Airtable Formulas
Last updated
Last updated
Airtable formulas are a powerful tool in your pSEO arsenal. They allow you to programmatically generate content without using external plugins or AI, making it easy to fill in repeatable content quickly.
Be careful using formulas for long content. Search engines look for duplicate content across your site: a paragraph or two that only changes a few words will get picked up and may not perform well.
Formulas are ideally suited for shorter text snippets, such as titles, meta content, and slugs. They can also combine paragraphs of unique content for new pages.
For a complete list of formula actions, check out Airtable’s documentation.
While formulas can be complicated, simple functions are relatively straightforward.
Let’s look at a common use case: creating a page title.
In our example, we want to create page titles that match our head term:
Best {keyword} {category} tools for pSEO
Our categories include ‘Content Sync’, ‘Analytics’, and ‘Indexing’.
Our keywords are ‘Free’ and ‘Paid.
Click on the field settings and select ‘Edit field’.
Change the field type to ‘Formula’
Start writing the formula!
In Airtable, text is contained within quotation marks. We’ll start ours with "Best ". Note that we’ve included a space within the quotation marks—the formula won’t insert spaces for us.
Next, let’s reference our keyword. We’ll concatenate the text using an ampersand (&)—a technical way of saying ‘join together’.
After the ampersand, we’ll type in the name of the field we want to reference: in our case, we want “Free” or “Paid” from keyword.
We’ll continue writing our formula, separating chunks with ampersands.
Save and check your results.
Something isn’t quite right—we’re missing a space!
Click on the field menu again and select ‘Edit field’.
We need to insert a space surrounded by ampersands and quotation marks between keyword and category.
Click save and check again.
Our formula has taken the content from category and keyword, combined it with the template we specified, and generated our page titles.
Whenever we add a new item to this table, it automatically generates a title based on the data in those fields.
Of course, there’s a lot more you can do with formulas. If you get stuck, you can look online for a solution, ask your AI of choice, or send a message to the Findable community in Slack.
