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 a Google Sheet, 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 sheet, align the columns, delete duplicate headers
- You VLOOKUP the results back against your original list
- You realize the columns are in the wrong order for the scoring model your head of content set up
- 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 spreadsheet 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, fetch the Semrush US keyword overview and write search volume, CPC, and keyword difficulty into columns B, C, and D. Use the batch endpoint where possible to handle the full list efficiently.
SheetXAI reads column A, batches the API calls against Semrush's keyword overview endpoint, and fills columns B through D for all 150 rows. The sheet is ready by the time you finish coffee.
What You Get
A fully enriched keyword sheet with:
- Column B — Search Volume — monthly US search volume per keyword
- Column C — CPC — cost per click in the US market
- Column D — Keyword Difficulty — Semrush's 0–100 difficulty score
All 150 rows filled in one operation. No CSV assembly, no VLOOKUP, no staging sheet.
From here, your scoring model runs immediately. Sort by difficulty ascending, filter by volume threshold, mark your quick wins. The data is already in the shape your sheet expects.
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: 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, CPC, and keyword difficulty into columns B, C, and D.
When some rows are already enriched and you only want to fill the gaps
You ran a partial pull last week for 50 keywords. Column B already has values for those rows. You do not want to overwrite what is there.
For each keyword in column A, 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, CPC, and keyword difficulty into columns B, C, and D.
When you want to filter to only high-opportunity keywords after the pull
Once the data is in, you want to immediately flag the keywords worth pursuing: high volume, low difficulty, non-zero CPC (which signals commercial intent).
Fetch Semrush keyword metrics for column A into columns B through D as above. Then in column E, 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. Leave the rest blank.
When the list is raw and still includes brand terms and stop words
The product team's keyword dump includes your own brand name, competitor brand names, and filler phrases nobody actually targets.
First, scan the keywords in column A. 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 E for those. Then for everything not flagged, fetch Semrush US keyword overview metrics and write search volume, CPC, and keyword difficulty into columns B, C, and D.
The pattern: instead of cleaning the list first, then running the enrichment, then flagging priorities, you describe the whole pipeline in one prompt. SheetXAI handles the sequence.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and paste your keyword list into column A of any Google Sheet, 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 or the Semrush in Google Sheets overview.