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I Believe In Miracles: Part 1
Characters: Cas x Reader, Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester, and the occasional Aztec God.
Word Count: 3,204
Warnings: There’s partial nudity, cursing, a lot of sass, and Cas not being amused with either brother about 100% of the time. In fact, Cas is 125% done with both of them for this entire fic. Just imagine his face is in a constant state of eye roll and frowns. Oh, and walking tacos. And a brief mention of hallucinogens, that may or may not have been consumed by someone in this fic. Listen, this thing goes a lot of places, so fair warning. I can’t promise anything.
A/N: This fic was written for @winchesterprincessbride‘s reverse gif challenge, and my gif will be placed below. Because this entire thing is just Cas being unamused, I will probably use different gifs for the next two parts, but the first part will be the actual challenge gif. It was supposed to be a short, Cas is angry one shot and it turned into a 3 part crack fic that I am most proud of and I have absolutely no regrets. As always, it was beta’d by my wonderful loves @trexrambling and @pinknerdpanda, and you should thank them because without them thoughts wouldn’t connect as well, my commas would be all over the place, and in general it just wouldn’t be the piece that it is right now. I love you, my dear sweet trex and panda bear. As always, tags are at the bottom. If you find that you are missing or you would like to be added, please send me a message or an ask! Feedback is always welcome.
Right Freakin’ Now
In a hotel somewhere in Nebraska
Cas stood silently, his hands dangling at his sides as he looked over the clothing spread across the bed with narrowed eyes. Sam and Dean stood to the side, both brothers leaning against the dresser as they tried to keep straight faces while watching Cas’s obvious discomfort at the task at hand.
“I cannot make this decision. These are not good options, Dean.”
“Cas, buddy, I know it’s not ideal, but you’ve gotta do it. Me and Sam...we’re too recognizable, we’ll never be able make it in without getting caught. It’s gotta be you, man.”
Cas glared at Dean, “Not ideal? I am an Angel of the Lord. If my Father saw me doing this…”
“But he won’t, Cas. God’s not around, and he certainly won’t be in a place like that.”
Cas’s glare shifted from Dean to Sam, “Oh, I am sorry, I forgot that the Almighty cannot see through walls. Sam, what do you think being the God of all entails, exactly?” Sam huffed but remained quiet, and Dean choked back a snort as he watched Cas’s attention turn back to the clothing. “I cannot choose. All of these are inappropriate.”
Dean walked over and clapped Cas on the shoulder, earning him a severe side eye from the angel, “That’s kinda the point of this, Cas. Here…” Dean’s eyes skimmed over the outfits, and he grinned when his eyes landed on what he’d been looking for. He grabbed the somewhat flimsy fabric and held it out to Cas, “What about this? It’s not as...revealing.”
Cas looked at the garment Dean was holding up and frowned, “Can I wear something underneath? I believe the original purpose of this outfit used more accessories.”
Dean shook his head, “Where you’re going, you ain’t gonna need more accessories.”
Instead of glaring, Cas looked at Dean with almost pleading eyes, “Must I really do this? Is there really no other way to accomplish our task? I am an angel, after all, I could just go in and come right back out.”
Sam was the one to shake his head this time, “No, Cas. There are too many moving parts. This isn’t just a rescue mission, we have to actually stop the thing too.”
“Listen, Cas, if we had any other options, we wouldn’t have you do it. But we have to kill a god and we have to get Y/N back, and this is what we’re left with. I promise that we will take care of it before you actually have to do anything. So for Y/N, huh?” Dean gently shook the clothing at Cas, his eyebrows raised.
Cas sighed as he grabbed the offending garment from Dean, “Fine. I will do it, but both of you will keep your comments to yourselves. I fully expect you to resolve this before I have to make a fool out of myself.”
Dean made an X over his heart and looked at Cas solemnly, “Cross my heart, buddy. You won’t have to do a thing other than find Y/N and get her out of there.”
Unfortunately for Cas, he missed the look Sam and Dean shared behind his back as the brothers ushered him out of the room and towards the hotel’s parking lot.
Three days earlier…
Sam, Dean, and Cas were all sitting around the worn table in the hotel room, their eyes trained on Y/N as she explained her plan. She looked quite pleased with herself, although the three men looked less than excited.
“So, what do you think?”
Dean looked at Sam, then glanced over to find Cas looking straight ahead, his lips pursed and eyebrows furrowed, “Well, umm...it’s a plan. Definitely...yea. Definitely a plan.’”
Sam cleared his throat, “Just...are we even sure that it’s Xochipilli? Why would an Aztec god be in Nebraska?”
Y/N put a hand on one of her hips and frowned, “Why are half the things we hunt where they are? Does it matter why he’s here? Nope. What matters is that people keep disappearing in that new corn maze and showing up with missing organs, strung up like scarecrows. And you know who loves corn? Xochipilli loves corn.”
“Maize,” Cas’s deep voice startled all three of them.
Y/N raised an eyebrow, “What?”
Cas shifted his gaze to Y/N, “He’s actually associated with Cinteotl, who is the god of maize. Xochipilli is responsible for agricultural produce, technically.”
Sam nodded, “Which brings up another important question: Why is the god of agricultural produce in a strip club?”
Y/N spun her laptop around and jabbed a finger at it for emphasis, “He’s also the god of beauty, dance, and song, among other things. And what does stripping involve? Dance and song.”
“Xochipilli is a busy man,” Dean chuckled and elbowed Sam, which earned him one of Sam’s patented eye rolls. “Anyway, I don’t see where that means you need to go undercover. Why can’t we just go in after hours and gank the son of a bitch? Business as usual.”
Y/N clicked another tab on the web browser and pointed at the picture, “Because he wears a talisman, an oyohualli. So we have to find the person wearing it and then destroy the pendant. That should take care of it. I’m assuming he’ll be in male form, but I couldn’t find a ton of lore about him. Thus the need for undercover.”
Dean laughed, “I think Y/N just wants to get up on that pole.” He waggled his eyebrows and Y/N smacked him on the shoulder. Sam didn’t miss the especially pointed glare that Cas sent Dean’s way, despite staying quiet.
“Okay,” Sam said louder than necessary, “the plan is for Y/N to go to the club and pose as a stripper looking for a job, and then what? Just wander around looking for someone wearing a corn pendant-”
“Maize,” Cas interrupted, his gaze still on Y/N.
Sam rolled his eyes, “Maize pendant. And then-”
“The pendant doesn’t look like maize. It’s a tear drop made out of mother of pearl. Why would it look like maize?” Y/N interrupted Sam this time, and he dropped his head in his hands.
“Fine. We find the tear drop pendant and then what? How are we supposed to get it? We’re talking about a god. I know we’ve killed them before, but it's not like it's a walk in the park. Do we know if destroying that pendant will kill him?”
Y/N winked, “Don't worry, I’ll find a way. I don't know for sure, but if we can sever his ties to it, then...well, the rest should be cake.” She grabbed a bag, which up until that point the guys had not seen, and skipped to the bathroom.
Sam turned his attention to Cas, “What was that?”
Cas’s eyes narrowed, “What was what?”
Sam nodded his head towards the bathroom, “That face you made when Dean mentioned Y/N pole dancing. If looks could kill, man.”
Cas tilted his head in confusion, “I do not know what you mean. I simply looked at him.”
Sam leaned towards Cas and lowered his voice, “Nope, that wasn’t just a glance in his general direction. You glared at him.” Cas’s eyes dropped to where his hands were nervously straightening his tie, but he remained quiet. “Are you....are you jealous?”
Cas looked sharply at Sam, his brows furrowed, “Sam, I am an angel, I do not feel jealousy. Even if I did exhibit such a human emotion, I have no reason to be jealous of Dean. The suggestion is ridiculous-”
“Holy hell!” Dean’s exclamation interrupted them, and Sam’s mouth dropped open as he looked towards the disruption. Y/N had come out of the bathroom wearing something that could barely classify as clothing. She was wearing a black, skin tight, low-cut crop top and a pair of jean shorts that were barely clinging to the idea of being considered shorts. She’d topped off the ensemble with black heels that were at least six inches tall and had taken the time to straighten her hair and put makeup on. Y/N was beautiful even during the filthiest hunts, but none of them were prepared for the sight standing in front of them.
“What do you think? Convincing enough?” Sam and Dean both just nodded.
Cas, looking perplexed, asked the question that all three were thinking, “How does dressing provocatively prove that you can dance? I don't understand the correlation.”
Y/N focused her gaze on Cas and smiled, “You don’t think I can dance?” Sam’s eyes widened as he realized what she was about to do.
“I do not know what kind of education you’ve received, Y/N, only that it seemed you were implying that your outfit alone proved your ability to provoke arousal through dance.” Y/N began to walk slowly towards Cas, her eyes trained on him as she stopped just short of where he was sitting.
“So are you saying that my outfit isn’t convincing?” She shoved his knees apart and slipped between them as she grabbed his tie and forced him to look up at her.
“I...I did not say that. ...What are you doing?”
Y/N bent down so that she was leaning over him, her cleavage practically in his face, “Well, I want to make sure I can get the job done, I don’t want to go in there all half-cocked and blow it.” Y/N winked slyly at Sam, then dropped suddenly so that she was sitting in Cas’s lap. “I watched some YouTube videos, it didn’t seem that hard.” She slowly kicked her leg up and over his head so that she was straddling his hips when it came back down, and her arms were looped loosely around his neck.
“I’m not so sure she learned those moves from YouTube, Sammy,” Dean practically croaked.
Y/N gave Dean a wicked grin over Cas’s shoulder then leaned forward, her lips barely ghosting over the shell of Cas’s ear, “What do you think now, Angel of the Lord?” She stood suddenly and walked towards the door, “You boys comin’ or not?” She walked outside, and both Sam and Dean turned their attention to Cas.
“I think someone might be,” Dean whispered loudly to Sam, who had to bite his lip to keep from laughing. Sam and Dean stood to leave, and Dean looked back over his shoulder at the still sitting angel, “You coming, Cas?”
Cas gave an almost imperceptible head shake, “No, I...uh... “ His normally deep voice had dropped even lower, and Dean had to take a step toward Cas to even hear him, “I will be a moment. I will..uhm...I will be there shortly.” Dean chuckled but retreated without saying anything else, closing the door behind him.
Sam, Dean, and Cas stood next to the Impala outside of Poppin’ Pacoani as they waited for Y/N to let them know if she’d gotten the job or not. Cas stared at the “Now Hiring” sign with a frown, his eyebrows knitted more tightly together than usual.
“Cas, come on, we’ve gotta go inside. Y/N texted me, she said they hired her on the spot.” Sam shoved his phone in his pocket and walked quickly to the entrance, quickly followed by a muttering Dean.
“Of course they hired her on the spot, she probably just had to look at them and wink. Sweet Jesus…”
Cas frowned, “I do not think we should allow her to do this. She should not have to take her clothes off to find the information we are looking for.”
Dean turned back to Cas, who looked dejected as he leaned against the Impala, “We shouldn't let her do it? I don’t know if we’re talking about the same girl, but no one lets her do anything. She just does it. What’s your problem? You’ve been acting weird this whole time, is it because this is a ‘den of inequity’ or something?”
Sam stopped at the door and watched as Dean retraced his steps back to the car, sighed, then followed his brother, “We don’t have time for this, Y/N is expecting us in there.”
Dean waved his hand at Sam, “Nuh-uh, we’re talking about this. Cas has had a stick up his ass this entire time, and we have done far worse than a strip joint. Hell, Sam, we impersonated priests, and not a word out of this guy. So what? What’s your problem?”
Cas glanced at Sam, who shrugged, then back to Dean, “First, I do not have a stick in any of my orifices, just to be clear. Second, I have no problem. I just do not think that Y/N should have to remove her clothes in front of a room of men. Would you want to remove your clothes in front of a group of complete strangers?”
Dean raised an eyebrow and pursed his lips as if thinking about it, “Eh, I’ve done worse.” He crossed his arms, “So, what gives?”
Cas fidgeted with his tie again, his eyes focused on what his fingers were doing, “I just do not believe Y/N should let all those men see her unclothed.”
Dean looked at Cas, then to Sam, then back to Cas, his eyes wide, “You’re jealous!” He waved his hand toward Cas as he looked at Sam, “He’s jealous!”
“Angels don't get jealous, Dean. Leave him alone and come on. Cas, you can stay out here. We’ll call if we need anything. Let’s go.” Sam began walking back toward the strip club, and Dean lingered for a moment as he looked questioningly at Cas.
When Cas remained silent, Dean threw his hands up and rolled his eyes, “Fine. We’ll talk about it later.” He stormed after Sam, and Cas sighed in relief.
Castiel looked over at the door as it swung shut behind the brothers and frowned. “This is not ideal,” he muttered to himself as he opened the back door of the Impala and sat down to wait.
“Dude, they have these things called ‘walking tacos’. Kinda sounds like an STD, but they’re damn delicious. Wanna try it?” Dean offered Sam the bag of what looked like Fritos mixed with a conglomeration of various taco toppings and Sam shook his head, a look of disgust on his face.
“First, you’re disgusting. Second, you need to focus. Do you see anyone that could fit Xochipilli’s description?”
Dean rolled his eyes as he shoved another bite of taco into his mouth, “Yea, because he’s obviously going to look exactly like what an Aztec god is described as,” he mumbled around corn chips and cheese. “Did you forget about that freaking hotel? Ganesh didn’t exactly look like an elephant.”
It was Sam’s turn to roll his eyes, “Whatever, dude. Do you see anyone suspicious, anyone wearing the talisman Y/N described?”
Dean glanced around, his crunching eliciting another glare from Sam, and shook his head, “I don’t see anyone that stands out, definitely no talisman. Maybe Y/N has found something.”
Sam elbowed Dean and pointed towards the stage, “I think she found something. Not so sure it’s a talisman.”
Dean slowly turned to face the stage and his mouth gaped open, lettuce and taco meat dropping onto his shirt, “Whoa.”
“Next up, a new face in our beautiful ranks, please welcome Angel to the stage!” The lights dimmed, and Sam and Dean watched as Y/N walked slowly out on stage. Her outfit was different than she'd had on before; she had swapped out her crop top and jean shorts for a black leather halter dress, the hem of which stopped just below giving everything away. She had switched out her high heels for knee-high stiletto boots and had added black fishnet thigh-highs. The boys watched as the music started, and they were treated to a punk version of Umbrella as Y/N began her routine.
Dean leaned towards Sam, “What could she possibly take off, there's barely anything there! She's not actually going to do it, is she?” he hissed, the idea not seeming as appealing as it had when he'd been talking to Cas earlier.
Sam shrugged, “I don’t know, but she’s got this. She’ll be fine. Just...eat your walking taco and calm down.” Dean’s attention moved back to the stage when he heard a shout rise from the crowd. Despite the high tempo of the song, Y/N was alternating between fast spins and slow splits, and by the time he looked up she was holding herself upside down on the pole with just her legs as she reached out and grabbed dollar bills from the men in the front row.
As she flipped off of the pole, Dean punched Sam in the arm, then gesticulated wildly towards Y/N, “She has angel wing tattoos! When did she get those?! How….what is happening…?”
Sam shook out his arm and glared at Dean, “Still not our problem, Dean. It’s not like she has to tell us everything, and she’s not always lived and hunted with us. Our actual problem is finding an Aztec god hell bent on sacrificing everyone in his path so that he can have a nice cornfield, so maybe look for that.” Dean glanced around the room, but nothing caught his eye until his gaze returned to the stage. Y/N pulled her hair down and shook it out, her y/h/c locks spilling down almost to her elbows, and her hands went to the knot at the back of her neck as she moved to untie her halter.
Dean threw the walking taco, nearly hitting a nearby patron, and started marching towards the stage, “I can’t let her do this. I can’t. This...it’s wrong, man.”
“Dean!” Sam whispered loudly, his eyes searching the room for any bouncers that were lurking, “Dean!”
Dean rushed towards the stage, so focused on his mission that he never saw the two large men begin to flank him on both sides, “Y...Angel! Stop! You don’t have to do this!”
Sam saw the two men gunning for Dean and groaned, “Seriously?!” He ran after Dean with the hope that he would reach him before the bouncers would. Sam had half of his wish granted when one of the two bouncers veered off and collided into him, their bodies slamming into one of the tables. Dean, momentarily distracted by the sound of breaking wood and shattering glass, turned to see what the commotion was just as the second bouncer plowed into him. Unlike Sam, he was able to keep his balance and attempted to throw a punch but was quickly stopped by a meaty fist as it connected with his face. Dean hit the floor and groaned, allowing the bouncer to lift him up and carry him to the door. He cast one last look towards the stage where he saw Y/N standing with a hand on her hip, top half off and frowning. Dean groaned again and let his head fall back, his eyes closed.
Continue to Part 2 HERE.
Forever Tags: @trexrambling @pinknerdpanda @wheresthekillswitch @emilywritesaboutdean @arryn-nyxx @emptywithout @escabell @charliebradbury1104 @jarpadandjensenaremyheroes @deanssweetheart23 @canadianjelly @super-not-naturall @aubreyreadsstuff @dean-winchesters-baby @melissaj616 @fandomismyspiritanimal @keepcalmandcarryondean @hiimaprofessionalfangirl
#Supernatural fanfiction#winchesterprincessbride#celebration challenge#Castiel#Castiel x Reader#Cas is not amused#part 1
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GDPR - Let's all calm down a bit, shall we? - SEO, Content Marketing & Website Design
GDPR is getting to be like Y2K preparations.
It seems everyone is talking about it as if there will be Armageddon on the 25th May unless we all run around burning files and throwing hard drives off cliffs just in case the rozzers find someone's email address on them.
I was at a gin festival recently (great by the way, I'll tell you about it sometime), and people were talking about it at the bar.
Give it a break already!!!
Something more important than GDPR is happening on the 25th May, I'll be bothered about that.
What this article isn't
There is approximately one cubic gazillion of articles claiming to be the ultimate guide to GDPR, and I bet you've read a few and still don't understand them.
So, I'm not going to get into that here. This isn't a comprehensive GDPR marketing guide.
Instead, I thought what might be useful is a “cut through the crap” set of very short, succinct points that will give you some sort of idea about the whole process and what, if anything, you need to do about it.
Mostly, though, I'm hoping to stop a few people destroying their email lists because some guy in a suit said they should.
If I'm not compliant by the 25th May, will I be fined £17 million and sent to rot in jail?
NO!
Let me explain why:
There are consultants currently travelling the country telling everyone, usually on their first PowerPoint slide, that the fines that the ICO (the UK organisation that will implement GDPR) can punish you with are mahoosive; up to 4% of turnover or 17 million quid.
You can imagine that ACME window cleaning Ltd with two employees is positively quaking in its boots at this revelation, but it's nonsense.
In fact, the ICO themselves are getting a little hacked off with it.
I quote, from their own blog:
Myth #1:
The biggest threat to organisations from the GDPR is massive fines.
Fact:
This law is not about fines. It’s about putting the consumer and citizen first. We can’t lose sight of that.
Focusing on big fines makes for great headlines, but thinking that GDPR is about crippling financial punishment misses the point
GDPR gives the ICO more clout to punish people, yes, and it gives them the teeth to act when companies fail to follow the rules, but they're not going to be knocking on your door in the middle of the night threatening to take you to a cash point.
Last year they concluded 17,300 cases. 16 companies got fined. And none were fined the maximum available to the ICO.
The sort of companies that get fined are the ones that systematically or blatantly break the rules.
For example, ignoring people's requests to be removed from mailing lists and continue to email them on a huge scale.
The ICO wants to educate, so rather than throwing fines about willy-nilly, they'll work with the companies to ensure they're doing it right and help them stick to the rules.
Is it illegal to send marketing emails under GDPR?
Seriously, this is just nuts.
I've had more than one person say they're going to cancel their MailChimp account because they won't be able to email people anymore.
Let's make it clear:
But I need their consent, yeah?
Yep. Just like now. The important thing with GDPR is that they need to know exactly what they're signing up to.
You can't imply or assume consent anymore.
Make it clear what they're opting in to
When someone gives you any of their details such as email address, phone number etc., you need to make it really clear what it is they're opting in to and what you'll do with that information.
For example, if someone downloads an e-book from your website, you need to give them the option of also signing in to your mailing list. You can't just assume that because they've downloaded the book that they're also happy to receive your other emails.
To be fair, this has been a grey area for a while, but GDPR now makes it clear.
It's going to affect a lot of websites, for example, those that only let you read the rest of an article after you've signed up, but that's OK, they'll cope.
You probably can't just email them because they've bought from you
It's the same with online shopping.
You can send them transactional emails, that is, emails that are triggered by their purchase such as order confirmation, invoice and dispatch data, but you can't then start bombarding them with marketing emails unless they tick the box saying they're happy to have them.
(Note: This is actually covered by PECR, which is additional regulation, that suggests that you can contact your customers for legitimate reasons. A reason might be you want to offer them something. Just make sure they can opt out, you’ll be fine.)
