Entity Analysis with Google Cloud Natural Language API (No-Code Template)

This Google Sheets template leverages Google Cloud Natural Language API and Google Apps Script for entity analysis directly within your spreadsheets. It’s designed to channel the API to identify entities such as names, locations, organisations, and more from textual data, simplifying the process of extracting meaningful insights from large datasets without complex programming. For each entity, you also get data on the entity type, sentiment, and other entries, per the API response.

If you can paste text and copy an API key, you can run entity extraction on anything from titles to articles and customer feedback.

What you get

For every entity the API finds, the Entity Sentiment Data tab returns the entity name, its type (person, organisation, location, event, consumer good and more), its salience score, its sentiment score and sentiment magnitude, the number of mentions, the mention variations, and metadata such as a Wikipedia link when one is available.

How to use it

1. Set up a Google Cloud project, enable the Cloud Natural Language API and turn on billing.
2. Create an API key under APIs & Services > Credentials.
3. Make a copy of the template, open Extensions > Apps Script, and paste your key into the entityextraction.gs file in place of enterAPIkey (line 3). Save.
4. Paste an identifier (such as the URL) and the text into the Working sheet. Keep the column names as they are.
5. Run Sentiment Tools > Mark Entities and Sentiment from the menu, and approve the script permissions the first time. Each row is marked complete when it’s done.
6. Review the results in the Entity Sentiment Data tab, filtering out low-salience or irrelevant entities.

Use it for:

• Content Analysis: Quickly understand articles or posts by identifying key entities.
• Academic Research: Efficiently extract and categorise entities from research material or publications.
• Market Analysis: Identify brand mentions and key players in market research data.
• Customer Feedback Analysis: Extract product names, locations, and other relevant entities from customer reviews or feedback.

Costs and limits

The template returns per-entity sentiment, which Google bills as entity sentiment analysis: the first 5,000 units a month are free, then it costs $2.00 per 1,000 units, where a unit is up to 1,000 characters of text. Plain entity analysis is half that. Run a small batch first to gauge the cost. Very long texts work better in Python, and entity sentiment supports fewer languages than entity analysis, so check Google’s language support page for non-English content.

API keys are the simplest and least secure way to authenticate, so restrict yours to the Natural Language API and don’t share a copy of the sheet with the key inside. Keep the script on the v1 API: v2 has no entity sentiment method and doesn’t return salience.

This template simplifies entity analysis, making it accessible for users ranging from marketing professionals to academic researchers, enabling them to focus more on deriving insights and less on the complexities of data processing.

Learn it on MLforSEO

Follow the step-by-step tutorial on entity extraction with Google’s Natural Language API in Google Sheets, then learn to use the output for content analysis, review analysis and internal linking in Introduction to Machine Learning for SEO, and for query analysis in Semantic AI-powered SEO Keyword Research.