Whether you're an aspiring search-engine optimiser, digital marketing jack-of-all-trades or, a certified SEO champ, you'll know that Chrome extensions can really level up your marketing capability. However, finding these diamond in the rough extensions is the hard part.
To make your life a little easier, I've compiled a list of my all-time favourites, so you no longer need to scour the web looking for game-changing extensions. Dive into this blog and discover the SEO Chrome extensions that will launch your digital marketing capability into the stratosphere.
*Before you can appreciate the value of these extensions, you first need to understand the three factors of SEO. I’ve touched on these briefly at the bottom of the blog, but for a in-depth explanation check out this post on the basics of SEO.
Now, buckle up as I take you through the extensions that will help you nail your SEO and get you in that top organic spot consistently.
Meta SEO inspector
What it does: Basically, it’s a simplified version of Chrome's inspection tool.
It allows you to inspect the metadata from a web page when it may not be directly visible. It also highlights issues within the metadata, such as whether the meta description is too long or if elements are missing. Here we can see that NASA’s meta description is above the soft character limit of 170.
Why this is good: This tool makes page inspection easy. The simple layout makes it easy for web developers, or SEO’s to find issues within their webpage. For an SEO, it is super handy when it comes to inspecting meta titles and descriptions.
It allows us to identify what keywords the page is optimised for and whether work needs to be done on the metadata to make it just that little bit more punchy.
Keywords everywhere
What it does: This tool places text underneath the Google search bar, giving the user an indication of search volume, CPC (cost per click) and paid search competition for the term. It also places a related keywords tab to the right of the search results. The tool can also be used to analyse pages for keyword density and location.
Why this is good: The ultimate tool for SEO is engaging in keyword research projects. It's comprehensive and shouldn’t be the only tool used when engaging on these projects, but it does a great job of providing both quantitative data about the keyword and making the valuable keyword guessing game easier. This is great for keyword research as it provides important metrics and recommendations about similar keywords.
*Note: This is a paid tool, but it's totally worth it.
Lighthouse
What it does: Lighthouse is the ultimate page audit tool and is used to check the health of websites. The tool analyses everything from page performance to accessibility and best practice. The audit covers 5 different categories, using various ranking factors used by the Google Search engine.
These are:
- Performance
- Progressive web app qualities
- Accessibility for non-typical users
- SEO optimisation
- Best practices (web application wise)
Why this is good: This tool offers utility by allowing you to quickly understand how our website is performing across different devices and what changes need to be made to optimise your page. The opportunities section of the report gives you insight on how to improve the speed of the website, often through changes like image optimisation and text compression. Even if you only leverage the performance section of the report, you will get some great insights on how to improve the user experience of your website.
CSS Peeper
What it does: CSS Peeper is the ultimate tool for web designers, as it allows you to quickly identify the colours, images & font type a specific page is using. Therefore, limiting time spent digging around in the code to find CSS elements when making assets or redesigning web pages.
Why this is good: This tool plays a large part in maintaining a uniform user experience when a SEO specialist has to make changes to a website for their client. Being able to quickly identify what elements, colours and fonts that the brand uses allows the developer or SEO specialist to make changes that remain on-brand. Whether you’re making changes to webpage text, re-designing assets or optimising images, CSS peeper will allow you to make seamless changes.
Check My Links
What it does: A link checking tool that will crawl a website and look for broken links. This extension will provide a report detailing the status on all of the links on the page, which are valid and which are broken.
Why this is good: For backlinks to help your site rank more highly on the SERP, the link both needs to be quality and working. You can only receive the link juice if the link is active. With websites and consequently their pages being constantly refreshed, changed or remade, it is important to consistently check your links. This tool will allow you to find all the 404’s, redirects and other issues that are holding you back from receiving that valuable link juice. Therefore, allowing you to identify who you need to reach out too in your next link building task.
MozBar
What it does: The Moz extension is an all in one SEO tool, giving you the ability to examine link types and other metrics while viewing pages or browsing the SERP. The tool provides insights on metrics like domain and page authority and different link metrics. Page and domain authority scores are a ranking developed by Moz that can be used to determine how well a website or page will rank on the SERP. You can read more about how they are developed here.
Why this is good: The Moz bar is great for back linking jobs. It allows the SEO to analyse their various backlinks, and differentiate the links by their type. It also provides insights on SERP rankings by detailing the various domain authorities which lead to the SERP ranking. The page authority score may also highlight various pages which need some link juice loving and provide insights on how to approach your link building strategy.
Are there any SEO tools you use regularly that you think should be on this list? Feel free to let us know! We are always excited to learn about more tools that will level up our SEO ability.
SEO Factors
1. Page Text:
Google’s goal is to link users searches with relevant and quality content. For this reason, understanding what your ideal users are searching for is critical.
Once you understand what terms are the most valuable to you (completed your keyword research) you can then optimise your page for those terms.
The more optimised your page is for a user’s query, the higher your page is likely to rank on the SERP (search engine results page). Note, the placement of the keyword will affect its power in terms of convincing Google of its relevance. Generally speaking, the higher placed your keyword is on the page then the more power it has.
Meta titles & descriptions are other variables and can greatly increase the ability for your webpage to stand out over other pages on the SERP, increasing your CTR and website traffic.
2. User Experience:
Think page loading times, image size and overall user experience.
The way visitors interact with your page can impact your future ranking. Not only do you want users to click onto your site, but you want them to stay on your page, interact with and explore other pages.
If users are leaving your site after three seconds of arriving, this is a sign to Google that your website is either;
- Of low or poor quality (poor user experience) or,
- Not be relevant to what the user is searching
Regardless, both of these will negatively impact your ability to rank well.
It is important that you optimise your site to be cross-device friendly and that the user experience is seamless across all platforms - especially now with mobile first indexing.
3. Links to Site:
Link Building refers to receiving hyperlinks from external websites to your own.
Links help search engines determine how well a page should rank in their results. Typically the more high-quality websites that link to your site, the more likely you are to rank well in the SERP.
Consider each link to your page as a vote of confidence about its quality, having more votes helps you appear more credible in Google's eyes.
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