Best Chrome extensions for SEO: Analyze any website easily

Getting your website to the top of Google search rankings is hard, but these SEO extensions for Chrome and Edge will make the task easier. Analyse your website or competitor’s sites easily.

There are many SEO extensions for Chrome and not all of them are covered here, there are just too many. Here I look at extensions that analyze the SEO of a web page. There are other extensions that help find keywords, but that will be covered in a different article. This is about analyzing content.

When searching for good Chrome extensions, look at the last updated dates and make sure they are fairly recent, such as in the last couple of years. New or recently updated extensions are more likely to work and produce better results than old extensions.

This is because SEO extensions often rely on getting data from online services and when these services change or even shut down, that feature in the extension no longer works.

There isn’t a single extension that is perfect and that does everything you need, but you can install several and use the best features with each one. In fact, I would not want to be without the first couple. They are essential for analyzing websites and web pages.

What are SEO extensions for?

1 Analyse your site and find faults

These extensions are good for analyzing the pages on your site – home page and posts. Use them to find problems like missing image alt tags, missing meta descriptions and so on. Missing information like this will negatively affect your search engine ranking. fix the flaws and your website will perform better in search results.

Besides highlighting problems, these extensions show ranking, such as Alexa. The lower your Alexa number, the more popular your website is. You will never get to number 1 because the ranking includes sites like Google and Facebook, which have billions of users.

Figures like Alexa ranking, DA and others are not perfect and are not used by Google, but they are still useful when comparing your own site to competitors’ sites. There is value in having a low Alexa figure or high DA and it helps when getting guest posts, sponsored posts and affiliates.

2 Analyze competitor websites

You can learn a lot by analysing other websites in your niche. They might be doing something that you are not, they may have more visitors, they could have better meta tags, more internal links, and so on. Analyse sites whenever you can to see what you can learn, then apply that knowledge to your own site.

You can even tell where other sites get their traffic from, such as search or social media. This can give you clues that show how you might increase your own website traffic. Analyse competitors and use that information to improve your own website.

DA, SEMrush rank, Alexa rank and others are not perfect tools and they are not 100% accurate, but they are useful. Sites with good ranking almost always appear higher in Google search results. However, these figures do not tell you whether a site is making a lot of money, which is often the most important thing.

Let’s take a look at the best SEO extensions.

Open SEO Stats

Open SEO Stats extension for Chrome
Open SEO Stats Chrome extension analyzing a website

Open SEO Stats is a one of the best SEO extensions and is a favorite of mine that is always enabled and ready to be used. Visit a website and click the toolbar button to open a panel that displays a wide range of information on tabs that run down the left edge.

On the SEO Stats tab you can see the number of pages indexed by various search engines. On the right, the most interesting thing is the number of backlinks.

The Traffic Stats tab shows charts for Alexa traffic over six months and you can see the growth or decline of ranking, which roughly equates to visitors. A lower Alexa rank means more visitors.

The Site Info tab shows whether robots.txt and sitemap.xml are present. Security indicators from WOT (Web of Trust), McAfee and Norton show whether the site is safe.

Page Info shows meta information for the page, usage of titles, and other statistics. It shows the number of internal an external links and the URLs and link text. You can see exactly who a site links to.

Open SEO Stats is a a great SEO extension for analyzing your own website and competitors. The Tools section provides useful shortcuts to various tools like Google Trends, Google and Bing webmaster tools and so on. The only downside is that it requires payment. I installed it back when it was free and it continues to be free for me.

SEOquake

SEOquake Chrome extension for analyzing websites
SEOquake Chrome extension analyzing a website

SEOquake is another excellent Chrome extension and it gathers and presents a lot of valuable information about a website and the web page you are viewing across 10 tabs and a toolbar.

It can overlay an information bar across the top of the page and you can choose what information is displayed there. It is useful when you are analyzing pages, but annoying when you are browsing the web for fun. It can be turned on and off easily though.

Clicking the toolbar button opens a panel with many tabs for showing various statistics. There are five tabs and Parameters shows the Alexa rank, Google index, Bing index, and SEMrush rankings. I found it did not always show information and Alexa said n/a. However, clicking it opened the Alexa site with detailed analysis.

The Traffic Analytics tab is interesting and it shows the number of visitors the site gets, the number of pages viewed by a visitor, time spent on the page and bounce rate. Traffic sources shows where people come from, such as direct, referral, search and social.