Again, this is a grey area that's being tidied up, but many shops have been doing this for years, it's no biggie.
You can't have pre-ticked boxes or confusing consent
Some stores are a bit naughty, and right at the bottom of the order form there will be a tick-box with a sentence next to it saying “We will occasionally send you marketing emails, but if you'd rather not be pestered, un-tick this box.”
You can't do that anymore, which is a good thing.
This goes hand-in-hand with tick boxes that aren't especially clear, for example, ones that give multiple reasons or say things like
“By ticking this box, you do not allow us to remove your email address from our lists or maybe email you on a regular basis. If you do not wish us to not email you regarding things like this and such, then dance a merry jig while smoking a peace pipe.”
You must make it easy for people to unsubscribe
It needs to be really simple and completely fool-proof.
Ideally, a link on every single email that says “Unsubscribe” which takes them to a page that says “Sorry to see you go, you're now unsubscribed.”
Maybe give them a question to ask why, but that's it.
Close browser, job done.
Some people grind my gears by taking you to a site which you then have to log in to first (i.e. reset password because I forgot it) and then choose a complex set of tick boxes before being released from their vice-like grip.
One click dude, no dick moves.
How about getting consent for emails again, do I need to do that?
In most cases, no.
I've had a flurry of emails from companies saying “Due to GDPR, we need to get consent to keep sending you emails.”
The only time you'd need to do that is if you got the email through nefarious means in the first place.
For example, if I filled out a basic contact form on your site and then you started emailing me.
That's wrong, it's always been wrong, and now it's even wrongerer.
But if I signed up via your newsletter sign-up form, you do not need to ask me again.
Honestly, you don't.
If you got consent in the past, you have consent now.
Also, there's still a grey area about business to business. It seems you don't need consent anyway for this (there are exceptions, stick to the basics and you'll be OK.)
Also (2), do you use a proper mail client like MailChimp or ActiveCampaign or Aweber?
Well don't worry about it, there's an unsubscribe button at the bottom of the email. When people click this, they're unsubscribed, and they can only get back on the list if they specifically ask.
All cool.
Are there any scenarios when I might have to get consent again?
Other than that, you're probably OK. I'm saying “probably” because I don't know where you got your filthy list from, and I don't want you using this blog as an excuse. If you were bad with data in the past, clean it up.
Should I email everyone to get re-consent anyway? Just to make sure? I'm scared…
Oh please, grow some.
Yes, of course you can. Send out that email.
What's your current open rate? 20%?
And click through rate? 8%?
So, just working this out on the back of a fag packet, if I had a list of 800, I'd end up with 13 left on it when I've gone through this utterly pointless exercise.
Stop it.
So what should I do?
If you're a huge company with lots of employees, go get yourself a consultant, they'll help you in exchange for some dollar.
There are different rules for large businesses, and you might have some work to do, so go do it.
If you're a small business, you need to follow some basic steps:
The first is to check out the ICO website which explains everything in detail, it's all you need.
If someone tells you something is “what you need to do”, then check with the ICO, they're being incredibly pragmatic about it all.
Secondly, don't lose sleep over it.
Thirdly, check your mailing list. This next bit is a bit in-depth, so I've decided to give it a new section.
How to make sure I'm not breaking the law and will, therefore, go to jail or have my house repossessed
If you systematically scraped email addresses from the web, typed them in yourself from the Yellow pages or in some way got your mailing list using nefarious means, then delete them all.
However, if you fall into one of these categories, read on:
Still with me?
Audit your mailing lists
Where they from? Can you split out all the ones that opted in via your sign-up form? Good, do that, tag them or add them to another list.
This is the list of people who absolutely, positively wanted to sign up. Good, we're done. Leave them alone.
Got some others you're not sure about?
OK, put those in another list or tag them “we're not sure” or something, we'll work on these guys next.
Send out an email
The mistake everyone is making here is emailing everyone and saying “you need to sign up again” when they don't.
If they signed up before, that's fine. They gave consent and therefore that consent passes into the GDPR era.
So let's just tackle the ones we're not sure about, and rather than asking them to sign up or not hear from you ever again, let's do it another way. Let's give them an option of opting out.
Create an email something like this:
“Hi Geoff,
By now you've probably heard about GDPR and the new rules regarding email marketing and the correct way of getting consent.
Well, we're sure you were asked nicely if you wanted to receive our emails, but we can't be absolutely certain.
It might be that you downloaded something from us, or we met you at a networking event and you said it was fine, in which case, we're all good.
However, If you don't want to receive any more emails from us, then please click the button below to unsubscribe instantly from our list.
You won't need to do anything else, it's all automatic.
If you don't mind receiving our emails, then do nothing, but remember you can unsubscribe at any time.
Thanks for your time!
Keep this in mind
I'm not a GDPR consultant or a lawyer. This advice comes to you from someone who has read the documentation, but your situation might be unique/different.
However, there's no excuse for many in the industry to use scare tactics to get you to do something and propose knee-jerk reactions that might end up in your losing a significant part of your business.
As with everything, be sceptical of what you're told.
Investigate everything and then do what is right.
What if someone complains
Someone is bound to complain. There's been so much publicity about it, there will be people looking for companies to trip up so they can get the feds on them.
Don't panic.
If you're using a good email system (we recommend: ActiveCampaign) then all unsubscribes are handled automatically, you're safe, but if not, and someone requests to be removed from your lists – do it immediately.
As long as you're on the ball, delete people's data as soon as you're asked and be open about what you do with the data you keep, then you'll be OK.
Is this everything GDPR is about then?
Absolutely not.
GDPR is a huge deal for many companies and it covers vast swathes of regulation, that's for others to deal with.
I just wanted to clear up some misinformation about it that's doing the rounds at the moment and make sure that a bunch of companies that are doing everything right aren't forced to the wall by over-cautious consultants.
If you need more advice, find a good consultant.
There's one who reads this blog, he'll be in touch to tell me his contact details, as soon as he does, I'll pass them on!
This content was originally published here.
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The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
Working in Search Engine Optimization or Digital Advertising forces you to accomplish tasks quickly. Either everything is an emergency or you just need to find a way to be more efficient because there’s so much to accomplish.
In my experience, Chrome extensions have been one of the easiest ways to take care of those problems so I can get work done faster. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite extensions to help you do the same. Even more, I’ve expanded this blog to include specific scenarios where these tools will make you faster and more productive!
Google Tag Assistant
Tag Assistant is a great tool. It helps webmasters verify that their Google tags are installed and working properly. Sure, you can dig into your code and find that, but this extension makes it so much easier.
Here are the tags the extension will review:
Google Analytics (ga.js)
Google Analytics (dc.js)
AdWords Conversion Tracking
AdWords Remarketing (legacy)
AdWords Remarketing (new remarketing tag)
Doubleclick Floodlight
Google Tag Manager
How It Works
Go to the page you want to check and click on the extension. That will open a dropdown menu which shows you all of the tags installed on that page and if there’s something to worrying about.
Green tags – everything is good. No problems.
Gray tags – there’s no tag found on the page.
Blue tags – there are suggestions for improvement.
Yellow tags – there were minor problems with tag code implementation.
Red tags – there were critical implementation issues.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool in a variety of instances, but the first is tag checking. When I’m conducting an SEO or AdWords audit, one of the things I look for is accuracy of information. If I need to rely on GA or AdWords data, I need to make sure all of the tags are working properly and collecting the information the team needs to analyze properly.
Level of Detail
Tip: When you click on the icon, you can see more details about each problem. If you want more detail than the Tag Assistant gives you by default, you can right click on the chrome extension in your browser and click Options. Then you can choose how much information you want to see when there’s a problem.
Now, when you dig into the issues, you’ll get more detail than you would’ve if you left it on default.
Recordings
Another cool feature is recordings. But before we start on that, we need to fix two settings.
Follow Links Across Tabs – right click on the extension and go to Options. Right under Global Options, check the box for Recording: Follow Links Across Tabs.
Validation and Debug – Open the Chrome Extension and click on the 3-dot menu to the right side. Turn on Auto Validation and GA Debug.
All of the above allows you to automatically analyze tags across tabs and pull information from the debugger (which we need for detailed information).
Now, when there’s a problem with one of your tags, you can open up tag assistant and see what the problem is in detail.
To record:
go to the extension and click Record, but make sure your on a page that begins the flow of pages to your site.
Refresh your page.
Navigate through an important flow of pages on your site and click some buttons like add to card to record those actions.
Go to Google Tag Assistant again to click Stop.
Click Full Report.
This shows you if anything is wrong and what the problem is within that flow of pages/actions. Pretty neat stuff!
Builtwith
The Builtwith chrome extension does exactly what the name says. It profiles the website and tells you what technology the site is built with. I’m not just talking about the CMS (although that is part of it).
How It Works
When you open the extension, you can see all of this stuff and more:
Analytics
CMS
Web Server
Framework
Advertising
Analytics and Tracking
JavaScript Libraries & Functions
Mobile
Content Delivery Networks
Etc., etc., etc.
Each section covers the technology used in each category and is accompanied by a link and a description.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool often. As an SEO I need to know what kind of platform the website I’m analyzing is built on. I also need to know which tools they use. My site recommendations need to change if they’re using WordPress vs Drupal or even coding the site by hand (it happens more often than you think). This impacts whether I recommend a specific plugin, or give instructions for coding.
It also helps for me to understand how they’re tracking actions on their site. Is it all through GA or are they using Google Tag Manager? Maybe it’s Adobe Analytics. If it’s GTM, my recommendation might be to upload one of our Recipe packs instead of providing instructions for tracking Events in Google Analytics.
This extension helps me move forward as I work without having to dig into the code much to find the answers. It also helps me to better customize my recommendations for each website.
Moz Toolbar
The MozBar has helped me out on a number of client calls and SEO audits when I need to quickly answer a question about info on a page such as page title, heading tags, how many no-follow links there are and where they’re located as well as Page Authority and Domain Authority.
How It Works
The information you’ll be able to see is based on your account subscription. If you have a free account with Moz, this is what you’ll see:
Custom Searches
Link Metrics
Page Overlay
On-Page Links (Followed, No-Followed, External, or Internal)
Social Metrics
Data Export (CSV)
If you have a MozPro subscription, you get a ton of extra info in the toobar.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool every day, but it’s most useful for website audits, especially when I have to drill down to a specific page or two.
Current title tag and meta description when I’m writing new ones to improve CTR.
Page and Domain Authority
Links to and from that page
Is there schema on the page?
Is the page redirecting properly?
Does the page have a canonical tag? Is it the right one?
Are the heading tags descriptive and organized?
Are they using alt text? Does it have keywords in it?
What’s the page load time?
I could go on forever…
It definitely comes in handy during competitive audits! Keyword help, anyone?
Redirect Path
If you’re performing a full website audit, this chrome extension won’t be helpful, but if you’re looking at a single page or a small group of pages it comes in handy. Redirect Path displays different kinds of errors like 404s and 301s (and many more), as well as client side redirects. You can see them quickly and all in one place.
How It Works
You just click the icon and it gives you a dropdown displaying all redirect paths for that page. You can click on any of them to get more detailed information like server, modification date, content type, language, etc.
How/When I Use It
I love this tool because it shows you all of the paths at once, in order. So maybe it was a 301 redirect to a 404 page, which is very helpful to understand. It also looks at JS and meta refresh redirects.
It’s fantastic for testing rewrite rules, landing page redirects, finding redirect chains, etc. Oh, and it has a copy to clipboard feature, which is pretty awesome.
Web Developer Checklist
You can use the Web Dev Checklist extension to get a quick review of the site you’re looking at. With a single click, you’ll see everything from best practices to usability and code quality. There’s a big list!
How It Works
When you click the icon, you’ll get a dropdown like the one below. Pretty quickly, you get an idea of where the site falls short and where its on its game.
How/When I Use It
I use this in meetings a lot. Sometimes new clients will want to know, “are we doing this”? “Are we using this thing?” And I can say, nope, but we can! For example, they might say, “How can I get more info on my pages in SERPs? I keep seeing stuff below my competitors’ result”. And I open that up and say “we can get more info into SERPS by using Schema. It doesn’t look like your page has that yet”.
Or maybe they say “There’s a page showing up in SERPs that I don’t want in there. How do I remove it”? I open up my Web Developer Checklist and see that they aren’t using robots.txt. Easy fix. I’ll then offer to make and send them a robots.txt file for review and then add it to Search Console to fix the problem.
TableCapture
TableCapture is a super helpful Chrome extension that converts html tables so they can be pasted into Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or Open Office.
How It Works
While on a page with an HTML table, click the icon for TableCapture. It opens up a dropdown with a list of tables on the page for you to choose from.
Then you can choose to copy the table or open up Google Docs to paste it. It pastes beautifully with no problems.
Oh, I forgot to mention that, if the table includes links, you can choose to bring them in with the table information. You can find that under Options. Click Extract link URLs from table cells. Be aware that it will pull the link in beside it, not as anchor text. For example: Link test (http://ift.tt/2z8K0po).
Here’s a page with a few tables on for you to test: http://ift.tt/2xpafDz.
FYI: George, the developer, is super helpful. If you have any questions, he’s on top of it pretty quickly.
How/When I Use It
I find this extension super helpful for any kind of research, like reviewing competitor websites, gathering lead gen ideas, etc. I’ve heard it can be really useful for financial analysts and journalists, too.
When I’m doing PPC work, often a client will say, “I only want to target people in these locations”. Then I’ll need to pull together a list of zip codes. So I can go to a table with a list of them, use TableCapture and get the list into an uploadable format for AdWords. It’s so much easier than doing it manually.
Ghostery
The internet can be a scary place. Everything you do is tracked by someone. Many webmasters are gathering information on how you interact with their websites and collecting data about your preferences so they can build a profile for you and optimize their marketing and advertising methods. Ghostery allows you to combat that tracking, to an extent. It’s designed to improve your privacy by allowing you to see which website is tracking what and lets you make more informed decisions regarding what you share.
How It Works
When you open the extension, you get a list of trackers the website is using. It also gives you the option to block those trackers for a better browsing experience.
How/When I Use It
While most people probably use this to block ads, I use for other reasons.
First, it’s really helpful for troubleshooting slow loading pages. If a page loads too slow, I can turn off trackers to see if that is what’s effecting the load time.
Second, I use this to stay up-to-date in SEM. When I’m doing competitor research, I can see which ad networks our clients’ competitors are using and if they’re remarketing/retargeting.
Page Load Time
Speaking of page load times, this one is another favorite of mine. The Page Load Time extension does exactly what it sounds like: it shows you the time it takes to load the page you’ve just navigated to. When you open it up, everything gets broken down for you so you can see why the page is loading slowly.
How It Works
It’s always on, so whenever my page finishes loading, the chrome extension displays the time it took. If you click the icon, you’ll get a little window showing the events and how long each took to load and in which order.
How/When I Use It
Page Speed is a Google ranking factor. That means if your site/page is too slow, it’s not showing up in SERPs. On top of that being a Google priority, slow load times are also a bad user experience. Nobody wants that and we certainly don’t want it for our clients.
Whether I’m look at it for SEO or for SEM, I need to know why the page is loading slowly. So I pop open Page Load Time to ID the culprit and get to work on showing the client how to fix it.
Character Count
Character Count tells you how many characters you’ve highlighted on a webpage. It sounds simple but it’s glorious.
How It Works
All you do is click the chrome extension to turn it on, highlight some text on a page, and the number of characters you’re looking at appears at the top right corner of the browser.
How/When I Use It
I can’t even begin to tell you how many times per week I use Character Count. I write a lot of ad copy and review a lot of websites, so it comes in handy to know how many characters are on a page.
If I’m advertising for a client, the first step is to look at the page they want traffic to land on. I skim the site and look for text that clearly defines the goal of the page and highlight it. Is it short enough to be a headline in AdWords? Maybe it will fit in the description if not.
I also use character count for writing meta descriptions. Again, the copy on the page is the key. I want the general idea of the page in less than 155 characters. Can I find that somewhere?
You might also want to look into Word Count if you do this kind of work often.
Keywords Everywhere
Keywords Everywhere is a keyword research tool that allows you to find similar keywords and provides Google search volume and Cost per Click data for that term, so it’s great for SEO and SEM. It keeps me from having to switch back and forth between all of my keyword tools, too, which is a time saver.
How It Works
The Chrome Extension is always on, so every time you do a search you’ll get Google volume for that keyword as well as CPC data.
You can also see keyword data in the following platforms. It doesn’t just apply to Google Search.
Supported websites:
Google.com – the data is shown right under the search textbox
Google Search Console – the data is shown in the Search Analytics page
Google Analytics – data shown in the Organic and Search Engine Optimization -> Queries pages
Google Trends – data shown in the queries widget
Google Keyword Planner – data shown in a new column
Google Search – data shown under main keyword as well as related searches
YouTube – data shown under the searchbox
Amazon – data shown under the searchbox
eBay – data shown under the searchbox
Etsy – data shown under the searchbox
UberSuggest – data shown alongside keywords in this awesome keyword suggestion tool
AnswerThePublic.com – data shown in popup on each spoke of the wheel, data also shown in the alphabetic listings
Soovle.com – data shown next to each keyword all over the page
KeywordShitter.com – data shown under the main text area next to keywords
Majestic – Anchor Text Report
Moz Open Site Explorer – Anchor Text Report
How/When I Use It
After I do a Google search for a keyword I’m thinking about using, I can go to the bottom of the search results and get all of the similar words that people search for and save them via the Add All Keywords button on the right of the screen.
All of those keywords show up in my favorites along with the data I need to finish my research. I can then copy or download them into any document of my choice. You can print them too, but I never use that.
It gets better. I can then go into Google Analytics or Search Console and, in any report with keywords listed, I’ll get monthly volume and CPC data for the keywords that are already bringing people to their site.
Keywords Everywhere has a new feature that lets you upload keywords (up to 10,000) and it returns data for all of them.
It might seem like a long process, but I like the extension because I don’t have to sift through a bevvy of keywords that aren’t useful. Most of these are going to be relevant. I encourage you to give it a try. It’s wonderful.
Bonus Extensions
These tools aren’t necessarily related to SEO or PPC advertisers, but they can certainly be useful in this industry.
MockFlow
If you’re into user experience and site layout, but aren’t a designer, this one is essential! MockFlow lets you design wireframe concepts quickly and easily. If you don’t have access to all of that fancy development software, this one will be really helpful.
Color Zilla
http://ift.tt/2z8yBG3
0 notes
Text
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
Working in Search Engine Optimization or Digital Advertising forces you to accomplish tasks quickly. Either everything is an emergency or you just need to find a way to be more efficient because there’s so much to accomplish.
In my experience, Chrome extensions have been one of the easiest ways to take care of those problems so I can get work done faster. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite extensions to help you do the same. Even more, I’ve expanded this blog to include specific scenarios where these tools will make you faster and more productive!
Google Tag Assistant
Tag Assistant is a great tool. It helps webmasters verify that their Google tags are installed and working properly. Sure, you can dig into your code and find that, but this extension makes it so much easier.
Here are the tags the extension will review:
Google Analytics (ga.js)
Google Analytics (dc.js)
AdWords Conversion Tracking
AdWords Remarketing (legacy)
AdWords Remarketing (new remarketing tag)
Doubleclick Floodlight
Google Tag Manager
How It Works
Go to the page you want to check and click on the extension. That will open a dropdown menu which shows you all of the tags installed on that page and if there’s something to worrying about.
Green tags – everything is good. No problems.
Gray tags – there’s no tag found on the page.
Blue tags – there are suggestions for improvement.
Yellow tags – there were minor problems with tag code implementation.
Red tags – there were critical implementation issues.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool in a variety of instances, but the first is tag checking. When I’m conducting an SEO or AdWords audit, one of the things I look for is accuracy of information. If I need to rely on GA or AdWords data, I need to make sure all of the tags are working properly and collecting the information the team needs to analyze properly.
Level of Detail
Tip: When you click on the icon, you can see more details about each problem. If you want more detail than the Tag Assistant gives you by default, you can right click on the chrome extension in your browser and click Options. Then you can choose how much information you want to see when there’s a problem.
Now, when you dig into the issues, you’ll get more detail than you would’ve if you left it on default.
Recordings
Another cool feature is recordings. But before we start on that, we need to fix two settings.
Follow Links Across Tabs – right click on the extension and go to Options. Right under Global Options, check the box for Recording: Follow Links Across Tabs.
Validation and Debug – Open the Chrome Extension and click on the 3-dot menu to the right side. Turn on Auto Validation and GA Debug.
All of the above allows you to automatically analyze tags across tabs and pull information from the debugger (which we need for detailed information).
Now, when there’s a problem with one of your tags, you can open up tag assistant and see what the problem is in detail.
To record:
go to the extension and click Record, but make sure your on a page that begins the flow of pages to your site.
Refresh your page.
Navigate through an important flow of pages on your site and click some buttons like add to card to record those actions.
Go to Google Tag Assistant again to click Stop.
