The Chrome browser has become the most widely accepted desktop browser with the best user experience in the world. According to a recent market survey, Google's chrome browser's market share has exceeded 70%.
Google's central role in digital software and hardware has fueled this growth, but users also love browser customization.
In fact, it's incredibly customizable. There are thousands of extensions available, and finding a few that will help you with your daily routine is a very time-consuming endeavor. In one store you can find Nicholas Page (an extension to any page that will be Nicholas Cage themed) various income tax calculators.
In between these two extremes, there are hundreds of SEO-themed extensions that are far more useful than some others.
Using some SEO Chrome extensions can be a bit of a learning curve, but once you get used to it, they will save you a lot of time in the long run.
So, in this list, we've narrowed down 15 extensions that will make you more effective in the core area of SEO.
A Chrome extension for quick website reviews
SimilarWeb The
SimilarWeb extension is a great place to start a quick site analysis. It provides a broader view of the site, not just SEO, while taking into account all traffic sources. The extension works by analyzing clickstream data from thousands of Internet Service Providers, SimilarWeb's own web crawlers and their customers' data.
As a result of these calculations, you can get reasonably reliable statistics on your brand's audience, how much they spend on paid media, and which countries the traffic comes from.
All of these factors affect SEO, which, of course, provides valuable insights when analyzing a brand's digital presence. The Chrome extension is free, but paid accounts have access to a more complete dataset.
MozBar
We don't really have a list of SEO Chrome extensions that don't include MozBar. As an all-in-one tool for a quick SEO website overview, MozBar remains the best on the market. Once a user is logged into their Moz Community account (signup is free, for those who don't have an account yet), MozBar will act on the website and search engine results pages.
It contains an extensive list of analytics covering SEO techniques, online content, social media engagement and backlinks. However, MozBar can make your website load a little slower, so it should only be enabled if you need to evaluate your website's SEO metrics.
Impactana
Impactana is a content marketing toolbar that provides the social media analytics you've come to expect, showing the share of each web page from Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and more.
What sets it apart from the competition is the use of proprietary metrics to calculate the "Impact" and "Buzz" of each content. These metrics contain user engagement signals to assess whether content has been shared and users have been interacted with. Therefore, this is a good starting point when analyzing the effectiveness of your competitors’ content marketing campaigns.
Chrome Extensions for SEO Techniques
User-Agent Switcher
In this mobile-first era, we need to make sure we optimize for a variety of screen sizes and device types. It's quite difficult to switch from desktop to mobile unless you have a user agent switcher to download.
This extension will give you options to view web pages as they will be displayed on various devices and operating systems. This is an important extension for developers, but very useful for those doing SEO analysis.
Scraper
Many times we need to extract telemarketing list elements from a series of individual pages or websites for large-scale analysis. There are a few different ways to do this, such as using IMPORTXML code to pull structured data from a website out of Google Sheets or Excel.
The Chrome extension Scraper speeds up this process, using the XPath query language to export HTML data elements from pages, and similar data from entire websites.
It takes a little getting used to, but here's a handy step-by-step guide. Once you get used to Scraper's features, it will save a lot of time in any SEO technical audit.
META SEO Inspector
If we want to understand how search engines crawl and index our site (presumably we all do), we need to get hold of metadata. META SEO Inspector goes beyond the narrowness of "meta" tags defined in HTML source code based on SEO metadata.
The extension also facilitates analysis of XFN tags, canonical tags and various microformats. It is also updated frequently to keep up to date with any revisions or additions to Google's Best Practice Guidelines.