I'd say that most SEOs love Google Chrome extensions.
But having too many extensions doesn't necessarily equate to higher productivity.
In fact, this can lead to slowing down your computer.
So with so many options, the challenge is in choosing only the ones you actually need.
Well, I've already done a lot of the hard work for you, so today, I'm going to show you
what I think are the best Chrome extensions for your everyday SEO needs.
Stay tuned.
[music]
What's up SEOs?
Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic, research
your competitors and dominate your niche.
Now, the extensions I'm about to share with you are in no particular order.
And this list is by no means complete.
Instead, I'm going to share 1-3 extensions that help with common SEO categories.
And those are link building, keyword research, on-page SEO, and technical SEO.
And of course, I'll show you how they work and share a use case or two.
So let's get started with some Chrome extensions for link building.
The first one I use is Hunter.
Hunter is an email finding tool and in I've found it to be the best one to find emails
quickly and accurately.
Just visit a page, and click on the icon in the extension bar.
You'll then see a list of associated names and email addresses that Hunter has found
somewhere on the web.
Now, let's say you were reading about YouTube SEO and you wanted to contact the author.
Just click on the Hunter icon, then enter the first and last name of the person in the search box.
Hunter will try and return a result either with scraped data or in this case, their
best guess for the person.
You can click this icon to save them in the Hunter web app
or click the email address to copy it to your clipboard.
The next extension in this category is Linkclump.
This tool lets you open, copy or bookmark multiple links at the same time.
The way I use it is when building links, specifically when vetting prospects.
So let's say you're in the Backlinks report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer and you want to visit
these three pages to see if they'll be good link prospects.
With Linkclump installed, just hold down the letter Z and then drag your cursor over the links.
Let go and it'll open the pages in a new tab
so it's just a matter of qualifying or disqualifying them from your list.
And if you don't want to open them in new tabs,
you can create new actions in the extension Options menu.
So you'll see that I've set another one here to copy the URLs when I hold down X
and drag my mouse.
So let's say we're in Google and looking for resource page link opportunities.
And when you visit this page, you'll see that the page has links to some external resources.
So I'll hold down X, and drag my mouse over the links.
Then I can take it into a tool like Ahrefs' Batch Analysis, paste them in there,
and get SEO metrics on all of these pages.
From here, I might check out the backlink profiles of these pages and see if they've
built other resource links, which I could then go after.
Finally, we have the NoFollow extension.
This extension will put a box around all links that are nofollowed on a page.
You can use this when you're looking for guest posting opportunities.
So just visit a post on a site you want to write for,
and scroll through it to see if all or most of the links are nofollowed.
If they are, it probably won't be worth your time to write for their blog if link building is your goal.
The next extension is my absolute favorite, which kind of fits into an "all-in-one" category…
P.S. I'm completely biased...
It's Ahrefs' SEO Toolbar.
Our extension allows you to see keyword, backlink, and organic traffic data right inside Google SERPs.
Just enter your query, and you'll see keyword metrics under the search bar like search volume,
CPC, Keyword Difficulty scores, and more.
On top of that, you'll see estimated search traffic and the number of backlinks at both
page and domain levels.
When you click one of the numbers, it'll open up the respective report in Ahrefs where you
can continue your analysis.
The toolbar is also visible on any page you visit and you'll see SEO metrics there too.
Now, in order to see this data, you'll need an Ahrefs account.
But we've also added some free features like a Broken Link Checker and an On-Page Analysis tool,
which you can use by clicking the icons here.
A freemium option for keyword research would be Surfer SEO's Keyword Surfer extension.
Just enter a query in Google, and you'll see global search volumes and country-specific
search volume.
And they have a couple other cool features like keyword ideas in the sidebar and domain
level data like estimated search traffic and number of backlinks.
I'm not 100% sure how or where they get their traffic and backlinks data, but it feels a bit off to me.
For example, they estimate Amazon.com's search traffic to be 46.9 million and total "quality backlinks"
to be just over 700,000.
And the numbers seem pretty low for me since we've found over 3 billion live links for Amazon's domain,
and estimate their search traffic to be 714 million, which are usually under-estimations.
But I wouldn't hold it against them, the company focuses more on on-page SEO and from what I've heard,
they do a great job.
Speaking of on-page SEO, the best standalone Chrome extension I've found for that is SEO Minion.
SEO Minion is an extension that's great for quick on-page spot-checks.
Just visit a page and click on the Minion icon in your extensions bar.
You'll then have a handful of options to choose from.
So you can do a basic on-page analysis where you'll see information like the Title, Description,
Canonical URL, and Meta Robots tags.
And below that, you'll see a breakdown of all heading, open graph, and Twitter tags.
You can also do other things like highlight all links on the page, check for broken links,
see if any Hreflang tags exist, and more.
Another cool feature is that the icon may have text written over it, like "redir".
And this means the page you visited has redirects.
You can then see all hops that took place by clicking on the icon and looking down here.
The next category is page speed and I've got two extensions for you.
The first is Lighthouse.
Lighthouse is an open source tool made by Google.
It's purpose is to help improve the performance, quality, and correctness of your web apps.
Just visit a webpage and hit the Lighthouse icon.
Then click Generate report.
It'll run some tests and once it's done loading, a report will pop-up showing scores for various
categories like Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, SEO, and PWA.
And below, you'll see suggestions on what you should do to improve your page for each category.
Now, if this report looks familiar to you it's because they use a similar report in PageSpeed Insights.
Now, if you want to see the actual time it takes for a page to load, there's a neat little extension
called Page Load Time.
Just visit a page, and it'll show you in the extensions bar how long it took for the page to load.
And if you click the icon, you'll see a breakdown of where that time was spent.
The next extension is called Window Resizer, which is a great tool to test mobile friendliness.
Window resizer allows you to resize the browser's window to specific resolutions in two clicks.
For example, if you want to test the mobile design and experience for a page on an iPhone 6,
just click the icon in the extensions bar and choose the iPhone 6 resolution.
Want to see it on an iPad?
Just do the same thing, but this time, choose iPad.
These are the Chrome Extensions I use regularly in my SEO processes.
But I know there are a lot of other great extensions out there.
So let me know in the comments which Google Chrome Extensions you think are must-haves for SEOs.
And if you enjoyed this video, make sure to like, share and subscribe for more actionable
SEO and marketing tutorials.
I'll see you in the next one.