Click Full Report.
This shows you if anything is wrong and what the problem is within that flow of pages/actions. Pretty neat stuff!
Builtwith
The Builtwith chrome extension does exactly what the name says. It profiles the website and tells you what technology the site is built with. I’m not just talking about the CMS (although that is part of it).
How It Works
When you open the extension, you can see all of this stuff and more:
Analytics
CMS
Web Server
Framework
Advertising
Analytics and Tracking
JavaScript Libraries & Functions
Mobile
Content Delivery Networks
Etc., etc., etc.
Each section covers the technology used in each category and is accompanied by a link and a description.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool often. As an SEO I need to know what kind of platform the website I’m analyzing is built on. I also need to know which tools they use. My site recommendations need to change if they’re using WordPress vs Drupal or even coding the site by hand (it happens more often than you think). This impacts whether I recommend a specific plugin, or give instructions for coding.
It also helps for me to understand how they’re tracking actions on their site. Is it all through GA or are they using Google Tag Manager? Maybe it’s Adobe Analytics. If it’s GTM, my recommendation might be to upload one of our Recipe packs instead of providing instructions for tracking Events in Google Analytics.
This extension helps me move forward as I work without having to dig into the code much to find the answers. It also helps me to better customize my recommendations for each website.
Moz Toolbar
The MozBar has helped me out on a number of client calls and SEO audits when I need to quickly answer a question about info on a page such as page title, heading tags, how many no-follow links there are and where they’re located as well as Page Authority and Domain Authority.
How It Works
The information you’ll be able to see is based on your account subscription. If you have a free account with Moz, this is what you’ll see:
Custom Searches
Link Metrics
Page Overlay
On-Page Links (Followed, No-Followed, External, or Internal)
Social Metrics
Data Export (CSV)
If you have a MozPro subscription, you get a ton of extra info in the toobar.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool every day, but it’s most useful for website audits, especially when I have to drill down to a specific page or two.
Current title tag and meta description when I’m writing new ones to improve CTR.
Page and Domain Authority
Links to and from that page
Is there schema on the page?
Is the page redirecting properly?
Does the page have a canonical tag? Is it the right one?
Are the heading tags descriptive and organized?
Are they using alt text? Does it have keywords in it?
What’s the page load time?
I could go on forever…
It definitely comes in handy during competitive audits! Keyword help, anyone?
Redirect Path
If you’re performing a full website audit, this chrome extension won’t be helpful, but if you’re looking at a single page or a small group of pages it comes in handy. Redirect Path displays different kinds of errors like 404s and 301s (and many more), as well as client side redirects. You can see them quickly and all in one place.
How It Works
You just click the icon and it gives you a dropdown displaying all redirect paths for that page. You can click on any of them to get more detailed information like server, modification date, content type, language, etc.
How/When I Use It
I love this tool because it shows you all of the paths at once, in order. So maybe it was a 301 redirect to a 404 page, which is very helpful to understand. It also looks at JS and meta refresh redirects.
It’s fantastic for testing rewrite rules, landing page redirects, finding redirect chains, etc. Oh, and it has a copy to clipboard feature, which is pretty awesome.
Web Developer Checklist
You can use the Web Dev Checklist extension to get a quick review of the site you’re looking at. With a single click, you’ll see everything from best practices to usability and code quality. There’s a big list!
How It Works
When you click the icon, you’ll get a dropdown like the one below. Pretty quickly, you get an idea of where the site falls short and where its on its game.
How/When I Use It
I use this in meetings a lot. Sometimes new clients will want to know, “are we doing this”? “Are we using this thing?” And I can say, nope, but we can! For example, they might say, “How can I get more info on my pages in SERPs? I keep seeing stuff below my competitors’ result”. And I open that up and say “we can get more info into SERPS by using Schema. It doesn’t look like your page has that yet”.
Or maybe they say “There’s a page showing up in SERPs that I don’t want in there. How do I remove it”? I open up my Web Developer Checklist and see that they aren’t using robots.txt. Easy fix. I’ll then offer to make and send them a robots.txt file for review and then add it to Search Console to fix the problem.
TableCapture
TableCapture is a super helpful Chrome extension that converts html tables so they can be pasted into Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or Open Office.
How It Works
While on a page with an HTML table, click the icon for TableCapture. It opens up a dropdown with a list of tables on the page for you to choose from.
Then you can choose to copy the table or open up Google Docs to paste it. It pastes beautifully with no problems.
Oh, I forgot to mention that, if the table includes links, you can choose to bring them in with the table information. You can find that under Options. Click Extract link URLs from table cells. Be aware that it will pull the link in beside it, not as anchor text. For example: Link test (http://ift.tt/2z8K0po).
Here’s a page with a few tables on for you to test: http://ift.tt/2xpafDz.
FYI: George, the developer, is super helpful. If you have any questions, he’s on top of it pretty quickly.
How/When I Use It
I find this extension super helpful for any kind of research, like reviewing competitor websites, gathering lead gen ideas, etc. I’ve heard it can be really useful for financial analysts and journalists, too.
When I’m doing PPC work, often a client will say, “I only want to target people in these locations”. Then I’ll need to pull together a list of zip codes. So I can go to a table with a list of them, use TableCapture and get the list into an uploadable format for AdWords. It’s so much easier than doing it manually.
Ghostery
The internet can be a scary place. Everything you do is tracked by someone. Many webmasters are gathering information on how you interact with their websites and collecting data about your preferences so they can build a profile for you and optimize their marketing and advertising methods. Ghostery allows you to combat that tracking, to an extent. It’s designed to improve your privacy by allowing you to see which website is tracking what and lets you make more informed decisions regarding what you share.
How It Works
When you open the extension, you get a list of trackers the website is using. It also gives you the option to block those trackers for a better browsing experience.
How/When I Use It
While most people probably use this to block ads, I use for other reasons.
First, it’s really helpful for troubleshooting slow loading pages. If a page loads too slow, I can turn off trackers to see if that is what’s effecting the load time.
Second, I use this to stay up-to-date in SEM. When I’m doing competitor research, I can see which ad networks our clients’ competitors are using and if they’re remarketing/retargeting.
Page Load Time
Speaking of page load times, this one is another favorite of mine. The Page Load Time extension does exactly what it sounds like: it shows you the time it takes to load the page you’ve just navigated to. When you open it up, everything gets broken down for you so you can see why the page is loading slowly.
How It Works
It’s always on, so whenever my page finishes loading, the chrome extension displays the time it took. If you click the icon, you’ll get a little window showing the events and how long each took to load and in which order.
How/When I Use It
Page Speed is a Google ranking factor. That means if your site/page is too slow, it’s not showing up in SERPs. On top of that being a Google priority, slow load times are also a bad user experience. Nobody wants that and we certainly don’t want it for our clients.
Whether I’m look at it for SEO or for SEM, I need to know why the page is loading slowly. So I pop open Page Load Time to ID the culprit and get to work on showing the client how to fix it.
Character Count
Character Count tells you how many characters you’ve highlighted on a webpage. It sounds simple but it’s glorious.
How It Works
All you do is click the chrome extension to turn it on, highlight some text on a page, and the number of characters you’re looking at appears at the top right corner of the browser.
How/When I Use It
I can’t even begin to tell you how many times per week I use Character Count. I write a lot of ad copy and review a lot of websites, so it comes in handy to know how many characters are on a page.
If I’m advertising for a client, the first step is to look at the page they want traffic to land on. I skim the site and look for text that clearly defines the goal of the page and highlight it. Is it short enough to be a headline in AdWords? Maybe it will fit in the description if not.
I also use character count for writing meta descriptions. Again, the copy on the page is the key. I want the general idea of the page in less than 155 characters. Can I find that somewhere?
You might also want to look into Word Count if you do this kind of work often.
Keywords Everywhere
Keywords Everywhere is a keyword research tool that allows you to find similar keywords and provides Google search volume and Cost per Click data for that term, so it’s great for SEO and SEM. It keeps me from having to switch back and forth between all of my keyword tools, too, which is a time saver.
How It Works
The Chrome Extension is always on, so every time you do a search you’ll get Google volume for that keyword as well as CPC data.
You can also see keyword data in the following platforms. It doesn’t just apply to Google Search.
Supported websites:
Google.com – the data is shown right under the search textbox
Google Search Console – the data is shown in the Search Analytics page
Google Analytics – data shown in the Organic and Search Engine Optimization -> Queries pages
Google Trends – data shown in the queries widget
Google Keyword Planner – data shown in a new column
Google Search – data shown under main keyword as well as related searches
YouTube – data shown under the searchbox
Amazon – data shown under the searchbox
eBay – data shown under the searchbox
Etsy – data shown under the searchbox
UberSuggest – data shown alongside keywords in this awesome keyword suggestion tool
AnswerThePublic.com – data shown in popup on each spoke of the wheel, data also shown in the alphabetic listings
Soovle.com – data shown next to each keyword all over the page
KeywordShitter.com – data shown under the main text area next to keywords
Majestic – Anchor Text Report
Moz Open Site Explorer – Anchor Text Report
How/When I Use It
After I do a Google search for a keyword I’m thinking about using, I can go to the bottom of the search results and get all of the similar words that people search for and save them via the Add All Keywords button on the right of the screen.
All of those keywords show up in my favorites along with the data I need to finish my research. I can then copy or download them into any document of my choice. You can print them too, but I never use that.
It gets better. I can then go into Google Analytics or Search Console and, in any report with keywords listed, I’ll get monthly volume and CPC data for the keywords that are already bringing people to their site.
Keywords Everywhere has a new feature that lets you upload keywords (up to 10,000) and it returns data for all of them.
It might seem like a long process, but I like the extension because I don’t have to sift through a bevvy of keywords that aren’t useful. Most of these are going to be relevant. I encourage you to give it a try. It’s wonderful.
Bonus Extensions
These tools aren’t necessarily related to SEO or PPC advertisers, but they can certainly be useful in this industry.
MockFlow
If you’re into user experience and site layout, but aren’t a designer, this one is essential! MockFlow lets you design wireframe concepts quickly and easily. If you don’t have access to all of that fancy development software, this one will be really helpful.
Color Zilla
http://ift.tt/2z8yBG3
0 notes
Text
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
Working in Search Engine Optimization or Digital Advertising forces you to accomplish tasks quickly. Either everything is an emergency or you just need to find a way to be more efficient because there’s so much to accomplish.
In my experience, Chrome extensions have been one of the easiest ways to take care of those problems so I can get work done faster. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite extensions to help you do the same. Even more, I’ve expanded this blog to include specific scenarios where these tools will make you faster and more productive!
Google Tag Assistant
Tag Assistant is a great tool. It helps webmasters verify that their Google tags are installed and working properly. Sure, you can dig into your code and find that, but this extension makes it so much easier.
Here are the tags the extension will review:
Google Analytics (ga.js)
Google Analytics (dc.js)
AdWords Conversion Tracking
AdWords Remarketing (legacy)
AdWords Remarketing (new remarketing tag)
Doubleclick Floodlight
Google Tag Manager
How It Works
Go to the page you want to check and click on the extension. That will open a dropdown menu which shows you all of the tags installed on that page and if there’s something to worrying about.
Green tags – everything is good. No problems.
Gray tags – there’s no tag found on the page.
Blue tags – there are suggestions for improvement.
Yellow tags – there were minor problems with tag code implementation.
Red tags – there were critical implementation issues.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool in a variety of instances, but the first is tag checking. When I’m conducting an SEO or AdWords audit, one of the things I look for is accuracy of information. If I need to rely on GA or AdWords data, I need to make sure all of the tags are working properly and collecting the information the team needs to analyze properly.
Level of Detail
Tip: When you click on the icon, you can see more details about each problem. If you want more detail than the Tag Assistant gives you by default, you can right click on the chrome extension in your browser and click Options. Then you can choose how much information you want to see when there’s a problem.
Now, when you dig into the issues, you’ll get more detail than you would’ve if you left it on default.
Recordings
Another cool feature is recordings. But before we start on that, we need to fix two settings.
Follow Links Across Tabs – right click on the extension and go to Options. Right under Global Options, check the box for Recording: Follow Links Across Tabs.
Validation and Debug – Open the Chrome Extension and click on the 3-dot menu to the right side. Turn on Auto Validation and GA Debug.
All of the above allows you to automatically analyze tags across tabs and pull information from the debugger (which we need for detailed information).
Now, when there’s a problem with one of your tags, you can open up tag assistant and see what the problem is in detail.
To record:
go to the extension and click Record, but make sure your on a page that begins the flow of pages to your site.
Refresh your page.
Navigate through an important flow of pages on your site and click some buttons like add to card to record those actions.
Go to Google Tag Assistant again to click Stop.
Click Full Report.
This shows you if anything is wrong and what the problem is within that flow of pages/actions. Pretty neat stuff!
Builtwith
The Builtwith chrome extension does exactly what the name says. It profiles the website and tells you what technology the site is built with. I’m not just talking about the CMS (although that is part of it).
How It Works
When you open the extension, you can see all of this stuff and more:
Analytics
CMS
Web Server
Framework
Advertising
Analytics and Tracking
JavaScript Libraries & Functions
Mobile
Content Delivery Networks
Etc., etc., etc.
Each section covers the technology used in each category and is accompanied by a link and a description.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool often. As an SEO I need to know what kind of platform the website I’m analyzing is built on. I also need to know which tools they use. My site recommendations need to change if they’re using WordPress vs Drupal or even coding the site by hand (it happens more often than you think). This impacts whether I recommend a specific plugin, or give instructions for coding.
It also helps for me to understand how they’re tracking actions on their site. Is it all through GA or are they using Google Tag Manager? Maybe it’s Adobe Analytics. If it’s GTM, my recommendation might be to upload one of our Recipe packs instead of providing instructions for tracking Events in Google Analytics.
This extension helps me move forward as I work without having to dig into the code much to find the answers. It also helps me to better customize my recommendations for each website.
Moz Toolbar
The MozBar has helped me out on a number of client calls and SEO audits when I need to quickly answer a question about info on a page such as page title, heading tags, how many no-follow links there are and where they’re located as well as Page Authority and Domain Authority.
How It Works
The information you’ll be able to see is based on your account subscription. If you have a free account with Moz, this is what you’ll see:
Custom Searches
Link Metrics
Page Overlay
On-Page Links (Followed, No-Followed, External, or Internal)
Social Metrics
Data Export (CSV)
If you have a MozPro subscription, you get a ton of extra info in the toobar.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool every day, but it’s most useful for website audits, especially when I have to drill down to a specific page or two.
Current title tag and meta description when I’m writing new ones to improve CTR.
Page and Domain Authority
Links to and from that page
Is there schema on the page?
Is the page redirecting properly?
Does the page have a canonical tag? Is it the right one?
Are the heading tags descriptive and organized?
Are they using alt text? Does it have keywords in it?
What’s the page load time?
I could go on forever…
It definitely comes in handy during competitive audits! Keyword help, anyone?
Redirect Path
If you’re performing a full website audit, this chrome extension won’t be helpful, but if you’re looking at a single page or a small group of pages it comes in handy. Redirect Path displays different kinds of errors like 404s and 301s (and many more), as well as client side redirects. You can see them quickly and all in one place.
How It Works
You just click the icon and it gives you a dropdown displaying all redirect paths for that page. You can click on any of them to get more detailed information like server, modification date, content type, language, etc.
How/When I Use It
I love this tool because it shows you all of the paths at once, in order. So maybe it was a 301 redirect to a 404 page, which is very helpful to understand. It also looks at JS and meta refresh redirects.
It’s fantastic for testing rewrite rules, landing page redirects, finding redirect chains, etc. Oh, and it has a copy to clipboard feature, which is pretty awesome.
Web Developer Checklist
You can use the Web Dev Checklist extension to get a quick review of the site you’re looking at. With a single click, you’ll see everything from best practices to usability and code quality. There’s a big list!
How It Works
When you click the icon, you’ll get a dropdown like the one below. Pretty quickly, you get an idea of where the site falls short and where its on its game.
How/When I Use It
I use this in meetings a lot. Sometimes new clients will want to know, “are we doing this”? “Are we using this thing?” And I can say, nope, but we can! For example, they might say, “How can I get more info on my pages in SERPs? I keep seeing stuff below my competitors’ result”. And I open that up and say “we can get more info into SERPS by using Schema. It doesn’t look like your page has that yet”.
Or maybe they say “There’s a page showing up in SERPs that I don’t want in there. How do I remove it”? I open up my Web Developer Checklist and see that they aren’t using robots.txt. Easy fix. I’ll then offer to make and send them a robots.txt file for review and then add it to Search Console to fix the problem.
TableCapture
TableCapture is a super helpful Chrome extension that converts html tables so they can be pasted into Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or Open Office.
How It Works
While on a page with an HTML table, click the icon for TableCapture. It opens up a dropdown with a list of tables on the page for you to choose from.
Then you can choose to copy the table or open up Google Docs to paste it. It pastes beautifully with no problems.
Oh, I forgot to mention that, if the table includes links, you can choose to bring them in with the table information. You can find that under Options. Click Extract link URLs from table cells. Be aware that it will pull the link in beside it, not as anchor text. For example: Link test (http://ift.tt/2z8K0po).
Here’s a page with a few tables on for you to test: http://ift.tt/2xpafDz.
FYI: George, the developer, is super helpful. If you have any questions, he’s on top of it pretty quickly.
How/When I Use It
I find this extension super helpful for any kind of research, like reviewing competitor websites, gathering lead gen ideas, etc. I’ve heard it can be really useful for financial analysts and journalists, too.
When I’m doing PPC work, often a client will say, “I only want to target people in these locations”. Then I’ll need to pull together a list of zip codes. So I can go to a table with a list of them, use TableCapture and get the list into an uploadable format for AdWords. It’s so much easier than doing it manually.
Ghostery
The internet can be a scary place. Everything you do is tracked by someone. Many webmasters are gathering information on how you interact with their websites and collecting data about your preferences so they can build a profile for you and optimize their marketing and advertising methods. Ghostery allows you to combat that tracking, to an extent. It’s designed to improve your privacy by allowing you to see which website is tracking what and lets you make more informed decisions regarding what you share.
How It Works
When you open the extension, you get a list of trackers the website is using. It also gives you the option to block those trackers for a better browsing experience.
How/When I Use It
While most people probably use this to block ads, I use for other reasons.
First, it’s really helpful for troubleshooting slow loading pages. If a page loads too slow, I can turn off trackers to see if that is what’s effecting the load time.
Second, I use this to stay up-to-date in SEM. When I’m doing competitor research, I can see which ad networks our clients’ competitors are using and if they’re remarketing/retargeting.
Page Load Time
Speaking of page load times, this one is another favorite of mine. The Page Load Time extension does exactly what it sounds like: it shows you the time it takes to load the page you’ve just navigated to. When you open it up, everything gets broken down for you so you can see why the page is loading slowly.
How It Works
It’s always on, so whenever my page finishes loading, the chrome extension displays the time it took. If you click the icon, you’ll get a little window showing the events and how long each took to load and in which order.
How/When I Use It
Page Speed is a Google ranking factor. That means if your site/page is too slow, it’s not showing up in SERPs. On top of that being a Google priority, slow load times are also a bad user experience. Nobody wants that and we certainly don’t want it for our clients.
Whether I’m look at it for SEO or for SEM, I need to know why the page is loading slowly. So I pop open Page Load Time to ID the culprit and get to work on showing the client how to fix it.
Character Count
Character Count tells you how many characters you’ve highlighted on a webpage. It sounds simple but it’s glorious.
How It Works
All you do is click the chrome extension to turn it on, highlight some text on a page, and the number of characters you’re looking at appears at the top right corner of the browser.
How/When I Use It
I can’t even begin to tell you how many times per week I use Character Count. I write a lot of ad copy and review a lot of websites, so it comes in handy to know how many characters are on a page.
If I’m advertising for a client, the first step is to look at the page they want traffic to land on. I skim the site and look for text that clearly defines the goal of the page and highlight it. Is it short enough to be a headline in AdWords? Maybe it will fit in the description if not.
I also use character count for writing meta descriptions. Again, the copy on the page is the key. I want the general idea of the page in less than 155 characters. Can I find that somewhere?
You might also want to look into Word Count if you do this kind of work often.
Keywords Everywhere
Keywords Everywhere is a keyword research tool that allows you to find similar keywords and provides Google search volume and Cost per Click data for that term, so it’s great for SEO and SEM. It keeps me from having to switch back and forth between all of my keyword tools, too, which is a time saver.
How It Works
The Chrome Extension is always on, so every time you do a search you’ll get Google volume for that keyword as well as CPC data.
You can also see keyword data in the following platforms. It doesn’t just apply to Google Search.
