Remove geographic modifiers from keyword list

[dsinger]

I just pulled a search term report for all of 2013 from my PPC account.  What I got was 673,000 rows of terms that have garnered at least 1 impression in 2013.  This is exactly what I was looking for.

My issue is that the vast majority of terms are geo-modified to include the city, the city and state or the zip code.  I am trying to remove the geographic information to get to a list of root words people are interested in based on their search query patterns.

Does anyone know how to remove all city, state and zip codes quickly without having to do a find and replace for each geo-modifier in excel?

for example, if i could get a list of all city and state combinations in the US and a list of all zip codes, and put that list on a separate tab and then have a macro find and remove from the original tab any instances of anything from the second tab, that would probably do the trick.  Then I could remove duplicates and have my list of root words.

[Travis_Bailey]

This is going to be something of a hack, but likely a time saver. Apply conditional formatting based upon a partial match, likely city state zip. Enter chosen city state zip into column B. The link should walk you through the specifics.

Next, show only conditional formatted cells. I'm pretty sure you can do this with a filter. I haven't used Excel in a while. I like Sheets now.

Select all formatted cells, which should just be a shift+down input. Once you've copied and pasted it into another workbook, you can do a find and replace (with nothing) for the city state and zip. If it works like I remember, you should have your root keywords.

[dsinger]

I believe this will only solve half of my problem.  I would still have to do a find and replace (with nothing) one by one.  The only difference is that my working list would be smaller.  Right?

What I need is a way to do a bulk find and replace for partial matches.  So, if my working list of exported search queries is in column A and my list of city and state and zip code combinations are in column C, I need some function that will take the full list of column C and find those as partial matches in column A.  If found, it should remove that part of the query.

for example, if I have the query "hamburgers phoenix az" in column A and in column C i have "detroit michigan", "phoenix az", "des moines ia", because "phoenix az" is an option from column C and partial matches the query in column A, the net result should be "hamburgers"

Hope this makes sense

[Travis_Bailey]

If you filter and show only cells that have been formatted a particular way, say red, all you should have to do is copy and paste the results into a new column. Then you should be able to find and replace the city state with nothing once. That should yield your root keyword list.

Just make a copy and delete the other columns if they're presenting an issue.