The figures may not be absolutely perfect and are estimates at best, but they are close judging by a couple of sites I know, so this information is very useful when analyzing competitor websites.

Buttons across the top open a new browser tab to display information like meta information, keywords and keyword density, internal and external links, and much more. They are useful for checking your own site and for analyzing competitor’s sites.

SEO META in 1 CLICK

SEO META in 1 CLICK Chrome extension for analyzing web page SEO
SEO META in 1 CLICK extension for Chrome

The SEO META in 1 CLICK Chrome extension analyses the current web page and displays information on five tabs. The Summary tab shows the page title, meta description, meta keywords, author, publisher and a few other things. The Headers tab lists the headers, starting with h1 tags and working down.

The Images tab shows the number of images and highlights those without an alt or title information. This is useful for checking that your own pages have the necessary tags. It is easy to miss them.

Links shows the total links and internal links, and the number of links without a title tag. Use it to check your own pages for missing SEO information and make a note to edit the page to fix it. The Social tab shows the Facebook OpenGraph information and Twitter info.

This tool could be used on other sites, but it most useful for checking that your own pages have the right information for SEO.

Web Rank SEO

WebRank SEO extension for Google Chrome
WebRank SEO extension for Chrome

WebRank SEO provides similar information to other SEO extensions and clicking the icon in the toolbar opens a window containing useful information.

It displays the Alexa ranking at the top and below it shows how the ranking has changed over the last year in an easy-to-read chart. You can see the ups and downs over time and it roughly equates to visitor numbers and site popularity. It shows the number of pages indexed at Bing and Google, but I did not find this to be accurate. Website security indicators from WOT, SiteAdvisor and Norton show whether it is safe.

Buttons across the top open a new browser tab to show SEO analysis, Whois lookup, and a site comparison tool.

This is an OK tool, but there is some missing information and there are better extensions like SEOquake and Open SEO Stats.

MozBar

MozBar SEO extension for Google Chrome
MozBar SEO extension for Chrome

MozBar is often listed as an essential SEO extension, but the information it provides is really quite basic, but it is useful for checking your own site and for seeing what other sites hide in the code of their pages.

It displays a bar at the top of the page and this shows the domain authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA). Clicking a button opens a tabbed panel at the top of the web page that can be used to show a variety of information. For example, you can see the page title, meta description and keywords. The h1 and h2 tags are displayed, text in bold and italics is listed, and there is a list of all the alt descriptions.

The page load time is shown, and whether there is a meta robots information. There are a few other bits of stats, and the promise of more if you pay for a premium account. It is OK, but I like the alternatives better.

Meta SEO Inspector

Meta SEO Inspector extension for Chrome

META SEO inspector is a simple tool that displays information contained in the header of a web page and a few other interesting and useful items too. For example, it shows the page title, meta description and meta keywords tags, site verification codes, author and so on.

It shows the OpenGraph information used in social shares. There is a section showing markup and use of headers to structure the page. There is a list of internal and external links, the URLs and link text.

The most useful feature is the warnings when things are not right for SEO purposes. For example, if the page title is too long or if there are images without alt tag descriptions or titles.

There is a tab that provides links to various online tools and these are useful. The extension is OK for analyzing your site, but SEO META in 1 Click is similar and you may prefer it.

SEO Minion

SEO Minion extension for Chrome

Click the SEO Minion icon in the Chrome toolbar and a panel opens on the right of the page. Analyze On-Page SEO shows all the meta tags Open Graph tags, Twitter tags and so on. It also shows the structure, with h1, h2, h3 tags, and the number of words and characters.

Links on a web oage are usually obvious, but Highlight all links is still useful because it highlights in green where links are, so you can see the location more easily and they can be filtered, so you can highlight just internal, external, nofollow and on. Broken links can be listed, but would you really want to analyze just one page? A tool that checks the whole site for broken links would be better.

I could not see the value in the SERP tools. Maybe if you enable the extension in incognito mode it would be useful. The other tools are useful though and there are some useful features in this free extension.


Course: Get more visitors with on-page SEO

  1. How to improve SEO by optimizing images
  2. How to write great titles that enhance SEO
  3. How to format the text for better SEO
  4. How good content boosts SEO
  5. How to create SEO friendly URLs
  6. How other factors affect the SEO
  7. How to boost SEO with meta information
  8. Best free SEO extensions for Chrome

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