Supported websites:
Google.com – the data is shown right under the search textbox
Google Search Console – the data is shown in the Search Analytics page
Google Analytics – data shown in the Organic and Search Engine Optimization -> Queries pages
Google Trends – data shown in the queries widget
Google Keyword Planner – data shown in a new column
Google Search – data shown under main keyword as well as related searches
YouTube – data shown under the searchbox
Amazon – data shown under the searchbox
eBay – data shown under the searchbox
Etsy – data shown under the searchbox
UberSuggest – data shown alongside keywords in this awesome keyword suggestion tool
AnswerThePublic.com – data shown in popup on each spoke of the wheel, data also shown in the alphabetic listings
Soovle.com – data shown next to each keyword all over the page
KeywordShitter.com – data shown under the main text area next to keywords
Majestic – Anchor Text Report
Moz Open Site Explorer – Anchor Text Report
How/When I Use It
After I do a Google search for a keyword I’m thinking about using, I can go to the bottom of the search results and get all of the similar words that people search for and save them via the Add All Keywords button on the right of the screen.
All of those keywords show up in my favorites along with the data I need to finish my research. I can then copy or download them into any document of my choice. You can print them too, but I never use that.
It gets better. I can then go into Google Analytics or Search Console and, in any report with keywords listed, I’ll get monthly volume and CPC data for the keywords that are already bringing people to their site.
Keywords Everywhere has a new feature that lets you upload keywords (up to 10,000) and it returns data for all of them.
It might seem like a long process, but I like the extension because I don’t have to sift through a bevvy of keywords that aren’t useful. Most of these are going to be relevant. I encourage you to give it a try. It’s wonderful.
Bonus Extensions
These tools aren’t necessarily related to SEO or PPC advertisers, but they can certainly be useful in this industry.
MockFlow
If you’re into user experience and site layout, but aren’t a designer, this one is essential! MockFlow lets you design wireframe concepts quickly and easily. If you don’t have access to all of that fancy development software, this one will be really helpful.
Color Zilla
http://ift.tt/2z8yBG3
0 notes
Text
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
Working in Search Engine Optimization or Digital Advertising forces you to accomplish tasks quickly. Either everything is an emergency or you just need to find a way to be more efficient because there’s so much to accomplish.
In my experience, Chrome extensions have been one of the easiest ways to take care of those problems so I can get work done faster. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite extensions to help you do the same. Even more, I’ve expanded this blog to include specific scenarios where these tools will make you faster and more productive!
Google Tag Assistant
Tag Assistant is a great tool. It helps webmasters verify that their Google tags are installed and working properly. Sure, you can dig into your code and find that, but this extension makes it so much easier.
Here are the tags the extension will review:
Google Analytics (ga.js)
Google Analytics (dc.js)
AdWords Conversion Tracking
AdWords Remarketing (legacy)
AdWords Remarketing (new remarketing tag)
Doubleclick Floodlight
Google Tag Manager
How It Works
Go to the page you want to check and click on the extension. That will open a dropdown menu which shows you all of the tags installed on that page and if there’s something to worrying about.
Green tags – everything is good. No problems.
Gray tags – there’s no tag found on the page.
Blue tags – there are suggestions for improvement.
Yellow tags – there were minor problems with tag code implementation.
Red tags – there were critical implementation issues.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool in a variety of instances, but the first is tag checking. When I’m conducting an SEO or AdWords audit, one of the things I look for is accuracy of information. If I need to rely on GA or AdWords data, I need to make sure all of the tags are working properly and collecting the information the team needs to analyze properly.
Level of Detail
Tip: When you click on the icon, you can see more details about each problem. If you want more detail than the Tag Assistant gives you by default, you can right click on the chrome extension in your browser and click Options. Then you can choose how much information you want to see when there’s a problem.
Now, when you dig into the issues, you’ll get more detail than you would’ve if you left it on default.
Recordings
Another cool feature is recordings. But before we start on that, we need to fix two settings.
Follow Links Across Tabs – right click on the extension and go to Options. Right under Global Options, check the box for Recording: Follow Links Across Tabs.
Validation and Debug – Open the Chrome Extension and click on the 3-dot menu to the right side. Turn on Auto Validation and GA Debug.
All of the above allows you to automatically analyze tags across tabs and pull information from the debugger (which we need for detailed information).
Now, when there’s a problem with one of your tags, you can open up tag assistant and see what the problem is in detail.
To record:
go to the extension and click Record, but make sure your on a page that begins the flow of pages to your site.
Refresh your page.
Navigate through an important flow of pages on your site and click some buttons like add to card to record those actions.
Go to Google Tag Assistant again to click Stop.
Click Full Report.
This shows you if anything is wrong and what the problem is within that flow of pages/actions. Pretty neat stuff!
Builtwith
The Builtwith chrome extension does exactly what the name says. It profiles the website and tells you what technology the site is built with. I’m not just talking about the CMS (although that is part of it).
How It Works
When you open the extension, you can see all of this stuff and more:
Analytics
CMS
Web Server
Framework
Advertising
Analytics and Tracking
JavaScript Libraries & Functions
Mobile
Content Delivery Networks
Etc., etc., etc.
Each section covers the technology used in each category and is accompanied by a link and a description.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool often. As an SEO I need to know what kind of platform the website I’m analyzing is built on. I also need to know which tools they use. My site recommendations need to change if they’re using WordPress vs Drupal or even coding the site by hand (it happens more often than you think). This impacts whether I recommend a specific plugin, or give instructions for coding.
It also helps for me to understand how they’re tracking actions on their site. Is it all through GA or are they using Google Tag Manager? Maybe it’s Adobe Analytics. If it’s GTM, my recommendation might be to upload one of our Recipe packs instead of providing instructions for tracking Events in Google Analytics.
This extension helps me move forward as I work without having to dig into the code much to find the answers. It also helps me to better customize my recommendations for each website.
Moz Toolbar
The MozBar has helped me out on a number of client calls and SEO audits when I need to quickly answer a question about info on a page such as page title, heading tags, how many no-follow links there are and where they’re located as well as Page Authority and Domain Authority.
How It Works
The information you’ll be able to see is based on your account subscription. If you have a free account with Moz, this is what you’ll see:
Custom Searches
Link Metrics
Page Overlay
On-Page Links (Followed, No-Followed, External, or Internal)
Social Metrics
Data Export (CSV)
If you have a MozPro subscription, you get a ton of extra info in the toobar.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool every day, but it’s most useful for website audits, especially when I have to drill down to a specific page or two.
Current title tag and meta description when I’m writing new ones to improve CTR.
Page and Domain Authority
Links to and from that page
Is there schema on the page?
Is the page redirecting properly?
Does the page have a canonical tag? Is it the right one?
Are the heading tags descriptive and organized?
Are they using alt text? Does it have keywords in it?
What’s the page load time?
I could go on forever…
It definitely comes in handy during competitive audits! Keyword help, anyone?
Redirect Path
If you’re performing a full website audit, this chrome extension won’t be helpful, but if you’re looking at a single page or a small group of pages it comes in handy. Redirect Path displays different kinds of errors like 404s and 301s (and many more), as well as client side redirects. You can see them quickly and all in one place.
How It Works
You just click the icon and it gives you a dropdown displaying all redirect paths for that page. You can click on any of them to get more detailed information like server, modification date, content type, language, etc.
How/When I Use It
I love this tool because it shows you all of the paths at once, in order. So maybe it was a 301 redirect to a 404 page, which is very helpful to understand. It also looks at JS and meta refresh redirects.
It’s fantastic for testing rewrite rules, landing page redirects, finding redirect chains, etc. Oh, and it has a copy to clipboard feature, which is pretty awesome.
Web Developer Checklist
You can use the Web Dev Checklist extension to get a quick review of the site you’re looking at. With a single click, you’ll see everything from best practices to usability and code quality. There’s a big list!
How It Works
When you click the icon, you’ll get a dropdown like the one below. Pretty quickly, you get an idea of where the site falls short and where its on its game.
How/When I Use It
I use this in meetings a lot. Sometimes new clients will want to know, “are we doing this”? “Are we using this thing?” And I can say, nope, but we can! For example, they might say, “How can I get more info on my pages in SERPs? I keep seeing stuff below my competitors’ result”. And I open that up and say “we can get more info into SERPS by using Schema. It doesn’t look like your page has that yet”.
Or maybe they say “There’s a page showing up in SERPs that I don’t want in there. How do I remove it”? I open up my Web Developer Checklist and see that they aren’t using robots.txt. Easy fix. I’ll then offer to make and send them a robots.txt file for review and then add it to Search Console to fix the problem.
TableCapture
TableCapture is a super helpful Chrome extension that converts html tables so they can be pasted into Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or Open Office.
How It Works
While on a page with an HTML table, click the icon for TableCapture. It opens up a dropdown with a list of tables on the page for you to choose from.
Then you can choose to copy the table or open up Google Docs to paste it. It pastes beautifully with no problems.
Oh, I forgot to mention that, if the table includes links, you can choose to bring them in with the table information. You can find that under Options. Click Extract link URLs from table cells. Be aware that it will pull the link in beside it, not as anchor text. For example: Link test (http://ift.tt/2z8K0po).
Here’s a page with a few tables on for you to test: http://ift.tt/2xpafDz.
FYI: George, the developer, is super helpful. If you have any questions, he’s on top of it pretty quickly.
How/When I Use It
I find this extension super helpful for any kind of research, like reviewing competitor websites, gathering lead gen ideas, etc. I’ve heard it can be really useful for financial analysts and journalists, too.
When I’m doing PPC work, often a client will say, “I only want to target people in these locations”. Then I’ll need to pull together a list of zip codes. So I can go to a table with a list of them, use TableCapture and get the list into an uploadable format for AdWords. It’s so much easier than doing it manually.
Ghostery
The internet can be a scary place. Everything you do is tracked by someone. Many webmasters are gathering information on how you interact with their websites and collecting data about your preferences so they can build a profile for you and optimize their marketing and advertising methods. Ghostery allows you to combat that tracking, to an extent. It’s designed to improve your privacy by allowing you to see which website is tracking what and lets you make more informed decisions regarding what you share.
How It Works
When you open the extension, you get a list of trackers the website is using. It also gives you the option to block those trackers for a better browsing experience.
How/When I Use It
While most people probably use this to block ads, I use for other reasons.
First, it’s really helpful for troubleshooting slow loading pages. If a page loads too slow, I can turn off trackers to see if that is what’s effecting the load time.
Second, I use this to stay up-to-date in SEM. When I’m doing competitor research, I can see which ad networks our clients’ competitors are using and if they’re remarketing/retargeting.
Page Load Time
Speaking of page load times, this one is another favorite of mine. The Page Load Time extension does exactly what it sounds like: it shows you the time it takes to load the page you’ve just navigated to. When you open it up, everything gets broken down for you so you can see why the page is loading slowly.
How It Works
It’s always on, so whenever my page finishes loading, the chrome extension displays the time it took. If you click the icon, you’ll get a little window showing the events and how long each took to load and in which order.
How/When I Use It
Page Speed is a Google ranking factor. That means if your site/page is too slow, it’s not showing up in SERPs. On top of that being a Google priority, slow load times are also a bad user experience. Nobody wants that and we certainly don’t want it for our clients.
Whether I’m look at it for SEO or for SEM, I need to know why the page is loading slowly. So I pop open Page Load Time to ID the culprit and get to work on showing the client how to fix it.
Character Count
Character Count tells you how many characters you’ve highlighted on a webpage. It sounds simple but it’s glorious.
How It Works
All you do is click the chrome extension to turn it on, highlight some text on a page, and the number of characters you’re looking at appears at the top right corner of the browser.
How/When I Use It
I can’t even begin to tell you how many times per week I use Character Count. I write a lot of ad copy and review a lot of websites, so it comes in handy to know how many characters are on a page.
If I’m advertising for a client, the first step is to look at the page they want traffic to land on. I skim the site and look for text that clearly defines the goal of the page and highlight it. Is it short enough to be a headline in AdWords? Maybe it will fit in the description if not.
I also use character count for writing meta descriptions. Again, the copy on the page is the key. I want the general idea of the page in less than 155 characters. Can I find that somewhere?
You might also want to look into Word Count if you do this kind of work often.
Keywords Everywhere
Keywords Everywhere is a keyword research tool that allows you to find similar keywords and provides Google search volume and Cost per Click data for that term, so it’s great for SEO and SEM. It keeps me from having to switch back and forth between all of my keyword tools, too, which is a time saver.
How It Works
The Chrome Extension is always on, so every time you do a search you’ll get Google volume for that keyword as well as CPC data.
You can also see keyword data in the following platforms. It doesn’t just apply to Google Search.
Supported websites:
Google.com – the data is shown right under the search textbox
Google Search Console – the data is shown in the Search Analytics page
Google Analytics – data shown in the Organic and Search Engine Optimization -> Queries pages
Google Trends – data shown in the queries widget
Google Keyword Planner – data shown in a new column
Google Search – data shown under main keyword as well as related searches
YouTube – data shown under the searchbox
Amazon – data shown under the searchbox
eBay – data shown under the searchbox
Etsy – data shown under the searchbox
UberSuggest – data shown alongside keywords in this awesome keyword suggestion tool
AnswerThePublic.com – data shown in popup on each spoke of the wheel, data also shown in the alphabetic listings
Soovle.com – data shown next to each keyword all over the page
KeywordShitter.com – data shown under the main text area next to keywords
Majestic – Anchor Text Report
Moz Open Site Explorer – Anchor Text Report
How/When I Use It
After I do a Google search for a keyword I’m thinking about using, I can go to the bottom of the search results and get all of the similar words that people search for and save them via the Add All Keywords button on the right of the screen.
All of those keywords show up in my favorites along with the data I need to finish my research. I can then copy or download them into any document of my choice. You can print them too, but I never use that.
It gets better. I can then go into Google Analytics or Search Console and, in any report with keywords listed, I’ll get monthly volume and CPC data for the keywords that are already bringing people to their site.
Keywords Everywhere has a new feature that lets you upload keywords (up to 10,000) and it returns data for all of them.
It might seem like a long process, but I like the extension because I don’t have to sift through a bevvy of keywords that aren’t useful. Most of these are going to be relevant. I encourage you to give it a try. It’s wonderful.
Bonus Extensions
These tools aren’t necessarily related to SEO or PPC advertisers, but they can certainly be useful in this industry.
MockFlow
If you’re into user experience and site layout, but aren’t a designer, this one is essential! MockFlow lets you design wireframe concepts quickly and easily. If you don’t have access to all of that fancy development software, this one will be really helpful.
Color Zilla
http://ift.tt/2z8yBG3
0 notes
Text
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
Working in Search Engine Optimization or Digital Advertising forces you to accomplish tasks quickly. Either everything is an emergency or you just need to find a way to be more efficient because there’s so much to accomplish.
In my experience, Chrome extensions have been one of the easiest ways to take care of those problems so I can get work done faster. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite extensions to help you do the same. Even more, I’ve expanded this blog to include specific scenarios where these tools will make you faster and more productive!
Google Tag Assistant
Tag Assistant is a great tool. It helps webmasters verify that their Google tags are installed and working properly. Sure, you can dig into your code and find that, but this extension makes it so much easier.
Here are the tags the extension will review:
Google Analytics (ga.js)
Google Analytics (dc.js)
AdWords Conversion Tracking
AdWords Remarketing (legacy)
AdWords Remarketing (new remarketing tag)
Doubleclick Floodlight
Google Tag Manager
How It Works
Go to the page you want to check and click on the extension. That will open a dropdown menu which shows you all of the tags installed on that page and if there’s something to worrying about.
Green tags – everything is good. No problems.
Gray tags – there’s no tag found on the page.
Blue tags – there are suggestions for improvement.
Yellow tags – there were minor problems with tag code implementation.
Red tags – there were critical implementation issues.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool in a variety of instances, but the first is tag checking. When I’m conducting an SEO or AdWords audit, one of the things I look for is accuracy of information. If I need to rely on GA or AdWords data, I need to make sure all of the tags are working properly and collecting the information the team needs to analyze properly.
Level of Detail
Tip: When you click on the icon, you can see more details about each problem. If you want more detail than the Tag Assistant gives you by default, you can right click on the chrome extension in your browser and click Options. Then you can choose how much information you want to see when there’s a problem.
Now, when you dig into the issues, you’ll get more detail than you would’ve if you left it on default.
Recordings
Another cool feature is recordings. But before we start on that, we need to fix two settings.
Follow Links Across Tabs – right click on the extension and go to Options. Right under Global Options, check the box for Recording: Follow Links Across Tabs.
Validation and Debug – Open the Chrome Extension and click on the 3-dot menu to the right side. Turn on Auto Validation and GA Debug.
All of the above allows you to automatically analyze tags across tabs and pull information from the debugger (which we need for detailed information).
Now, when there’s a problem with one of your tags, you can open up tag assistant and see what the problem is in detail.
To record:
go to the extension and click Record, but make sure your on a page that begins the flow of pages to your site.
Refresh your page.
Navigate through an important flow of pages on your site and click some buttons like add to card to record those actions.
Go to Google Tag Assistant again to click Stop.
Click Full Report.
This shows you if anything is wrong and what the problem is within that flow of pages/actions. Pretty neat stuff!
Builtwith
The Builtwith chrome extension does exactly what the name says. It profiles the website and tells you what technology the site is built with. I’m not just talking about the CMS (although that is part of it).
How It Works
When you open the extension, you can see all of this stuff and more:
Analytics
CMS
Web Server
Framework
Advertising
Analytics and Tracking
JavaScript Libraries & Functions
Mobile
Content Delivery Networks
Etc., etc., etc.
Each section covers the technology used in each category and is accompanied by a link and a description.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool often. As an SEO I need to know what kind of platform the website I’m analyzing is built on. I also need to know which tools they use. My site recommendations need to change if they’re using WordPress vs Drupal or even coding the site by hand (it happens more often than you think). This impacts whether I recommend a specific plugin, or give instructions for coding.
It also helps for me to understand how they’re tracking actions on their site. Is it all through GA or are they using Google Tag Manager? Maybe it’s Adobe Analytics. If it’s GTM, my recommendation might be to upload one of our Recipe packs instead of providing instructions for tracking Events in Google Analytics.
This extension helps me move forward as I work without having to dig into the code much to find the answers. It also helps me to better customize my recommendations for each website.
Moz Toolbar
The MozBar has helped me out on a number of client calls and SEO audits when I need to quickly answer a question about info on a page such as page title, heading tags, how many no-follow links there are and where they’re located as well as Page Authority and Domain Authority.
How It Works
The information you’ll be able to see is based on your account subscription. If you have a free account with Moz, this is what you’ll see:
Custom Searches
Link Metrics
Page Overlay
On-Page Links (Followed, No-Followed, External, or Internal)
Social Metrics
Data Export (CSV)
If you have a MozPro subscription, you get a ton of extra info in the toobar.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool every day, but it’s most useful for website audits, especially when I have to drill down to a specific page or two.
Current title tag and meta description when I’m writing new ones to improve CTR.
Page and Domain Authority
Links to and from that page
Is there schema on the page?
Is the page redirecting properly?
Does the page have a canonical tag? Is it the right one?
Are the heading tags descriptive and organized?
Are they using alt text? Does it have keywords in it?
What’s the page load time?
I could go on forever…
It definitely comes in handy during competitive audits! Keyword help, anyone?
Redirect Path
If you’re performing a full website audit, this chrome extension won’t be helpful, but if you’re looking at a single page or a small group of pages it comes in handy. Redirect Path displays different kinds of errors like 404s and 301s (and many more), as well as client side redirects. You can see them quickly and all in one place.
How It Works
You just click the icon and it gives you a dropdown displaying all redirect paths for that page. You can click on any of them to get more detailed information like server, modification date, content type, language, etc.
How/When I Use It
I love this tool because it shows you all of the paths at once, in order. So maybe it was a 301 redirect to a 404 page, which is very helpful to understand. It also looks at JS and meta refresh redirects.
It’s fantastic for testing rewrite rules, landing page redirects, finding redirect chains, etc. Oh, and it has a copy to clipboard feature, which is pretty awesome.
Web Developer Checklist
You can use the Web Dev Checklist extension to get a quick review of the site you’re looking at. With a single click, you’ll see everything from best practices to usability and code quality. There’s a big list!
How It Works
When you click the icon, you’ll get a dropdown like the one below. Pretty quickly, you get an idea of where the site falls short and where its on its game.
How/When I Use It
I use this in meetings a lot. Sometimes new clients will want to know, “are we doing this”? “Are we using this thing?” And I can say, nope, but we can! For example, they might say, “How can I get more info on my pages in SERPs? I keep seeing stuff below my competitors’ result”. And I open that up and say “we can get more info into SERPS by using Schema. It doesn’t look like your page has that yet”.
Or maybe they say “There’s a page showing up in SERPs that I don’t want in there. How do I remove it”? I open up my Web Developer Checklist and see that they aren’t using robots.txt. Easy fix. I’ll then offer to make and send them a robots.txt file for review and then add it to Search Console to fix the problem.
TableCapture
TableCapture is a super helpful Chrome extension that converts html tables so they can be pasted into Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or Open Office.
