Complete Guide to Regex for SEO
Keyword clusters, grouping web pages and examining their performance, or searching for a pattern to figure out content opportunities is sometimes time consuming tasks but using REGEX is like a super-power to discover everything in SEO.
Regular expressions (Regex) are used to detect patterns in sequences of characters in strings. We can easily match any results thanks to Regex:
- Regex allows you to get results on large datasets.
- Allows you to set up a reliable code structure.
- Bulk changes can be made within big data sets.
What Are the Meanings of the Characters Used in Regex Codes?
| Regex | Example | What It Does |
|---|---|---|
| ^ (starts with) | ^seo | Any string that starts with “seo” |
| $ (ends with) | seo$ | Any string that ends with “seo” |
| . (any character) | se. | Matches either “seo” and “sem” |
| | (either/or) | seo|aso | Matches either “seo” or “aso” |
| {} | seo{3} | Matches the “seo” keywords exactly three times |
| + (one or more repetitions) | seo+ | Matches strings that start with “se”, followed by 1 or more occurrences of “o” |
| * (zero or more repetitions) | seo* | Matches xy, xyz, xyzz, etc. |
| () (group) | (word) | Matches all words starting with “word” |
| [] | [a-zA-Z] | Matches any lower and uppercase characters |
| ? (optional character) | go+gle | Matches “google” or “gogle” |
Useful Regex Patterns in Google Search Console
One of the most needed tools for Regex is Google Search Console. As you know, a website gets ranking and traffic in hundreds of thousands or even millions of different queries; Naturally, processing the keyword data here requires a lot of attention and analysis.
At this point, we have compiled many useful regex operators that can benefit you for analysis:
- Get informational intent queries: who|what|when|where|how|why
- Get transactional intent queries: .*(buy|cheap|price|purchase|order).*
- Get brand queries with misspellings: go+gle
- Get all queries including specific terms: .*seo.*
- Get queries including 2 terms with some other text between them: seo.+agency
- Get all queries about after-purchase: ^(clean|broken|shattered|polish|replace|problem|treat|doesn’t work|repair|manual|fix)[” “]
Useful Regex Patterns in Google Analytics 4
Regex is also a very useful tool in Google Analytics 4; so we’ve compiled the regex operators you might need here as well:
- Filter homepage traffic: ^/$
- Filter non-HTML traffic: .$(/.docx|/.pdf|/.doc)
- Get brand queries with misspellings: go+gle
