Other times?  Not so much.

Having played with this a lot, let me first suggest changing the keyword just a bit.  Maybe change it from plural to singular (say, baseball card dealer instead of baseball card dealers), or try removing a term entirely, as with the example above where chicago electric power company delivers nothing, but chicago electric company works fine. I can’t tell you why the tool prefers one over the other, only that this has worked for me on occasion.  (NOTE: The above example is from the same spreadsheet, with both queries side by side, entered within seconds of each other.)

Also, a bit of advice: don’t abuse the functionality.  Look, the Google servers can detect when it’s getting too many requests from the same IP, and if it thinks anything automated is going on, it just revokes your privileges.  So I know it can be extremely convenient and fun to have a single Google spreadsheet with 20 or more XPATH strings delivering results for a list of keywords.  But don’t be surprised if, after opening that sheet, all other attempted importXML queries suddenly stop working.

Remember, this functionality is hardly perfect.  But it works quite well, especially since it’s free and all.

Fortunately, Google Docs makes it pretty easy, and using XPathBuilder, you can quickly and easily generate the code to pull the results in quickly.

(NOTE: In order to do this, you must have a Google Docs account.  If you don’t have one, go here to get one.  Signup is free.  If you have a Gmail account, you already have a login.)

Step 1: Go to the tool at XPathBuilder and enter the query of your choice in one of the Search String fields.

Step 2: The dropdown menu directly to the right of the Search String field offers a series of search engines.  Click Bing in that list.  (NOTE: You must select a search engine in the list – if you don’t, it won’t generate the code.)

Step 3: Click the Submit button at the bottom of the screen.  The code should then appear in the Search String Results field.

Step 4: Select the code, copy it and paste it into a cell in your Google spreadsheet.  The code should execute automatically.

Notice that the code is actually within cell A1, but what actually appears is the #1 result for the keyword in Bing.

Unlike using importXML and XPath to import Google results, these commands seem to be fairly reliable for Bing, and don’t appear to suffer the same level of unreliability in terms of importing results.  However, if your experience has been different, drop us a line in the comment thread to describe what’s happening on your end.

This tool is built to utilize the importXML function available within Google spreadsheets.  Before you go any further, make sure your Google Docs account is open. (If you don’t have one, get one at docs.google.com.) Make sure you have a Google spreadsheet open so you have a place to paste your code.

XPathBuilder is really simple, or at least we hope it is.  Go to the front page of the site and enter the phrase you want to search, and select a search engine from the dropdown at the right.

Then click the Submit button at the bottom of the page. You’ll get a long string of code in the field just below the search phrase.

Select that string of code and paste it in your Google spreadsheet exactly as written. Then wait for the code to execute automatically.

(There are five separate string generators, so you can generate up to five separate strings at once.)

That’s it.  There are multiple applications for this particular approach.  And of course, it’s all free of charge.

I’m a professional SEO, so I look forward to this becoming a useful tool in the community.  If you have some suggestions for making this tool better, let me know.

After casting about for a bit, I ran across some posts by Tom Critchlow of Distilled, and others on SEO Gadget, about the wonderful world of Google Docs’ importXML feature.  Unbelievable.  What better way to look at results across a keyword set to get a sense of the lay of the land?  I’ve never done drugs, but I swear it was the SEO version of crack cocaine.

However, like any good junkie, I quickly built up a tolerance.  Boring old Google SERPs weren’t enough.  What about Bing?  Yahoo?  What other applications did this little tool have?  And was there a decent way to speed up the process of building out the strings?  On that last point, apparently not.  I searched in vain for some sort of online tool to help generate strings more quickly.  I was amazed to find that there was nothing really out there.

So necessity being the mother of invention, I decided to build my own.  With the invaluable assistance of my associate Bruce Gemberling, here it is.

A quick word about Bruce: he’s a fantastic developer.  With every project I’ve ever worked with him on, the guy is constantly a step or two ahead, always building out his stuff with future expansion in mind.  And he works really fast.  Given his experience with WordPress and Magento, I think this project was kind of child’s play for him.  You should totally hire him.

The future of this tool is pretty much wide open.  Again, as I say on the FAQ page, this tool is still very much in beta.  (Hey, at least we aren’t like Microsoft and charging you for the privilege of testing it.)  So we’re depending on the search community to step forward with ideas.  Are there additional features or search engines we might add?  Is something broken and need fixing?  Drop us a line and let us know what you think.