How It Works
While on a page with an HTML table, click the icon for TableCapture. It opens up a dropdown with a list of tables on the page for you to choose from.
Then you can choose to copy the table or open up Google Docs to paste it. It pastes beautifully with no problems.
Oh, I forgot to mention that, if the table includes links, you can choose to bring them in with the table information. You can find that under Options. Click Extract link URLs from table cells. Be aware that it will pull the link in beside it, not as anchor text. For example: Link test (http://ift.tt/2z8K0po).
Here’s a page with a few tables on for you to test: http://ift.tt/2xpafDz.
FYI: George, the developer, is super helpful. If you have any questions, he’s on top of it pretty quickly.
How/When I Use It
I find this extension super helpful for any kind of research, like reviewing competitor websites, gathering lead gen ideas, etc. I’ve heard it can be really useful for financial analysts and journalists, too.
When I’m doing PPC work, often a client will say, “I only want to target people in these locations”. Then I’ll need to pull together a list of zip codes. So I can go to a table with a list of them, use TableCapture and get the list into an uploadable format for AdWords. It’s so much easier than doing it manually.
Ghostery
The internet can be a scary place. Everything you do is tracked by someone. Many webmasters are gathering information on how you interact with their websites and collecting data about your preferences so they can build a profile for you and optimize their marketing and advertising methods. Ghostery allows you to combat that tracking, to an extent. It’s designed to improve your privacy by allowing you to see which website is tracking what and lets you make more informed decisions regarding what you share.
How It Works
When you open the extension, you get a list of trackers the website is using. It also gives you the option to block those trackers for a better browsing experience.
How/When I Use It
While most people probably use this to block ads, I use for other reasons.
First, it’s really helpful for troubleshooting slow loading pages. If a page loads too slow, I can turn off trackers to see if that is what’s effecting the load time.
Second, I use this to stay up-to-date in SEM. When I’m doing competitor research, I can see which ad networks our clients’ competitors are using and if they’re remarketing/retargeting.
Page Load Time
Speaking of page load times, this one is another favorite of mine. The Page Load Time extension does exactly what it sounds like: it shows you the time it takes to load the page you’ve just navigated to. When you open it up, everything gets broken down for you so you can see why the page is loading slowly.
How It Works
It’s always on, so whenever my page finishes loading, the chrome extension displays the time it took. If you click the icon, you’ll get a little window showing the events and how long each took to load and in which order.
How/When I Use It
Page Speed is a Google ranking factor. That means if your site/page is too slow, it’s not showing up in SERPs. On top of that being a Google priority, slow load times are also a bad user experience. Nobody wants that and we certainly don’t want it for our clients.
Whether I’m look at it for SEO or for SEM, I need to know why the page is loading slowly. So I pop open Page Load Time to ID the culprit and get to work on showing the client how to fix it.
Character Count
Character Count tells you how many characters you’ve highlighted on a webpage. It sounds simple but it’s glorious.
How It Works
All you do is click the chrome extension to turn it on, highlight some text on a page, and the number of characters you’re looking at appears at the top right corner of the browser.
How/When I Use It
I can’t even begin to tell you how many times per week I use Character Count. I write a lot of ad copy and review a lot of websites, so it comes in handy to know how many characters are on a page.
If I’m advertising for a client, the first step is to look at the page they want traffic to land on. I skim the site and look for text that clearly defines the goal of the page and highlight it. Is it short enough to be a headline in AdWords? Maybe it will fit in the description if not.
I also use character count for writing meta descriptions. Again, the copy on the page is the key. I want the general idea of the page in less than 155 characters. Can I find that somewhere?
You might also want to look into Word Count if you do this kind of work often.
Keywords Everywhere
Keywords Everywhere is a keyword research tool that allows you to find similar keywords and provides Google search volume and Cost per Click data for that term, so it’s great for SEO and SEM. It keeps me from having to switch back and forth between all of my keyword tools, too, which is a time saver.
How It Works
The Chrome Extension is always on, so every time you do a search you’ll get Google volume for that keyword as well as CPC data.
You can also see keyword data in the following platforms. It doesn’t just apply to Google Search.
Supported websites:
Google.com – the data is shown right under the search textbox
Google Search Console – the data is shown in the Search Analytics page
Google Analytics – data shown in the Organic and Search Engine Optimization -> Queries pages
Google Trends – data shown in the queries widget
Google Keyword Planner – data shown in a new column
Google Search – data shown under main keyword as well as related searches
YouTube – data shown under the searchbox
Amazon – data shown under the searchbox
eBay – data shown under the searchbox
Etsy – data shown under the searchbox
UberSuggest – data shown alongside keywords in this awesome keyword suggestion tool
AnswerThePublic.com – data shown in popup on each spoke of the wheel, data also shown in the alphabetic listings
Soovle.com – data shown next to each keyword all over the page
KeywordShitter.com – data shown under the main text area next to keywords
Majestic – Anchor Text Report
Moz Open Site Explorer – Anchor Text Report
How/When I Use It
After I do a Google search for a keyword I’m thinking about using, I can go to the bottom of the search results and get all of the similar words that people search for and save them via the Add All Keywords button on the right of the screen.
All of those keywords show up in my favorites along with the data I need to finish my research. I can then copy or download them into any document of my choice. You can print them too, but I never use that.
It gets better. I can then go into Google Analytics or Search Console and, in any report with keywords listed, I’ll get monthly volume and CPC data for the keywords that are already bringing people to their site.
Keywords Everywhere has a new feature that lets you upload keywords (up to 10,000) and it returns data for all of them.
It might seem like a long process, but I like the extension because I don’t have to sift through a bevvy of keywords that aren’t useful. Most of these are going to be relevant. I encourage you to give it a try. It’s wonderful.
Bonus Extensions
These tools aren’t necessarily related to SEO or PPC advertisers, but they can certainly be useful in this industry.
MockFlow
If you’re into user experience and site layout, but aren’t a designer, this one is essential! MockFlow lets you design wireframe concepts quickly and easily. If you don’t have access to all of that fancy development software, this one will be really helpful.
Color Zilla
http://ift.tt/2z8yBG3
0 notes
Text
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
Working in Search Engine Optimization or Digital Advertising forces you to accomplish tasks quickly. Either everything is an emergency or you just need to find a way to be more efficient because there’s so much to accomplish.
In my experience, Chrome extensions have been one of the easiest ways to take care of those problems so I can get work done faster. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite extensions to help you do the same. Even more, I’ve expanded this blog to include specific scenarios where these tools will make you faster and more productive!
Google Tag Assistant
Tag Assistant is a great tool. It helps webmasters verify that their Google tags are installed and working properly. Sure, you can dig into your code and find that, but this extension makes it so much easier.
Here are the tags the extension will review:
Google Analytics (ga.js)
Google Analytics (dc.js)
AdWords Conversion Tracking
AdWords Remarketing (legacy)
AdWords Remarketing (new remarketing tag)
Doubleclick Floodlight
Google Tag Manager
How It Works
Go to the page you want to check and click on the extension. That will open a dropdown menu which shows you all of the tags installed on that page and if there’s something to worrying about.
Green tags – everything is good. No problems.
Gray tags – there’s no tag found on the page.
Blue tags – there are suggestions for improvement.
Yellow tags – there were minor problems with tag code implementation.
Red tags – there were critical implementation issues.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool in a variety of instances, but the first is tag checking. When I’m conducting an SEO or AdWords audit, one of the things I look for is accuracy of information. If I need to rely on GA or AdWords data, I need to make sure all of the tags are working properly and collecting the information the team needs to analyze properly.
Level of Detail
Tip: When you click on the icon, you can see more details about each problem. If you want more detail than the Tag Assistant gives you by default, you can right click on the chrome extension in your browser and click Options. Then you can choose how much information you want to see when there’s a problem.
Now, when you dig into the issues, you’ll get more detail than you would’ve if you left it on default.
Recordings
Another cool feature is recordings. But before we start on that, we need to fix two settings.
Follow Links Across Tabs – right click on the extension and go to Options. Right under Global Options, check the box for Recording: Follow Links Across Tabs.
Validation and Debug – Open the Chrome Extension and click on the 3-dot menu to the right side. Turn on Auto Validation and GA Debug.
All of the above allows you to automatically analyze tags across tabs and pull information from the debugger (which we need for detailed information).
Now, when there’s a problem with one of your tags, you can open up tag assistant and see what the problem is in detail.
To record:
go to the extension and click Record, but make sure your on a page that begins the flow of pages to your site.
Refresh your page.
Navigate through an important flow of pages on your site and click some buttons like add to card to record those actions.
Go to Google Tag Assistant again to click Stop.
Click Full Report.
This shows you if anything is wrong and what the problem is within that flow of pages/actions. Pretty neat stuff!
Builtwith
The Builtwith chrome extension does exactly what the name says. It profiles the website and tells you what technology the site is built with. I’m not just talking about the CMS (although that is part of it).
How It Works
When you open the extension, you can see all of this stuff and more:
Analytics
CMS
Web Server
Framework
Advertising
Analytics and Tracking
JavaScript Libraries & Functions
Mobile
Content Delivery Networks
Etc., etc., etc.
Each section covers the technology used in each category and is accompanied by a link and a description.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool often. As an SEO I need to know what kind of platform the website I’m analyzing is built on. I also need to know which tools they use. My site recommendations need to change if they’re using WordPress vs Drupal or even coding the site by hand (it happens more often than you think). This impacts whether I recommend a specific plugin, or give instructions for coding.
It also helps for me to understand how they’re tracking actions on their site. Is it all through GA or are they using Google Tag Manager? Maybe it’s Adobe Analytics. If it’s GTM, my recommendation might be to upload one of our Recipe packs instead of providing instructions for tracking Events in Google Analytics.
This extension helps me move forward as I work without having to dig into the code much to find the answers. It also helps me to better customize my recommendations for each website.
Moz Toolbar
The MozBar has helped me out on a number of client calls and SEO audits when I need to quickly answer a question about info on a page such as page title, heading tags, how many no-follow links there are and where they’re located as well as Page Authority and Domain Authority.
How It Works
The information you’ll be able to see is based on your account subscription. If you have a free account with Moz, this is what you’ll see:
Custom Searches
Link Metrics
Page Overlay
On-Page Links (Followed, No-Followed, External, or Internal)
Social Metrics
Data Export (CSV)
If you have a MozPro subscription, you get a ton of extra info in the toobar.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool every day, but it’s most useful for website audits, especially when I have to drill down to a specific page or two.
Current title tag and meta description when I’m writing new ones to improve CTR.
Page and Domain Authority
Links to and from that page
Is there schema on the page?
Is the page redirecting properly?
Does the page have a canonical tag? Is it the right one?
Are the heading tags descriptive and organized?
Are they using alt text? Does it have keywords in it?
What’s the page load time?
I could go on forever…
It definitely comes in handy during competitive audits! Keyword help, anyone?
Redirect Path
If you’re performing a full website audit, this chrome extension won’t be helpful, but if you’re looking at a single page or a small group of pages it comes in handy. Redirect Path displays different kinds of errors like 404s and 301s (and many more), as well as client side redirects. You can see them quickly and all in one place.
How It Works
You just click the icon and it gives you a dropdown displaying all redirect paths for that page. You can click on any of them to get more detailed information like server, modification date, content type, language, etc.
How/When I Use It
I love this tool because it shows you all of the paths at once, in order. So maybe it was a 301 redirect to a 404 page, which is very helpful to understand. It also looks at JS and meta refresh redirects.
It’s fantastic for testing rewrite rules, landing page redirects, finding redirect chains, etc. Oh, and it has a copy to clipboard feature, which is pretty awesome.
Web Developer Checklist
You can use the Web Dev Checklist extension to get a quick review of the site you’re looking at. With a single click, you’ll see everything from best practices to usability and code quality. There’s a big list!
How It Works
When you click the icon, you’ll get a dropdown like the one below. Pretty quickly, you get an idea of where the site falls short and where its on its game.
How/When I Use It
I use this in meetings a lot. Sometimes new clients will want to know, “are we doing this”? “Are we using this thing?” And I can say, nope, but we can! For example, they might say, “How can I get more info on my pages in SERPs? I keep seeing stuff below my competitors’ result”. And I open that up and say “we can get more info into SERPS by using Schema. It doesn’t look like your page has that yet”.
Or maybe they say “There’s a page showing up in SERPs that I don’t want in there. How do I remove it”? I open up my Web Developer Checklist and see that they aren’t using robots.txt. Easy fix. I’ll then offer to make and send them a robots.txt file for review and then add it to Search Console to fix the problem.
TableCapture
TableCapture is a super helpful Chrome extension that converts html tables so they can be pasted into Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or Open Office.
How It Works
While on a page with an HTML table, click the icon for TableCapture. It opens up a dropdown with a list of tables on the page for you to choose from.
Then you can choose to copy the table or open up Google Docs to paste it. It pastes beautifully with no problems.
Oh, I forgot to mention that, if the table includes links, you can choose to bring them in with the table information. You can find that under Options. Click Extract link URLs from table cells. Be aware that it will pull the link in beside it, not as anchor text. For example: Link test (http://ift.tt/2z8K0po).
Here’s a page with a few tables on for you to test: http://ift.tt/2xpafDz.
FYI: George, the developer, is super helpful. If you have any questions, he’s on top of it pretty quickly.
How/When I Use It
I find this extension super helpful for any kind of research, like reviewing competitor websites, gathering lead gen ideas, etc. I’ve heard it can be really useful for financial analysts and journalists, too.
When I’m doing PPC work, often a client will say, “I only want to target people in these locations”. Then I’ll need to pull together a list of zip codes. So I can go to a table with a list of them, use TableCapture and get the list into an uploadable format for AdWords. It’s so much easier than doing it manually.
Ghostery
The internet can be a scary place. Everything you do is tracked by someone. Many webmasters are gathering information on how you interact with their websites and collecting data about your preferences so they can build a profile for you and optimize their marketing and advertising methods. Ghostery allows you to combat that tracking, to an extent. It’s designed to improve your privacy by allowing you to see which website is tracking what and lets you make more informed decisions regarding what you share.
How It Works
When you open the extension, you get a list of trackers the website is using. It also gives you the option to block those trackers for a better browsing experience.
How/When I Use It
While most people probably use this to block ads, I use for other reasons.
First, it’s really helpful for troubleshooting slow loading pages. If a page loads too slow, I can turn off trackers to see if that is what’s effecting the load time.
Second, I use this to stay up-to-date in SEM. When I’m doing competitor research, I can see which ad networks our clients’ competitors are using and if they’re remarketing/retargeting.
Page Load Time
Speaking of page load times, this one is another favorite of mine. The Page Load Time extension does exactly what it sounds like: it shows you the time it takes to load the page you’ve just navigated to. When you open it up, everything gets broken down for you so you can see why the page is loading slowly.
How It Works
It’s always on, so whenever my page finishes loading, the chrome extension displays the time it took. If you click the icon, you’ll get a little window showing the events and how long each took to load and in which order.
How/When I Use It
Page Speed is a Google ranking factor. That means if your site/page is too slow, it’s not showing up in SERPs. On top of that being a Google priority, slow load times are also a bad user experience. Nobody wants that and we certainly don’t want it for our clients.
Whether I’m look at it for SEO or for SEM, I need to know why the page is loading slowly. So I pop open Page Load Time to ID the culprit and get to work on showing the client how to fix it.
Character Count
Character Count tells you how many characters you’ve highlighted on a webpage. It sounds simple but it’s glorious.
How It Works
All you do is click the chrome extension to turn it on, highlight some text on a page, and the number of characters you’re looking at appears at the top right corner of the browser.
How/When I Use It
I can’t even begin to tell you how many times per week I use Character Count. I write a lot of ad copy and review a lot of websites, so it comes in handy to know how many characters are on a page.
If I’m advertising for a client, the first step is to look at the page they want traffic to land on. I skim the site and look for text that clearly defines the goal of the page and highlight it. Is it short enough to be a headline in AdWords? Maybe it will fit in the description if not.
I also use character count for writing meta descriptions. Again, the copy on the page is the key. I want the general idea of the page in less than 155 characters. Can I find that somewhere?
You might also want to look into Word Count if you do this kind of work often.
Keywords Everywhere
Keywords Everywhere is a keyword research tool that allows you to find similar keywords and provides Google search volume and Cost per Click data for that term, so it’s great for SEO and SEM. It keeps me from having to switch back and forth between all of my keyword tools, too, which is a time saver.
How It Works
The Chrome Extension is always on, so every time you do a search you’ll get Google volume for that keyword as well as CPC data.
You can also see keyword data in the following platforms. It doesn’t just apply to Google Search.
Supported websites:
Google.com – the data is shown right under the search textbox
Google Search Console – the data is shown in the Search Analytics page
Google Analytics – data shown in the Organic and Search Engine Optimization -> Queries pages
Google Trends – data shown in the queries widget
Google Keyword Planner – data shown in a new column
Google Search – data shown under main keyword as well as related searches
YouTube – data shown under the searchbox
Amazon – data shown under the searchbox
eBay – data shown under the searchbox
Etsy – data shown under the searchbox
UberSuggest – data shown alongside keywords in this awesome keyword suggestion tool
AnswerThePublic.com – data shown in popup on each spoke of the wheel, data also shown in the alphabetic listings
Soovle.com – data shown next to each keyword all over the page
KeywordShitter.com – data shown under the main text area next to keywords
Majestic – Anchor Text Report
Moz Open Site Explorer – Anchor Text Report
How/When I Use It
After I do a Google search for a keyword I’m thinking about using, I can go to the bottom of the search results and get all of the similar words that people search for and save them via the Add All Keywords button on the right of the screen.
All of those keywords show up in my favorites along with the data I need to finish my research. I can then copy or download them into any document of my choice. You can print them too, but I never use that.
It gets better. I can then go into Google Analytics or Search Console and, in any report with keywords listed, I’ll get monthly volume and CPC data for the keywords that are already bringing people to their site.
Keywords Everywhere has a new feature that lets you upload keywords (up to 10,000) and it returns data for all of them.
It might seem like a long process, but I like the extension because I don’t have to sift through a bevvy of keywords that aren’t useful. Most of these are going to be relevant. I encourage you to give it a try. It’s wonderful.
Bonus Extensions
These tools aren’t necessarily related to SEO or PPC advertisers, but they can certainly be useful in this industry.
MockFlow
If you’re into user experience and site layout, but aren’t a designer, this one is essential! MockFlow lets you design wireframe concepts quickly and easily. If you don’t have access to all of that fancy development software, this one will be really helpful.
Color Zilla
http://ift.tt/2z8yBG3
0 notes
Text
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
Working in Search Engine Optimization or Digital Advertising forces you to accomplish tasks quickly. Either everything is an emergency or you just need to find a way to be more efficient because there’s so much to accomplish.
In my experience, Chrome extensions have been one of the easiest ways to take care of those problems so I can get work done faster. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite extensions to help you do the same. Even more, I’ve expanded this blog to include specific scenarios where these tools will make you faster and more productive!
Google Tag Assistant
Tag Assistant is a great tool. It helps webmasters verify that their Google tags are installed and working properly. Sure, you can dig into your code and find that, but this extension makes it so much easier.
Here are the tags the extension will review:
Google Analytics (ga.js)
Google Analytics (dc.js)
AdWords Conversion Tracking
AdWords Remarketing (legacy)
AdWords Remarketing (new remarketing tag)
Doubleclick Floodlight
Google Tag Manager
How It Works
Go to the page you want to check and click on the extension. That will open a dropdown menu which shows you all of the tags installed on that page and if there’s something to worrying about.
Green tags – everything is good. No problems.
Gray tags – there’s no tag found on the page.
Blue tags – there are suggestions for improvement.
Yellow tags – there were minor problems with tag code implementation.
Red tags – there were critical implementation issues.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool in a variety of instances, but the first is tag checking. When I’m conducting an SEO or AdWords audit, one of the things I look for is accuracy of information. If I need to rely on GA or AdWords data, I need to make sure all of the tags are working properly and collecting the information the team needs to analyze properly.
Level of Detail
Tip: When you click on the icon, you can see more details about each problem. If you want more detail than the Tag Assistant gives you by default, you can right click on the chrome extension in your browser and click Options. Then you can choose how much information you want to see when there’s a problem.
Now, when you dig into the issues, you’ll get more detail than you would’ve if you left it on default.
Recordings
Another cool feature is recordings. But before we start on that, we need to fix two settings.
Follow Links Across Tabs – right click on the extension and go to Options. Right under Global Options, check the box for Recording: Follow Links Across Tabs.
Validation and Debug – Open the Chrome Extension and click on the 3-dot menu to the right side. Turn on Auto Validation and GA Debug.
All of the above allows you to automatically analyze tags across tabs and pull information from the debugger (which we need for detailed information).
Now, when there’s a problem with one of your tags, you can open up tag assistant and see what the problem is in detail.
To record:
go to the extension and click Record, but make sure your on a page that begins the flow of pages to your site.
