they came back with mixed formatting: trailing whitespace, some ALL CAPS, some with leading hyphens.
Clean the keywords in column A of the Keywords tab: trim whitespace, lowercase everything, remove any leading hyphens or special characters. Then fetch the Semrush US keyword overview for each cleaned keyword and write search volume, keyword difficulty, CPC, and competitive density into columns B through E.
When some rows are already enriched and you only want to fill the gaps
You ran a partial pull last week for 50 keywords. Columns B through E already have values for those rows. You do not want to overwrite existing data.
For each keyword in column A of the Keywords tab, check if column B is already filled. If it is, skip that row. If it is blank, fetch the Semrush US keyword overview and write search volume, keyword difficulty, CPC, and competitive density into columns B through E.
When you want to flag high-opportunity keywords immediately after the pull
Once the data is in, you want to surface the keywords worth prioritizing: high volume, low difficulty, non-zero CPC.
Fetch Semrush keyword metrics for column A of the Keywords tab into columns B through E as above. Then in column F, write "Priority" for any keyword with search volume above 1,000, keyword difficulty below 40, and CPC above 0.50. Write "Review" for borderline cases where search volume is 500–1,000 or difficulty is 40–55. Leave the rest blank.
When the list is raw and still includes brand terms and filler phrases
The product team's keyword dump includes your own brand, competitor brand names, and filler phrases nobody actually targets.
First, scan the keywords in column A of the Keywords tab. Flag any that are brand terms (our brand is "Acme") or obvious filler phrases like "how to use," "what is," "definition of." Write "Exclude" in column F for those. Then for everything not flagged, fetch Semrush US keyword overview metrics and write search volume, keyword difficulty, CPC, and competitive density into columns B through E.
The pattern: instead of cleaning the list, then running the enrichment, then flagging priorities as three separate passes, you describe the whole pipeline in one prompt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and paste your keyword list into column A of any Excel workbook, then ask it to pull the Semrush metrics. The Semrush integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For the next step, see how to expand keywords into a topic cluster map in Excel or the Semrush in Excel overview.