As SEO specialists, we’re always striving to optimize our workflow and deliver better results. Therefore, a time-saving toolkit is indispensable.
In this post, we’ll share 8 of the best free SEO plugins for Google Chrome. We’ll take a look at some essential tools that are perfect for:
- Keyword research
- Rank monitoring
- Technical SEO
Let’s begin!
Keyword Research
Keywords aren’t the end-all-be-all of SEO. But they’re still fundamental. By using the right keywords across your website, you indicate to users that your content will be of interest to them. Plus, keywords also help search engines recognize and categorize your content.
If you’re interested in using a Chrome extension for keyword research, try:
- Keyword Surfer
- SEOStack Keyword Tool
Keyword Surfer
With Keyword Surfer, you can visualize keyword metrics without leaving the Google SERPs. It runs keyword research and gives you content guidelines, as well as providing:
- Search volume data on a local and global scale
- Keyword suggestions
- Visibility metrics
- On-page SEO data
- Domain-level traffic estimations
- Backlink count at a domain-level
Keyword Surfer also shows charts for the top organic search results, including:
- The amount of monthly traffic each website receives
- The word count of each result
- How many times a keyword is used on that page
Additionally, the plugin also comes with an NLP-based content editor that can guide you through the process of creating optimized content.
All in all, it’s an analysis tool for keywords and SERPs that uncovers a great amount of data for free. It also lets you research, write and optimize your content directly from Google Search.
SEOStack Keyword Tool
SEOStack Keyword Tool collects keyword data from a variety of sources, so you can analyze them and choose the keywords that are most valuable to your target audience.
You can get up to 1,000 keyword suggestions and ideas from one seed keyword, through Google Keyword Planner. Plus, you can also analyze keyword competitiveness by fetching SEO metrics from Google itself. SEOStack is ideal for finding long-tail keywords and untapped opportunities.
Moreover, you can track site ranking for lists of keywords and identify the top competitors for each. This feature uses metrics such as page rank, shares on social media, and backlink count. Once your research is done, you can export all your data into a CSV file.
Rethinking your SEO stack? Discover our selection of the 14 best tools for freelance SEO specialists.
Rank Monitoring
Keeping an eye on your SERP rankings is crucial.
Getting a higher average position is probably one of your SEO goals. And it makes sense. According to SmartInsights, the highest-ranking organic results have an average CTR of 39% on mobile and 35% on desktop.
But, did you know that you can use SEO Chrome extensions to monitor your positioning?
Curious? We recommend you check out:
- SEO Search simulator by Nightwatch
- SERPTrends SEO Extension
SEO Search Simulator by Nightwatch
With Nightwatch’s SEO Search Simulator you can emulate search engine queries from anywhere in the world, in any language, without a VPN. In addition, you can check and track your own or your competitors’ sites.
It’s quite useful to learn how a site’s performance changes depending on the location, and adjust your strategy whenever necessary. This plugin is an absolute must if you’re doing SEO on an international scale.
SERPTrends SEO Extension
The SERPTrends SEO Extension lets you track your Google searches and see how rankings changed over time, without leaving the SERPs.
This plugin shows you whether your site has remained in the same position if it has moved up or down, and through how many slots it moved. It also shows you which sites are new, by visually tagging them.
It’s fair to mention that on your first day of using this tool, you will see that all positions appear as “new”. Don’t worry, you’ll begin to see the changes one day after.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO analyzes all the technical elements of your site that could positively or negatively affect your SEO strategy, such as HTTP header responses, redirects, page elements, XML Sitemaps, and more. By implementing technical SEO best practices, you make your site easier to crawl, index, and therefore, rank.
Technical SEO can be daunting if it’s not approached with the proper tools.
In this section, we dive into four technical SEO Chrome plugins that will simplify your technical SEO efforts:
- Google Lighthouse
- View Rendered Source
- Mozbar
- SEORadar
Google Lighthouse
Google Lighthouse quickly audits your website and offers insights and suggestions to optimize:
- Performance
- Accessibility
- Compliance with coding best practices
- SEO
Google Lighthouse scans your site and assigns you a rating of 1-100 across those four dimensions. It will also let you know whether your website is a progressive web app (which is a plus).
This tool tests your website’s performance on both desktop and mobile, by simulating a 3G connection.
Lighthouse’s auditing criteria are based on Google’s core web vitals. Hence, with Lighthouse you can see your site as Google does. Yet, since Google tends to modify its ranking criteria, it’s important to stay up-to-date on Lighthouse updates.
In short, Lighthouse is a free, automated tool designed to improve website quality. Plus, it’s not just for developers, this tool can also be useful for anyone who wants to improve their site’s performance and wants to know how to do it.
Google Lighthouse is available as a Chrome extension, but it also comes with the web browser. You can find it among the developer tools.
View Rendered Source
With View Rendered Source you can view how a site’s original HTML was rendered into a working browser, highlighting your JavaScript elements. It provides a comparison between the raw code and its rendered version, outlining the differences and letting you know how JavaScript modified the site during rendering.
This plugin can be quite handy both for SEOs and web developers. Why? Well, for starters, it can help you get a better understanding of how Google interprets your site. Secondly, it’s great for web developers working with JavaScript frameworks such as Angular, React, and Vue.js, since it helps navigate the SEO uncertainties of dynamic rendering.
MozBar
The Mozbar helps you get key SEO insights on the go. This useful SEO Chrome extension shows you:
- Pages’ link metrics, directly on the SERPs
- Domain and page authority
- How many backlinks a page has
Moreover, you can inspect on-page elements, and view search results from various search engines and locations across the globe. What’s more, you can view what kinds of links are on a page, as well as visualize its meta tags.
The Mozbar Chrome extension is free. But there’s also a premium version. With it, you can get unlimited page optimization reports and have access to some extra features. For instance, with the premium Mozbar, you can see more detailed metrics, such as keyword difficulty scores.
SEORadar
A slight change in your code could significantly alter your SERP positioning. It may be as simple as:
- A mislabelled link
- A “noindex” metatag, added to the wrong page
- The removal of an important keyword
Oftentimes, these destructive mistakes appear as single lines of code, impossible to find within large codebases. Of course, you could manually go through your codebase. However, this would be time-consuming and highly fallible.
SEORadar is ideal to track code changes around the clock and alert you if any of them could affect your SEO efforts. How does it work? When crawling your site for the first time, SEORadar will take a “snapshot” of your code. This will be kept as a reference, used to monitor and automatically find potentially harmful changes.
With the SEORadar Chrome extension, you can compare a staging site and its live/production versions in the safest way possible. Your browser will fetch the test pages and forward them for comparison, no need to grant SEORadar access to your staging server.
SEO Plugins for Google Chrome: Key Takeaways
In this post, we shared 8 free SEO Chrome extensions that can make your workflow more dynamic. We covered:
- Keyword Surfer
- SEOStack Keyword Tool
- SEO Search Simulator
- SERPTrends
- Google Lighthouse
- View Render Source
- Mozbar
- SEORadar
Interested in how SEORadar can bring scalability to your technical SEO strategy? Learn more about SEORadar’s testing on staging capabilities, schedule a demo, or start a free trial today.