Refresh your page.
Navigate through an important flow of pages on your site and click some buttons like add to card to record those actions.
Go to Google Tag Assistant again to click Stop.
Click Full Report.
This shows you if anything is wrong and what the problem is within that flow of pages/actions. Pretty neat stuff!
Builtwith
The Builtwith chrome extension does exactly what the name says. It profiles the website and tells you what technology the site is built with. I’m not just talking about the CMS (although that is part of it).
How It Works
When you open the extension, you can see all of this stuff and more:
Analytics
CMS
Web Server
Framework
Advertising
Analytics and Tracking
JavaScript Libraries & Functions
Mobile
Content Delivery Networks
Etc., etc., etc.
Each section covers the technology used in each category and is accompanied by a link and a description.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool often. As an SEO I need to know what kind of platform the website I’m analyzing is built on. I also need to know which tools they use. My site recommendations need to change if they’re using WordPress vs Drupal or even coding the site by hand (it happens more often than you think). This impacts whether I recommend a specific plugin, or give instructions for coding.
It also helps for me to understand how they’re tracking actions on their site. Is it all through GA or are they using Google Tag Manager? Maybe it’s Adobe Analytics. If it’s GTM, my recommendation might be to upload one of our Recipe packs instead of providing instructions for tracking Events in Google Analytics.
This extension helps me move forward as I work without having to dig into the code much to find the answers. It also helps me to better customize my recommendations for each website.
Moz Toolbar
The MozBar has helped me out on a number of client calls and SEO audits when I need to quickly answer a question about info on a page such as page title, heading tags, how many no-follow links there are and where they’re located as well as Page Authority and Domain Authority.
How It Works
The information you’ll be able to see is based on your account subscription. If you have a free account with Moz, this is what you’ll see:
Custom Searches
Link Metrics
Page Overlay
On-Page Links (Followed, No-Followed, External, or Internal)
Social Metrics
Data Export (CSV)
If you have a MozPro subscription, you get a ton of extra info in the toobar.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool every day, but it’s most useful for website audits, especially when I have to drill down to a specific page or two.
Current title tag and meta description when I’m writing new ones to improve CTR.
Page and Domain Authority
Links to and from that page
Is there schema on the page?
Is the page redirecting properly?
Does the page have a canonical tag? Is it the right one?
Are the heading tags descriptive and organized?
Are they using alt text? Does it have keywords in it?
What’s the page load time?
I could go on forever…
It definitely comes in handy during competitive audits! Keyword help, anyone?
Redirect Path
If you’re performing a full website audit, this chrome extension won’t be helpful, but if you’re looking at a single page or a small group of pages it comes in handy. Redirect Path displays different kinds of errors like 404s and 301s (and many more), as well as client side redirects. You can see them quickly and all in one place.
How It Works
You just click the icon and it gives you a dropdown displaying all redirect paths for that page. You can click on any of them to get more detailed information like server, modification date, content type, language, etc.
How/When I Use It
I love this tool because it shows you all of the paths at once, in order. So maybe it was a 301 redirect to a 404 page, which is very helpful to understand. It also looks at JS and meta refresh redirects.
It’s fantastic for testing rewrite rules, landing page redirects, finding redirect chains, etc. Oh, and it has a copy to clipboard feature, which is pretty awesome.
Web Developer Checklist
You can use the Web Dev Checklist extension to get a quick review of the site you’re looking at. With a single click, you’ll see everything from best practices to usability and code quality. There’s a big list!
How It Works
When you click the icon, you’ll get a dropdown like the one below. Pretty quickly, you get an idea of where the site falls short and where its on its game.
How/When I Use It
I use this in meetings a lot. Sometimes new clients will want to know, “are we doing this”? “Are we using this thing?” And I can say, nope, but we can! For example, they might say, “How can I get more info on my pages in SERPs? I keep seeing stuff below my competitors’ result”. And I open that up and say “we can get more info into SERPS by using Schema. It doesn’t look like your page has that yet”.
Or maybe they say “There’s a page showing up in SERPs that I don’t want in there. How do I remove it”? I open up my Web Developer Checklist and see that they aren’t using robots.txt. Easy fix. I’ll then offer to make and send them a robots.txt file for review and then add it to Search Console to fix the problem.
TableCapture
TableCapture is a super helpful Chrome extension that converts html tables so they can be pasted into Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or Open Office.
How It Works
While on a page with an HTML table, click the icon for TableCapture. It opens up a dropdown with a list of tables on the page for you to choose from.
Then you can choose to copy the table or open up Google Docs to paste it. It pastes beautifully with no problems.
Oh, I forgot to mention that, if the table includes links, you can choose to bring them in with the table information. You can find that under Options. Click Extract link URLs from table cells. Be aware that it will pull the link in beside it, not as anchor text. For example: Link test (http://ift.tt/2z8K0po).
Here’s a page with a few tables on for you to test: http://ift.tt/2xpafDz.
FYI: George, the developer, is super helpful. If you have any questions, he’s on top of it pretty quickly.
How/When I Use It
I find this extension super helpful for any kind of research, like reviewing competitor websites, gathering lead gen ideas, etc. I’ve heard it can be really useful for financial analysts and journalists, too.
When I’m doing PPC work, often a client will say, “I only want to target people in these locations”. Then I’ll need to pull together a list of zip codes. So I can go to a table with a list of them, use TableCapture and get the list into an uploadable format for AdWords. It’s so much easier than doing it manually.
Ghostery
The internet can be a scary place. Everything you do is tracked by someone. Many webmasters are gathering information on how you interact with their websites and collecting data about your preferences so they can build a profile for you and optimize their marketing and advertising methods. Ghostery allows you to combat that tracking, to an extent. It’s designed to improve your privacy by allowing you to see which website is tracking what and lets you make more informed decisions regarding what you share.
How It Works
When you open the extension, you get a list of trackers the website is using. It also gives you the option to block those trackers for a better browsing experience.
How/When I Use It
While most people probably use this to block ads, I use for other reasons.
First, it’s really helpful for troubleshooting slow loading pages. If a page loads too slow, I can turn off trackers to see if that is what’s effecting the load time.
Second, I use this to stay up-to-date in SEM. When I’m doing competitor research, I can see which ad networks our clients’ competitors are using and if they’re remarketing/retargeting.
Page Load Time
Speaking of page load times, this one is another favorite of mine. The Page Load Time extension does exactly what it sounds like: it shows you the time it takes to load the page you’ve just navigated to. When you open it up, everything gets broken down for you so you can see why the page is loading slowly.
How It Works
It’s always on, so whenever my page finishes loading, the chrome extension displays the time it took. If you click the icon, you’ll get a little window showing the events and how long each took to load and in which order.
How/When I Use It
Page Speed is a Google ranking factor. That means if your site/page is too slow, it’s not showing up in SERPs. On top of that being a Google priority, slow load times are also a bad user experience. Nobody wants that and we certainly don’t want it for our clients.
Whether I’m look at it for SEO or for SEM, I need to know why the page is loading slowly. So I pop open Page Load Time to ID the culprit and get to work on showing the client how to fix it.
Character Count
Character Count tells you how many characters you’ve highlighted on a webpage. It sounds simple but it’s glorious.
How It Works
All you do is click the chrome extension to turn it on, highlight some text on a page, and the number of characters you’re looking at appears at the top right corner of the browser.
How/When I Use It
I can’t even begin to tell you how many times per week I use Character Count. I write a lot of ad copy and review a lot of websites, so it comes in handy to know how many characters are on a page.
If I’m advertising for a client, the first step is to look at the page they want traffic to land on. I skim the site and look for text that clearly defines the goal of the page and highlight it. Is it short enough to be a headline in AdWords? Maybe it will fit in the description if not.
I also use character count for writing meta descriptions. Again, the copy on the page is the key. I want the general idea of the page in less than 155 characters. Can I find that somewhere?
You might also want to look into Word Count if you do this kind of work often.
Keywords Everywhere
Keywords Everywhere is a keyword research tool that allows you to find similar keywords and provides Google search volume and Cost per Click data for that term, so it’s great for SEO and SEM. It keeps me from having to switch back and forth between all of my keyword tools, too, which is a time saver.
How It Works
The Chrome Extension is always on, so every time you do a search you’ll get Google volume for that keyword as well as CPC data.
You can also see keyword data in the following platforms. It doesn’t just apply to Google Search.
Supported websites:
Google.com – the data is shown right under the search textbox
Google Search Console – the data is shown in the Search Analytics page
Google Analytics – data shown in the Organic and Search Engine Optimization -> Queries pages
Google Trends – data shown in the queries widget
Google Keyword Planner – data shown in a new column
Google Search – data shown under main keyword as well as related searches
YouTube – data shown under the searchbox
Amazon – data shown under the searchbox
eBay – data shown under the searchbox
Etsy – data shown under the searchbox
UberSuggest – data shown alongside keywords in this awesome keyword suggestion tool
AnswerThePublic.com – data shown in popup on each spoke of the wheel, data also shown in the alphabetic listings
Soovle.com – data shown next to each keyword all over the page
KeywordShitter.com – data shown under the main text area next to keywords
Majestic – Anchor Text Report
Moz Open Site Explorer – Anchor Text Report
How/When I Use It
After I do a Google search for a keyword I’m thinking about using, I can go to the bottom of the search results and get all of the similar words that people search for and save them via the Add All Keywords button on the right of the screen.
All of those keywords show up in my favorites along with the data I need to finish my research. I can then copy or download them into any document of my choice. You can print them too, but I never use that.
It gets better. I can then go into Google Analytics or Search Console and, in any report with keywords listed, I’ll get monthly volume and CPC data for the keywords that are already bringing people to their site.
Keywords Everywhere has a new feature that lets you upload keywords (up to 10,000) and it returns data for all of them.
It might seem like a long process, but I like the extension because I don’t have to sift through a bevvy of keywords that aren’t useful. Most of these are going to be relevant. I encourage you to give it a try. It’s wonderful.
Bonus Extensions
These tools aren’t necessarily related to SEO or PPC advertisers, but they can certainly be useful in this industry.
MockFlow
If you’re into user experience and site layout, but aren’t a designer, this one is essential! MockFlow lets you design wireframe concepts quickly and easily. If you don’t have access to all of that fancy development software, this one will be really helpful.
Color Zilla
http://ift.tt/2z8yBG3
0 notes
Text
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
Working in Search Engine Optimization or Digital Advertising forces you to accomplish tasks quickly. Either everything is an emergency or you just need to find a way to be more efficient because there’s so much to accomplish.
In my experience, Chrome extensions have been one of the easiest ways to take care of those problems so I can get work done faster. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite extensions to help you do the same. Even more, I’ve expanded this blog to include specific scenarios where these tools will make you faster and more productive!
Google Tag Assistant
Tag Assistant is a great tool. It helps webmasters verify that their Google tags are installed and working properly. Sure, you can dig into your code and find that, but this extension makes it so much easier.
Here are the tags the extension will review:
Google Analytics (ga.js)
Google Analytics (dc.js)
AdWords Conversion Tracking
AdWords Remarketing (legacy)
AdWords Remarketing (new remarketing tag)
Doubleclick Floodlight
Google Tag Manager
How It Works
Go to the page you want to check and click on the extension. That will open a dropdown menu which shows you all of the tags installed on that page and if there’s something to worrying about.
Green tags – everything is good. No problems.
Gray tags – there’s no tag found on the page.
Blue tags – there are suggestions for improvement.
Yellow tags – there were minor problems with tag code implementation.
Red tags – there were critical implementation issues.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool in a variety of instances, but the first is tag checking. When I’m conducting an SEO or AdWords audit, one of the things I look for is accuracy of information. If I need to rely on GA or AdWords data, I need to make sure all of the tags are working properly and collecting the information the team needs to analyze properly.
Level of Detail
Tip: When you click on the icon, you can see more details about each problem. If you want more detail than the Tag Assistant gives you by default, you can right click on the chrome extension in your browser and click Options. Then you can choose how much information you want to see when there’s a problem.
Now, when you dig into the issues, you’ll get more detail than you would’ve if you left it on default.
Recordings
Another cool feature is recordings. But before we start on that, we need to fix two settings.
Follow Links Across Tabs – right click on the extension and go to Options. Right under Global Options, check the box for Recording: Follow Links Across Tabs.
Validation and Debug – Open the Chrome Extension and click on the 3-dot menu to the right side. Turn on Auto Validation and GA Debug.
All of the above allows you to automatically analyze tags across tabs and pull information from the debugger (which we need for detailed information).
Now, when there’s a problem with one of your tags, you can open up tag assistant and see what the problem is in detail.
To record:
go to the extension and click Record, but make sure your on a page that begins the flow of pages to your site.
Refresh your page.
Navigate through an important flow of pages on your site and click some buttons like add to card to record those actions.
Go to Google Tag Assistant again to click Stop.
Click Full Report.
This shows you if anything is wrong and what the problem is within that flow of pages/actions. Pretty neat stuff!
Builtwith
The Builtwith chrome extension does exactly what the name says. It profiles the website and tells you what technology the site is built with. I’m not just talking about the CMS (although that is part of it).
How It Works
When you open the extension, you can see all of this stuff and more:
Analytics
CMS
Web Server
Framework
Advertising
Analytics and Tracking
JavaScript Libraries & Functions
Mobile
Content Delivery Networks
Etc., etc., etc.
Each section covers the technology used in each category and is accompanied by a link and a description.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool often. As an SEO I need to know what kind of platform the website I’m analyzing is built on. I also need to know which tools they use. My site recommendations need to change if they’re using WordPress vs Drupal or even coding the site by hand (it happens more often than you think). This impacts whether I recommend a specific plugin, or give instructions for coding.
It also helps for me to understand how they’re tracking actions on their site. Is it all through GA or are they using Google Tag Manager? Maybe it’s Adobe Analytics. If it’s GTM, my recommendation might be to upload one of our Recipe packs instead of providing instructions for tracking Events in Google Analytics.
This extension helps me move forward as I work without having to dig into the code much to find the answers. It also helps me to better customize my recommendations for each website.
Moz Toolbar
The MozBar has helped me out on a number of client calls and SEO audits when I need to quickly answer a question about info on a page such as page title, heading tags, how many no-follow links there are and where they’re located as well as Page Authority and Domain Authority.
How It Works
The information you’ll be able to see is based on your account subscription. If you have a free account with Moz, this is what you’ll see:
Custom Searches
Link Metrics
Page Overlay
On-Page Links (Followed, No-Followed, External, or Internal)
Social Metrics
Data Export (CSV)
If you have a MozPro subscription, you get a ton of extra info in the toobar.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool every day, but it’s most useful for website audits, especially when I have to drill down to a specific page or two.
Current title tag and meta description when I’m writing new ones to improve CTR.
Page and Domain Authority
Links to and from that page
Is there schema on the page?
Is the page redirecting properly?
Does the page have a canonical tag? Is it the right one?
Are the heading tags descriptive and organized?
Are they using alt text? Does it have keywords in it?
What’s the page load time?
I could go on forever…
It definitely comes in handy during competitive audits! Keyword help, anyone?
Redirect Path
If you’re performing a full website audit, this chrome extension won’t be helpful, but if you’re looking at a single page or a small group of pages it comes in handy. Redirect Path displays different kinds of errors like 404s and 301s (and many more), as well as client side redirects. You can see them quickly and all in one place.
How It Works
You just click the icon and it gives you a dropdown displaying all redirect paths for that page. You can click on any of them to get more detailed information like server, modification date, content type, language, etc.
How/When I Use It
I love this tool because it shows you all of the paths at once, in order. So maybe it was a 301 redirect to a 404 page, which is very helpful to understand. It also looks at JS and meta refresh redirects.
It’s fantastic for testing rewrite rules, landing page redirects, finding redirect chains, etc. Oh, and it has a copy to clipboard feature, which is pretty awesome.
Web Developer Checklist
You can use the Web Dev Checklist extension to get a quick review of the site you’re looking at. With a single click, you’ll see everything from best practices to usability and code quality. There’s a big list!
How It Works
When you click the icon, you’ll get a dropdown like the one below. Pretty quickly, you get an idea of where the site falls short and where its on its game.
How/When I Use It
I use this in meetings a lot. Sometimes new clients will want to know, “are we doing this”? “Are we using this thing?” And I can say, nope, but we can! For example, they might say, “How can I get more info on my pages in SERPs? I keep seeing stuff below my competitors’ result”. And I open that up and say “we can get more info into SERPS by using Schema. It doesn’t look like your page has that yet”.
Or maybe they say “There’s a page showing up in SERPs that I don’t want in there. How do I remove it”? I open up my Web Developer Checklist and see that they aren’t using robots.txt. Easy fix. I’ll then offer to make and send them a robots.txt file for review and then add it to Search Console to fix the problem.
TableCapture
TableCapture is a super helpful Chrome extension that converts html tables so they can be pasted into Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or Open Office.
How It Works
While on a page with an HTML table, click the icon for TableCapture. It opens up a dropdown with a list of tables on the page for you to choose from.
Then you can choose to copy the table or open up Google Docs to paste it. It pastes beautifully with no problems.
Oh, I forgot to mention that, if the table includes links, you can choose to bring them in with the table information. You can find that under Options. Click Extract link URLs from table cells. Be aware that it will pull the link in beside it, not as anchor text. For example: Link test (http://ift.tt/2z8K0po).
Here’s a page with a few tables on for you to test: http://ift.tt/2xpafDz.
FYI: George, the developer, is super helpful. If you have any questions, he’s on top of it pretty quickly.
How/When I Use It
I find this extension super helpful for any kind of research, like reviewing competitor websites, gathering lead gen ideas, etc. I’ve heard it can be really useful for financial analysts and journalists, too.
When I’m doing PPC work, often a client will say, “I only want to target people in these locations”. Then I’ll need to pull together a list of zip codes. So I can go to a table with a list of them, use TableCapture and get the list into an uploadable format for AdWords. It’s so much easier than doing it manually.
Ghostery
The internet can be a scary place. Everything you do is tracked by someone. Many webmasters are gathering information on how you interact with their websites and collecting data about your preferences so they can build a profile for you and optimize their marketing and advertising methods. Ghostery allows you to combat that tracking, to an extent. It’s designed to improve your privacy by allowing you to see which website is tracking what and lets you make more informed decisions regarding what you share.
How It Works
When you open the extension, you get a list of trackers the website is using. It also gives you the option to block those trackers for a better browsing experience.
How/When I Use It
While most people probably use this to block ads, I use for other reasons.
First, it’s really helpful for troubleshooting slow loading pages. If a page loads too slow, I can turn off trackers to see if that is what’s effecting the load time.
Second, I use this to stay up-to-date in SEM. When I’m doing competitor research, I can see which ad networks our clients’ competitors are using and if they’re remarketing/retargeting.
Page Load Time
Speaking of page load times, this one is another favorite of mine. The Page Load Time extension does exactly what it sounds like: it shows you the time it takes to load the page you’ve just navigated to. When you open it up, everything gets broken down for you so you can see why the page is loading slowly.
How It Works
It’s always on, so whenever my page finishes loading, the chrome extension displays the time it took. If you click the icon, you’ll get a little window showing the events and how long each took to load and in which order.
How/When I Use It
Page Speed is a Google ranking factor. That means if your site/page is too slow, it’s not showing up in SERPs. On top of that being a Google priority, slow load times are also a bad user experience. Nobody wants that and we certainly don’t want it for our clients.
Whether I’m look at it for SEO or for SEM, I need to know why the page is loading slowly. So I pop open Page Load Time to ID the culprit and get to work on showing the client how to fix it.
Character Count
Character Count tells you how many characters you’ve highlighted on a webpage. It sounds simple but it’s glorious.
How It Works
All you do is click the chrome extension to turn it on, highlight some text on a page, and the number of characters you’re looking at appears at the top right corner of the browser.
How/When I Use It
I can’t even begin to tell you how many times per week I use Character Count. I write a lot of ad copy and review a lot of websites, so it comes in handy to know how many characters are on a page.
If I’m advertising for a client, the first step is to look at the page they want traffic to land on. I skim the site and look for text that clearly defines the goal of the page and highlight it. Is it short enough to be a headline in AdWords? Maybe it will fit in the description if not.
I also use character count for writing meta descriptions. Again, the copy on the page is the key. I want the general idea of the page in less than 155 characters. Can I find that somewhere?
You might also want to look into Word Count if you do this kind of work often.
Keywords Everywhere
Keywords Everywhere is a keyword research tool that allows you to find similar keywords and provides Google search volume and Cost per Click data for that term, so it’s great for SEO and SEM. It keeps me from having to switch back and forth between all of my keyword tools, too, which is a time saver.
How It Works
The Chrome Extension is always on, so every time you do a search you’ll get Google volume for that keyword as well as CPC data.
You can also see keyword data in the following platforms. It doesn’t just apply to Google Search.
Supported websites:
Google.com – the data is shown right under the search textbox
Google Search Console – the data is shown in the Search Analytics page
Google Analytics – data shown in the Organic and Search Engine Optimization -> Queries pages
Google Trends – data shown in the queries widget
Google Keyword Planner – data shown in a new column
Google Search – data shown under main keyword as well as related searches
YouTube – data shown under the searchbox
Amazon – data shown under the searchbox
eBay – data shown under the searchbox
Etsy – data shown under the searchbox
UberSuggest – data shown alongside keywords in this awesome keyword suggestion tool
AnswerThePublic.com – data shown in popup on each spoke of the wheel, data also shown in the alphabetic listings
Soovle.com – data shown next to each keyword all over the page
KeywordShitter.com – data shown under the main text area next to keywords
Majestic – Anchor Text Report
Moz Open Site Explorer – Anchor Text Report
How/When I Use It
After I do a Google search for a keyword I’m thinking about using, I can go to the bottom of the search results and get all of the similar words that people search for and save them via the Add All Keywords button on the right of the screen.
All of those keywords show up in my favorites along with the data I need to finish my research. I can then copy or download them into any document of my choice. You can print them too, but I never use that.
It gets better. I can then go into Google Analytics or Search Console and, in any report with keywords listed, I’ll get monthly volume and CPC data for the keywords that are already bringing people to their site.
Keywords Everywhere has a new feature that lets you upload keywords (up to 10,000) and it returns data for all of them.
It might seem like a long process, but I like the extension because I don’t have to sift through a bevvy of keywords that aren’t useful. Most of these are going to be relevant. I encourage you to give it a try. It’s wonderful.
Bonus Extensions
These tools aren’t necessarily related to SEO or PPC advertisers, but they can certainly be useful in this industry.
MockFlow
If you’re into user experience and site layout, but aren’t a designer, this one is essential! MockFlow lets you design wireframe concepts quickly and easily. If you don’t have access to all of that fancy development software, this one will be really helpful.
Color Zilla
http://ift.tt/2z8yBG3
0 notes
Text
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
Working in Search Engine Optimization or Digital Advertising forces you to accomplish tasks quickly. Either everything is an emergency or you just need to find a way to be more efficient because there’s so much to accomplish.
In my experience, Chrome extensions have been one of the easiest ways to take care of those problems so I can get work done faster. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite extensions to help you do the same. Even more, I’ve expanded this blog to include specific scenarios where these tools will make you faster and more productive!
Google Tag Assistant
Tag Assistant is a great tool. It helps webmasters verify that their Google tags are installed and working properly. Sure, you can dig into your code and find that, but this extension makes it so much easier.
Here are the tags the extension will review:
Google Analytics (ga.js)
Google Analytics (dc.js)
AdWords Conversion Tracking
AdWords Remarketing (legacy)
AdWords Remarketing (new remarketing tag)
Doubleclick Floodlight
Google Tag Manager
How It Works
Go to the page you want to check and click on the extension. That will open a dropdown menu which shows you all of the tags installed on that page and if there’s something to worrying about.
Green tags – everything is good. No problems.
Gray tags – there’s no tag found on the page.
Blue tags – there are suggestions for improvement.
Yellow tags – there were minor problems with tag code implementation.
Red tags – there were critical implementation issues.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool in a variety of instances, but the first is tag checking. When I’m conducting an SEO or AdWords audit, one of the things I look for is accuracy of information. If I need to rely on GA or AdWords data, I need to make sure all of the tags are working properly and collecting the information the team needs to analyze properly.
Level of Detail
Tip: When you click on the icon, you can see more details about each problem. If you want more detail than the Tag Assistant gives you by default, you can right click on the chrome extension in your browser and click Options. Then you can choose how much information you want to see when there’s a problem.
Now, when you dig into the issues, you’ll get more detail than you would’ve if you left it on default.
Recordings
Another cool feature is recordings. But before we start on that, we need to fix two settings.
Follow Links Across Tabs – right click on the extension and go to Options. Right under Global Options, check the box for Recording: Follow Links Across Tabs.
Validation and Debug – Open the Chrome Extension and click on the 3-dot menu to the right side. Turn on Auto Validation and GA Debug.
All of the above allows you to automatically analyze tags across tabs and pull information from the debugger (which we need for detailed information).
Now, when there’s a problem with one of your tags, you can open up tag assistant and see what the problem is in detail.
To record:
go to the extension and click Record, but make sure your on a page that begins the flow of pages to your site.
Refresh your page.
Navigate through an important flow of pages on your site and click some buttons like add to card to record those actions.
Go to Google Tag Assistant again to click Stop.
Click Full Report.
This shows you if anything is wrong and what the problem is within that flow of pages/actions. Pretty neat stuff!
Builtwith
The Builtwith chrome extension does exactly what the name says. It profiles the website and tells you what technology the site is built with. I’m not just talking about the CMS (although that is part of it).
How It Works
When you open the extension, you can see all of this stuff and more:
Analytics
CMS
Web Server
Framework
Advertising
Analytics and Tracking
JavaScript Libraries & Functions
Mobile
Content Delivery Networks
Etc., etc., etc.
Each section covers the technology used in each category and is accompanied by a link and a description.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool often. As an SEO I need to know what kind of platform the website I’m analyzing is built on. I also need to know which tools they use. My site recommendations need to change if they’re using WordPress vs Drupal or even coding the site by hand (it happens more often than you think). This impacts whether I recommend a specific plugin, or give instructions for coding.
It also helps for me to understand how they’re tracking actions on their site. Is it all through GA or are they using Google Tag Manager? Maybe it’s Adobe Analytics. If it’s GTM, my recommendation might be to upload one of our Recipe packs instead of providing instructions for tracking Events in Google Analytics.
This extension helps me move forward as I work without having to dig into the code much to find the answers. It also helps me to better customize my recommendations for each website.
Moz Toolbar
The MozBar has helped me out on a number of client calls and SEO audits when I need to quickly answer a question about info on a page such as page title, heading tags, how many no-follow links there are and where they’re located as well as Page Authority and Domain Authority.
How It Works
The information you’ll be able to see is based on your account subscription. If you have a free account with Moz, this is what you’ll see:
Custom Searches
Link Metrics
Page Overlay
On-Page Links (Followed, No-Followed, External, or Internal)
Social Metrics
Data Export (CSV)
If you have a MozPro subscription, you get a ton of extra info in the toobar.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool every day, but it’s most useful for website audits, especially when I have to drill down to a specific page or two.
Current title tag and meta description when I’m writing new ones to improve CTR.
Page and Domain Authority
Links to and from that page
Is there schema on the page?
Is the page redirecting properly?
Does the page have a canonical tag? Is it the right one?
Are the heading tags descriptive and organized?
Are they using alt text? Does it have keywords in it?
What’s the page load time?
I could go on forever…
It definitely comes in handy during competitive audits! Keyword help, anyone?
Redirect Path
If you’re performing a full website audit, this chrome extension won’t be helpful, but if you’re looking at a single page or a small group of pages it comes in handy. Redirect Path displays different kinds of errors like 404s and 301s (and many more), as well as client side redirects. You can see them quickly and all in one place.
How It Works
You just click the icon and it gives you a dropdown displaying all redirect paths for that page. You can click on any of them to get more detailed information like server, modification date, content type, language, etc.
How/When I Use It
I love this tool because it shows you all of the paths at once, in order. So maybe it was a 301 redirect to a 404 page, which is very helpful to understand. It also looks at JS and meta refresh redirects.
It’s fantastic for testing rewrite rules, landing page redirects, finding redirect chains, etc. Oh, and it has a copy to clipboard feature, which is pretty awesome.
Web Developer Checklist
You can use the Web Dev Checklist extension to get a quick review of the site you’re looking at. With a single click, you’ll see everything from best practices to usability and code quality. There’s a big list!
How It Works
When you click the icon, you’ll get a dropdown like the one below. Pretty quickly, you get an idea of where the site falls short and where its on its game.
How/When I Use It
I use this in meetings a lot. Sometimes new clients will want to know, “are we doing this”? “Are we using this thing?” And I can say, nope, but we can! For example, they might say, “How can I get more info on my pages in SERPs? I keep seeing stuff below my competitors’ result”. And I open that up and say “we can get more info into SERPS by using Schema. It doesn’t look like your page has that yet”.
Or maybe they say “There’s a page showing up in SERPs that I don’t want in there. How do I remove it”? I open up my Web Developer Checklist and see that they aren’t using robots.txt. Easy fix. I’ll then offer to make and send them a robots.txt file for review and then add it to Search Console to fix the problem.
TableCapture
TableCapture is a super helpful Chrome extension that converts html tables so they can be pasted into Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or Open Office.
How It Works
While on a page with an HTML table, click the icon for TableCapture. It opens up a dropdown with a list of tables on the page for you to choose from.
Then you can choose to copy the table or open up Google Docs to paste it. It pastes beautifully with no problems.
Oh, I forgot to mention that, if the table includes links, you can choose to bring them in with the table information. You can find that under Options. Click Extract link URLs from table cells. Be aware that it will pull the link in beside it, not as anchor text. For example: Link test (http://ift.tt/2z8K0po).
Here’s a page with a few tables on for you to test: http://ift.tt/2xpafDz.
FYI: George, the developer, is super helpful. If you have any questions, he’s on top of it pretty quickly.
How/When I Use It
I find this extension super helpful for any kind of research, like reviewing competitor websites, gathering lead gen ideas, etc. I’ve heard it can be really useful for financial analysts and journalists, too.
When I’m doing PPC work, often a client will say, “I only want to target people in these locations”. Then I’ll need to pull together a list of zip codes. So I can go to a table with a list of them, use TableCapture and get the list into an uploadable format for AdWords. It’s so much easier than doing it manually.
Ghostery
The internet can be a scary place. Everything you do is tracked by someone. Many webmasters are gathering information on how you interact with their websites and collecting data about your preferences so they can build a profile for you and optimize their marketing and advertising methods. Ghostery allows you to combat that tracking, to an extent. It’s designed to improve your privacy by allowing you to see which website is tracking what and lets you make more informed decisions regarding what you share.
How It Works
When you open the extension, you get a list of trackers the website is using. It also gives you the option to block those trackers for a better browsing experience.
How/When I Use It
While most people probably use this to block ads, I use for other reasons.
First, it’s really helpful for troubleshooting slow loading pages. If a page loads too slow, I can turn off trackers to see if that is what’s effecting the load time.
Second, I use this to stay up-to-date in SEM. When I’m doing competitor research, I can see which ad networks our clients’ competitors are using and if they’re remarketing/retargeting.
Page Load Time
Speaking of page load times, this one is another favorite of mine. The Page Load Time extension does exactly what it sounds like: it shows you the time it takes to load the page you’ve just navigated to. When you open it up, everything gets broken down for you so you can see why the page is loading slowly.
How It Works
It’s always on, so whenever my page finishes loading, the chrome extension displays the time it took. If you click the icon, you’ll get a little window showing the events and how long each took to load and in which order.
How/When I Use It
Page Speed is a Google ranking factor. That means if your site/page is too slow, it’s not showing up in SERPs. On top of that being a Google priority, slow load times are also a bad user experience. Nobody wants that and we certainly don’t want it for our clients.
Whether I’m look at it for SEO or for SEM, I need to know why the page is loading slowly. So I pop open Page Load Time to ID the culprit and get to work on showing the client how to fix it.
Character Count
Character Count tells you how many characters you’ve highlighted on a webpage. It sounds simple but it’s glorious.
How It Works
All you do is click the chrome extension to turn it on, highlight some text on a page, and the number of characters you’re looking at appears at the top right corner of the browser.
How/When I Use It
I can’t even begin to tell you how many times per week I use Character Count. I write a lot of ad copy and review a lot of websites, so it comes in handy to know how many characters are on a page.
If I’m advertising for a client, the first step is to look at the page they want traffic to land on. I skim the site and look for text that clearly defines the goal of the page and highlight it. Is it short enough to be a headline in AdWords? Maybe it will fit in the description if not.
I also use character count for writing meta descriptions. Again, the copy on the page is the key. I want the general idea of the page in less than 155 characters. Can I find that somewhere?
You might also want to look into Word Count if you do this kind of work often.
Keywords Everywhere
Keywords Everywhere is a keyword research tool that allows you to find similar keywords and provides Google search volume and Cost per Click data for that term, so it’s great for SEO and SEM. It keeps me from having to switch back and forth between all of my keyword tools, too, which is a time saver.
How It Works
The Chrome Extension is always on, so every time you do a search you’ll get Google volume for that keyword as well as CPC data.
You can also see keyword data in the following platforms. It doesn’t just apply to Google Search.
Supported websites:
Google.com – the data is shown right under the search textbox
Google Search Console – the data is shown in the Search Analytics page
Google Analytics – data shown in the Organic and Search Engine Optimization -> Queries pages
Google Trends – data shown in the queries widget
Google Keyword Planner – data shown in a new column
Google Search – data shown under main keyword as well as related searches
YouTube – data shown under the searchbox
Amazon – data shown under the searchbox
eBay – data shown under the searchbox
Etsy – data shown under the searchbox
UberSuggest – data shown alongside keywords in this awesome keyword suggestion tool
AnswerThePublic.com – data shown in popup on each spoke of the wheel, data also shown in the alphabetic listings
Soovle.com – data shown next to each keyword all over the page
KeywordShitter.com – data shown under the main text area next to keywords
Majestic – Anchor Text Report
Moz Open Site Explorer – Anchor Text Report
How/When I Use It
After I do a Google search for a keyword I’m thinking about using, I can go to the bottom of the search results and get all of the similar words that people search for and save them via the Add All Keywords button on the right of the screen.
All of those keywords show up in my favorites along with the data I need to finish my research. I can then copy or download them into any document of my choice. You can print them too, but I never use that.
It gets better. I can then go into Google Analytics or Search Console and, in any report with keywords listed, I’ll get monthly volume and CPC data for the keywords that are already bringing people to their site.
Keywords Everywhere has a new feature that lets you upload keywords (up to 10,000) and it returns data for all of them.
It might seem like a long process, but I like the extension because I don’t have to sift through a bevvy of keywords that aren’t useful. Most of these are going to be relevant. I encourage you to give it a try. It’s wonderful.
Bonus Extensions
These tools aren’t necessarily related to SEO or PPC advertisers, but they can certainly be useful in this industry.
MockFlow
If you’re into user experience and site layout, but aren’t a designer, this one is essential! MockFlow lets you design wireframe concepts quickly and easily. If you don’t have access to all of that fancy development software, this one will be really helpful.
Color Zilla
http://ift.tt/2z8yBG3
0 notes
Text
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
Working in Search Engine Optimization or Digital Advertising forces you to accomplish tasks quickly. Either everything is an emergency or you just need to find a way to be more efficient because there’s so much to accomplish.
In my experience, Chrome extensions have been one of the easiest ways to take care of those problems so I can get work done faster. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite extensions to help you do the same. Even more, I’ve expanded this blog to include specific scenarios where these tools will make you faster and more productive!
Google Tag Assistant
Tag Assistant is a great tool. It helps webmasters verify that their Google tags are installed and working properly. Sure, you can dig into your code and find that, but this extension makes it so much easier.
Here are the tags the extension will review:
Google Analytics (ga.js)
Google Analytics (dc.js)
AdWords Conversion Tracking
AdWords Remarketing (legacy)
AdWords Remarketing (new remarketing tag)
Doubleclick Floodlight
Google Tag Manager
How It Works
Go to the page you want to check and click on the extension. That will open a dropdown menu which shows you all of the tags installed on that page and if there’s something to worrying about.
Green tags – everything is good. No problems.
Gray tags – there’s no tag found on the page.
Blue tags – there are suggestions for improvement.
Yellow tags – there were minor problems with tag code implementation.
Red tags – there were critical implementation issues.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool in a variety of instances, but the first is tag checking. When I’m conducting an SEO or AdWords audit, one of the things I look for is accuracy of information. If I need to rely on GA or AdWords data, I need to make sure all of the tags are working properly and collecting the information the team needs to analyze properly.
Level of Detail
Tip: When you click on the icon, you can see more details about each problem. If you want more detail than the Tag Assistant gives you by default, you can right click on the chrome extension in your browser and click Options. Then you can choose how much information you want to see when there’s a problem.
Now, when you dig into the issues, you’ll get more detail than you would’ve if you left it on default.
Recordings
Another cool feature is recordings. But before we start on that, we need to fix two settings.
Follow Links Across Tabs – right click on the extension and go to Options. Right under Global Options, check the box for Recording: Follow Links Across Tabs.
Validation and Debug – Open the Chrome Extension and click on the 3-dot menu to the right side. Turn on Auto Validation and GA Debug.
All of the above allows you to automatically analyze tags across tabs and pull information from the debugger (which we need for detailed information).
Now, when there’s a problem with one of your tags, you can open up tag assistant and see what the problem is in detail.
To record:
go to the extension and click Record, but make sure your on a page that begins the flow of pages to your site.
Refresh your page.
Navigate through an important flow of pages on your site and click some buttons like add to card to record those actions.
Go to Google Tag Assistant again to click Stop.
Click Full Report.
This shows you if anything is wrong and what the problem is within that flow of pages/actions. Pretty neat stuff!
Builtwith
The Builtwith chrome extension does exactly what the name says. It profiles the website and tells you what technology the site is built with. I’m not just talking about the CMS (although that is part of it).
How It Works
When you open the extension, you can see all of this stuff and more:
Analytics
CMS
Web Server
Framework
Advertising
Analytics and Tracking
JavaScript Libraries & Functions
Mobile
Content Delivery Networks
Etc., etc., etc.
Each section covers the technology used in each category and is accompanied by a link and a description.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool often. As an SEO I need to know what kind of platform the website I’m analyzing is built on. I also need to know which tools they use. My site recommendations need to change if they’re using WordPress vs Drupal or even coding the site by hand (it happens more often than you think). This impacts whether I recommend a specific plugin, or give instructions for coding.
It also helps for me to understand how they’re tracking actions on their site. Is it all through GA or are they using Google Tag Manager? Maybe it’s Adobe Analytics. If it’s GTM, my recommendation might be to upload one of our Recipe packs instead of providing instructions for tracking Events in Google Analytics.
This extension helps me move forward as I work without having to dig into the code much to find the answers. It also helps me to better customize my recommendations for each website.
Moz Toolbar
The MozBar has helped me out on a number of client calls and SEO audits when I need to quickly answer a question about info on a page such as page title, heading tags, how many no-follow links there are and where they’re located as well as Page Authority and Domain Authority.
How It Works
The information you’ll be able to see is based on your account subscription. If you have a free account with Moz, this is what you’ll see:
Custom Searches
Link Metrics
Page Overlay
On-Page Links (Followed, No-Followed, External, or Internal)
Social Metrics
Data Export (CSV)
If you have a MozPro subscription, you get a ton of extra info in the toobar.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool every day, but it’s most useful for website audits, especially when I have to drill down to a specific page or two.
Current title tag and meta description when I’m writing new ones to improve CTR.
Page and Domain Authority
Links to and from that page
Is there schema on the page?
Is the page redirecting properly?
Does the page have a canonical tag? Is it the right one?
Are the heading tags descriptive and organized?
Are they using alt text? Does it have keywords in it?
What’s the page load time?
I could go on forever…
It definitely comes in handy during competitive audits! Keyword help, anyone?
Redirect Path
If you’re performing a full website audit, this chrome extension won’t be helpful, but if you’re looking at a single page or a small group of pages it comes in handy. Redirect Path displays different kinds of errors like 404s and 301s (and many more), as well as client side redirects. You can see them quickly and all in one place.
How It Works
You just click the icon and it gives you a dropdown displaying all redirect paths for that page. You can click on any of them to get more detailed information like server, modification date, content type, language, etc.
How/When I Use It
I love this tool because it shows you all of the paths at once, in order. So maybe it was a 301 redirect to a 404 page, which is very helpful to understand. It also looks at JS and meta refresh redirects.
It’s fantastic for testing rewrite rules, landing page redirects, finding redirect chains, etc. Oh, and it has a copy to clipboard feature, which is pretty awesome.
Web Developer Checklist
You can use the Web Dev Checklist extension to get a quick review of the site you’re looking at. With a single click, you’ll see everything from best practices to usability and code quality. There’s a big list!
How It Works
When you click the icon, you’ll get a dropdown like the one below. Pretty quickly, you get an idea of where the site falls short and where its on its game.
How/When I Use It
I use this in meetings a lot. Sometimes new clients will want to know, “are we doing this”? “Are we using this thing?” And I can say, nope, but we can! For example, they might say, “How can I get more info on my pages in SERPs? I keep seeing stuff below my competitors’ result”. And I open that up and say “we can get more info into SERPS by using Schema. It doesn’t look like your page has that yet”.
Or maybe they say “There’s a page showing up in SERPs that I don’t want in there. How do I remove it”? I open up my Web Developer Checklist and see that they aren’t using robots.txt. Easy fix. I’ll then offer to make and send them a robots.txt file for review and then add it to Search Console to fix the problem.
TableCapture
TableCapture is a super helpful Chrome extension that converts html tables so they can be pasted into Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or Open Office.
How It Works
While on a page with an HTML table, click the icon for TableCapture. It opens up a dropdown with a list of tables on the page for you to choose from.
Then you can choose to copy the table or open up Google Docs to paste it. It pastes beautifully with no problems.
Oh, I forgot to mention that, if the table includes links, you can choose to bring them in with the table information. You can find that under Options. Click Extract link URLs from table cells. Be aware that it will pull the link in beside it, not as anchor text. For example: Link test (http://ift.tt/2z8K0po).
Here’s a page with a few tables on for you to test: http://ift.tt/2xpafDz.
FYI: George, the developer, is super helpful. If you have any questions, he’s on top of it pretty quickly.
How/When I Use It
I find this extension super helpful for any kind of research, like reviewing competitor websites, gathering lead gen ideas, etc. I’ve heard it can be really useful for financial analysts and journalists, too.
When I’m doing PPC work, often a client will say, “I only want to target people in these locations”. Then I’ll need to pull together a list of zip codes. So I can go to a table with a list of them, use TableCapture and get the list into an uploadable format for AdWords. It’s so much easier than doing it manually.
Ghostery
The internet can be a scary place. Everything you do is tracked by someone. Many webmasters are gathering information on how you interact with their websites and collecting data about your preferences so they can build a profile for you and optimize their marketing and advertising methods. Ghostery allows you to combat that tracking, to an extent. It’s designed to improve your privacy by allowing you to see which website is tracking what and lets you make more informed decisions regarding what you share.
How It Works
When you open the extension, you get a list of trackers the website is using. It also gives you the option to block those trackers for a better browsing experience.
How/When I Use It
While most people probably use this to block ads, I use for other reasons.
First, it’s really helpful for troubleshooting slow loading pages. If a page loads too slow, I can turn off trackers to see if that is what’s effecting the load time.
Second, I use this to stay up-to-date in SEM. When I’m doing competitor research, I can see which ad networks our clients’ competitors are using and if they’re remarketing/retargeting.
Page Load Time
Speaking of page load times, this one is another favorite of mine. The Page Load Time extension does exactly what it sounds like: it shows you the time it takes to load the page you’ve just navigated to. When you open it up, everything gets broken down for you so you can see why the page is loading slowly.
How It Works
It’s always on, so whenever my page finishes loading, the chrome extension displays the time it took. If you click the icon, you’ll get a little window showing the events and how long each took to load and in which order.
How/When I Use It
Page Speed is a Google ranking factor. That means if your site/page is too slow, it’s not showing up in SERPs. On top of that being a Google priority, slow load times are also a bad user experience. Nobody wants that and we certainly don’t want it for our clients.
Whether I’m look at it for SEO or for SEM, I need to know why the page is loading slowly. So I pop open Page Load Time to ID the culprit and get to work on showing the client how to fix it.
Character Count
Character Count tells you how many characters you’ve highlighted on a webpage. It sounds simple but it’s glorious.
How It Works
All you do is click the chrome extension to turn it on, highlight some text on a page, and the number of characters you’re looking at appears at the top right corner of the browser.
How/When I Use It
I can’t even begin to tell you how many times per week I use Character Count. I write a lot of ad copy and review a lot of websites, so it comes in handy to know how many characters are on a page.
If I’m advertising for a client, the first step is to look at the page they want traffic to land on. I skim the site and look for text that clearly defines the goal of the page and highlight it. Is it short enough to be a headline in AdWords? Maybe it will fit in the description if not.
I also use character count for writing meta descriptions. Again, the copy on the page is the key. I want the general idea of the page in less than 155 characters. Can I find that somewhere?
You might also want to look into Word Count if you do this kind of work often.
Keywords Everywhere
Keywords Everywhere is a keyword research tool that allows you to find similar keywords and provides Google search volume and Cost per Click data for that term, so it’s great for SEO and SEM. It keeps me from having to switch back and forth between all of my keyword tools, too, which is a time saver.
How It Works
The Chrome Extension is always on, so every time you do a search you’ll get Google volume for that keyword as well as CPC data.
You can also see keyword data in the following platforms. It doesn’t just apply to Google Search.
Supported websites:
Google.com – the data is shown right under the search textbox
Google Search Console – the data is shown in the Search Analytics page
Google Analytics – data shown in the Organic and Search Engine Optimization -> Queries pages
Google Trends – data shown in the queries widget
Google Keyword Planner – data shown in a new column
Google Search – data shown under main keyword as well as related searches
YouTube – data shown under the searchbox
Amazon – data shown under the searchbox
eBay – data shown under the searchbox
Etsy – data shown under the searchbox
UberSuggest – data shown alongside keywords in this awesome keyword suggestion tool
AnswerThePublic.com – data shown in popup on each spoke of the wheel, data also shown in the alphabetic listings
Soovle.com – data shown next to each keyword all over the page
KeywordShitter.com – data shown under the main text area next to keywords
Majestic – Anchor Text Report
Moz Open Site Explorer – Anchor Text Report
How/When I Use It
After I do a Google search for a keyword I’m thinking about using, I can go to the bottom of the search results and get all of the similar words that people search for and save them via the Add All Keywords button on the right of the screen.
All of those keywords show up in my favorites along with the data I need to finish my research. I can then copy or download them into any document of my choice. You can print them too, but I never use that.
It gets better. I can then go into Google Analytics or Search Console and, in any report with keywords listed, I’ll get monthly volume and CPC data for the keywords that are already bringing people to their site.
Keywords Everywhere has a new feature that lets you upload keywords (up to 10,000) and it returns data for all of them.
It might seem like a long process, but I like the extension because I don’t have to sift through a bevvy of keywords that aren’t useful. Most of these are going to be relevant. I encourage you to give it a try. It’s wonderful.
Bonus Extensions
These tools aren’t necessarily related to SEO or PPC advertisers, but they can certainly be useful in this industry.
MockFlow
If you’re into user experience and site layout, but aren’t a designer, this one is essential! MockFlow lets you design wireframe concepts quickly and easily. If you don’t have access to all of that fancy development software, this one will be really helpful.
Color Zilla
http://ift.tt/2z8yBG3
0 notes
Text
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
Working in Search Engine Optimization or Digital Advertising forces you to accomplish tasks quickly. Either everything is an emergency or you just need to find a way to be more efficient because there’s so much to accomplish.
In my experience, Chrome extensions have been one of the easiest ways to take care of those problems so I can get work done faster. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite extensions to help you do the same. Even more, I’ve expanded this blog to include specific scenarios where these tools will make you faster and more productive!
Google Tag Assistant
Tag Assistant is a great tool. It helps webmasters verify that their Google tags are installed and working properly. Sure, you can dig into your code and find that, but this extension makes it so much easier.
Here are the tags the extension will review:
Google Analytics (ga.js)
Google Analytics (dc.js)
AdWords Conversion Tracking
AdWords Remarketing (legacy)
AdWords Remarketing (new remarketing tag)
Doubleclick Floodlight
Google Tag Manager
How It Works
Go to the page you want to check and click on the extension. That will open a dropdown menu which shows you all of the tags installed on that page and if there’s something to worrying about.
Green tags – everything is good. No problems.
Gray tags – there’s no tag found on the page.
Blue tags – there are suggestions for improvement.
Yellow tags – there were minor problems with tag code implementation.
Red tags – there were critical implementation issues.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool in a variety of instances, but the first is tag checking. When I’m conducting an SEO or AdWords audit, one of the things I look for is accuracy of information. If I need to rely on GA or AdWords data, I need to make sure all of the tags are working properly and collecting the information the team needs to analyze properly.
Level of Detail
Tip: When you click on the icon, you can see more details about each problem. If you want more detail than the Tag Assistant gives you by default, you can right click on the chrome extension in your browser and click Options. Then you can choose how much information you want to see when there’s a problem.
Now, when you dig into the issues, you’ll get more detail than you would’ve if you left it on default.
Recordings
Another cool feature is recordings. But before we start on that, we need to fix two settings.
Follow Links Across Tabs – right click on the extension and go to Options. Right under Global Options, check the box for Recording: Follow Links Across Tabs.
Validation and Debug – Open the Chrome Extension and click on the 3-dot menu to the right side. Turn on Auto Validation and GA Debug.
All of the above allows you to automatically analyze tags across tabs and pull information from the debugger (which we need for detailed information).
Now, when there’s a problem with one of your tags, you can open up tag assistant and see what the problem is in detail.
To record:
go to the extension and click Record, but make sure your on a page that begins the flow of pages to your site.
Refresh your page.
Navigate through an important flow of pages on your site and click some buttons like add to card to record those actions.
Go to Google Tag Assistant again to click Stop.
Click Full Report.
This shows you if anything is wrong and what the problem is within that flow of pages/actions. Pretty neat stuff!
Builtwith
The Builtwith chrome extension does exactly what the name says. It profiles the website and tells you what technology the site is built with. I’m not just talking about the CMS (although that is part of it).
How It Works
When you open the extension, you can see all of this stuff and more:
Analytics
CMS
Web Server
Framework
Advertising
Analytics and Tracking
JavaScript Libraries & Functions
Mobile
Content Delivery Networks
Etc., etc., etc.
Each section covers the technology used in each category and is accompanied by a link and a description.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool often. As an SEO I need to know what kind of platform the website I’m analyzing is built on. I also need to know which tools they use. My site recommendations need to change if they’re using WordPress vs Drupal or even coding the site by hand (it happens more often than you think). This impacts whether I recommend a specific plugin, or give instructions for coding.
It also helps for me to understand how they’re tracking actions on their site. Is it all through GA or are they using Google Tag Manager? Maybe it’s Adobe Analytics. If it’s GTM, my recommendation might be to upload one of our Recipe packs instead of providing instructions for tracking Events in Google Analytics.
This extension helps me move forward as I work without having to dig into the code much to find the answers. It also helps me to better customize my recommendations for each website.
Moz Toolbar
The MozBar has helped me out on a number of client calls and SEO audits when I need to quickly answer a question about info on a page such as page title, heading tags, how many no-follow links there are and where they’re located as well as Page Authority and Domain Authority.
How It Works
The information you’ll be able to see is based on your account subscription. If you have a free account with Moz, this is what you’ll see:
Custom Searches
Link Metrics
Page Overlay
On-Page Links (Followed, No-Followed, External, or Internal)
Social Metrics
Data Export (CSV)
If you have a MozPro subscription, you get a ton of extra info in the toobar.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool every day, but it’s most useful for website audits, especially when I have to drill down to a specific page or two.
Current title tag and meta description when I’m writing new ones to improve CTR.
Page and Domain Authority
Links to and from that page
Is there schema on the page?
Is the page redirecting properly?
Does the page have a canonical tag? Is it the right one?
Are the heading tags descriptive and organized?
Are they using alt text? Does it have keywords in it?
What’s the page load time?
I could go on forever…
It definitely comes in handy during competitive audits! Keyword help, anyone?
Redirect Path
If you’re performing a full website audit, this chrome extension won’t be helpful, but if you’re looking at a single page or a small group of pages it comes in handy. Redirect Path displays different kinds of errors like 404s and 301s (and many more), as well as client side redirects. You can see them quickly and all in one place.
How It Works
You just click the icon and it gives you a dropdown displaying all redirect paths for that page. You can click on any of them to get more detailed information like server, modification date, content type, language, etc.
How/When I Use It
I love this tool because it shows you all of the paths at once, in order. So maybe it was a 301 redirect to a 404 page, which is very helpful to understand. It also looks at JS and meta refresh redirects.
It’s fantastic for testing rewrite rules, landing page redirects, finding redirect chains, etc. Oh, and it has a copy to clipboard feature, which is pretty awesome.
Web Developer Checklist
You can use the Web Dev Checklist extension to get a quick review of the site you’re looking at. With a single click, you’ll see everything from best practices to usability and code quality. There’s a big list!
How It Works
When you click the icon, you’ll get a dropdown like the one below. Pretty quickly, you get an idea of where the site falls short and where its on its game.
How/When I Use It
I use this in meetings a lot. Sometimes new clients will want to know, “are we doing this”? “Are we using this thing?” And I can say, nope, but we can! For example, they might say, “How can I get more info on my pages in SERPs? I keep seeing stuff below my competitors’ result”. And I open that up and say “we can get more info into SERPS by using Schema. It doesn’t look like your page has that yet”.
Or maybe they say “There’s a page showing up in SERPs that I don’t want in there. How do I remove it”? I open up my Web Developer Checklist and see that they aren’t using robots.txt. Easy fix. I’ll then offer to make and send them a robots.txt file for review and then add it to Search Console to fix the problem.
TableCapture
TableCapture is a super helpful Chrome extension that converts html tables so they can be pasted into Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or Open Office.
How It Works
While on a page with an HTML table, click the icon for TableCapture. It opens up a dropdown with a list of tables on the page for you to choose from.
Then you can choose to copy the table or open up Google Docs to paste it. It pastes beautifully with no problems.
Oh, I forgot to mention that, if the table includes links, you can choose to bring them in with the table information. You can find that under Options. Click Extract link URLs from table cells. Be aware that it will pull the link in beside it, not as anchor text. For example: Link test (http://ift.tt/2z8K0po).
Here’s a page with a few tables on for you to test: http://ift.tt/2xpafDz.
FYI: George, the developer, is super helpful. If you have any questions, he’s on top of it pretty quickly.
How/When I Use It
I find this extension super helpful for any kind of research, like reviewing competitor websites, gathering lead gen ideas, etc. I’ve heard it can be really useful for financial analysts and journalists, too.
When I’m doing PPC work, often a client will say, “I only want to target people in these locations”. Then I’ll need to pull together a list of zip codes. So I can go to a table with a list of them, use TableCapture and get the list into an uploadable format for AdWords. It’s so much easier than doing it manually.
Ghostery
The internet can be a scary place. Everything you do is tracked by someone. Many webmasters are gathering information on how you interact with their websites and collecting data about your preferences so they can build a profile for you and optimize their marketing and advertising methods. Ghostery allows you to combat that tracking, to an extent. It’s designed to improve your privacy by allowing you to see which website is tracking what and lets you make more informed decisions regarding what you share.
How It Works
When you open the extension, you get a list of trackers the website is using. It also gives you the option to block those trackers for a better browsing experience.
How/When I Use It
While most people probably use this to block ads, I use for other reasons.
First, it’s really helpful for troubleshooting slow loading pages. If a page loads too slow, I can turn off trackers to see if that is what’s effecting the load time.
Second, I use this to stay up-to-date in SEM. When I’m doing competitor research, I can see which ad networks our clients’ competitors are using and if they’re remarketing/retargeting.
Page Load Time
Speaking of page load times, this one is another favorite of mine. The Page Load Time extension does exactly what it sounds like: it shows you the time it takes to load the page you’ve just navigated to. When you open it up, everything gets broken down for you so you can see why the page is loading slowly.
How It Works
It’s always on, so whenever my page finishes loading, the chrome extension displays the time it took. If you click the icon, you’ll get a little window showing the events and how long each took to load and in which order.
How/When I Use It
Page Speed is a Google ranking factor. That means if your site/page is too slow, it’s not showing up in SERPs. On top of that being a Google priority, slow load times are also a bad user experience. Nobody wants that and we certainly don’t want it for our clients.
Whether I’m look at it for SEO or for SEM, I need to know why the page is loading slowly. So I pop open Page Load Time to ID the culprit and get to work on showing the client how to fix it.
Character Count
Character Count tells you how many characters you’ve highlighted on a webpage. It sounds simple but it’s glorious.
How It Works
All you do is click the chrome extension to turn it on, highlight some text on a page, and the number of characters you’re looking at appears at the top right corner of the browser.
How/When I Use It
I can’t even begin to tell you how many times per week I use Character Count. I write a lot of ad copy and review a lot of websites, so it comes in handy to know how many characters are on a page.
If I’m advertising for a client, the first step is to look at the page they want traffic to land on. I skim the site and look for text that clearly defines the goal of the page and highlight it. Is it short enough to be a headline in AdWords? Maybe it will fit in the description if not.
I also use character count for writing meta descriptions. Again, the copy on the page is the key. I want the general idea of the page in less than 155 characters. Can I find that somewhere?
You might also want to look into Word Count if you do this kind of work often.
Keywords Everywhere
Keywords Everywhere is a keyword research tool that allows you to find similar keywords and provides Google search volume and Cost per Click data for that term, so it’s great for SEO and SEM. It keeps me from having to switch back and forth between all of my keyword tools, too, which is a time saver.
How It Works
The Chrome Extension is always on, so every time you do a search you’ll get Google volume for that keyword as well as CPC data.
You can also see keyword data in the following platforms. It doesn’t just apply to Google Search.
Supported websites:
Google.com – the data is shown right under the search textbox
Google Search Console – the data is shown in the Search Analytics page
Google Analytics – data shown in the Organic and Search Engine Optimization -> Queries pages
Google Trends – data shown in the queries widget
Google Keyword Planner – data shown in a new column
Google Search – data shown under main keyword as well as related searches
YouTube – data shown under the searchbox
Amazon – data shown under the searchbox
eBay – data shown under the searchbox
Etsy – data shown under the searchbox
UberSuggest – data shown alongside keywords in this awesome keyword suggestion tool
AnswerThePublic.com – data shown in popup on each spoke of the wheel, data also shown in the alphabetic listings
Soovle.com – data shown next to each keyword all over the page
KeywordShitter.com – data shown under the main text area next to keywords
Majestic – Anchor Text Report
Moz Open Site Explorer – Anchor Text Report
How/When I Use It
After I do a Google search for a keyword I’m thinking about using, I can go to the bottom of the search results and get all of the similar words that people search for and save them via the Add All Keywords button on the right of the screen.
All of those keywords show up in my favorites along with the data I need to finish my research. I can then copy or download them into any document of my choice. You can print them too, but I never use that.
It gets better. I can then go into Google Analytics or Search Console and, in any report with keywords listed, I’ll get monthly volume and CPC data for the keywords that are already bringing people to their site.
Keywords Everywhere has a new feature that lets you upload keywords (up to 10,000) and it returns data for all of them.
It might seem like a long process, but I like the extension because I don’t have to sift through a bevvy of keywords that aren’t useful. Most of these are going to be relevant. I encourage you to give it a try. It’s wonderful.
Bonus Extensions
These tools aren’t necessarily related to SEO or PPC advertisers, but they can certainly be useful in this industry.
MockFlow
If you’re into user experience and site layout, but aren’t a designer, this one is essential! MockFlow lets you design wireframe concepts quickly and easily. If you don’t have access to all of that fancy development software, this one will be really helpful.
Color Zilla
http://ift.tt/2z8yBG3
0 notes
Text
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
Working in Search Engine Optimization or Digital Advertising forces you to accomplish tasks quickly. Either everything is an emergency or you just need to find a way to be more efficient because there’s so much to accomplish.
In my experience, Chrome extensions have been one of the easiest ways to take care of those problems so I can get work done faster. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite extensions to help you do the same. Even more, I’ve expanded this blog to include specific scenarios where these tools will make you faster and more productive!
Google Tag Assistant
Tag Assistant is a great tool. It helps webmasters verify that their Google tags are installed and working properly. Sure, you can dig into your code and find that, but this extension makes it so much easier.
Here are the tags the extension will review:
Google Analytics (ga.js)
Google Analytics (dc.js)
AdWords Conversion Tracking
AdWords Remarketing (legacy)
AdWords Remarketing (new remarketing tag)
Doubleclick Floodlight
Google Tag Manager
How It Works
Go to the page you want to check and click on the extension. That will open a dropdown menu which shows you all of the tags installed on that page and if there’s something to worrying about.
Green tags – everything is good. No problems.
Gray tags – there’s no tag found on the page.
Blue tags – there are suggestions for improvement.
Yellow tags – there were minor problems with tag code implementation.
Red tags – there were critical implementation issues.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool in a variety of instances, but the first is tag checking. When I’m conducting an SEO or AdWords audit, one of the things I look for is accuracy of information. If I need to rely on GA or AdWords data, I need to make sure all of the tags are working properly and collecting the information the team needs to analyze properly.
Level of Detail
Tip: When you click on the icon, you can see more details about each problem. If you want more detail than the Tag Assistant gives you by default, you can right click on the chrome extension in your browser and click Options. Then you can choose how much information you want to see when there’s a problem.
Now, when you dig into the issues, you’ll get more detail than you would’ve if you left it on default.
Recordings
Another cool feature is recordings. But before we start on that, we need to fix two settings.
Follow Links Across Tabs – right click on the extension and go to Options. Right under Global Options, check the box for Recording: Follow Links Across Tabs.
Validation and Debug – Open the Chrome Extension and click on the 3-dot menu to the right side. Turn on Auto Validation and GA Debug.
All of the above allows you to automatically analyze tags across tabs and pull information from the debugger (which we need for detailed information).
Now, when there’s a problem with one of your tags, you can open up tag assistant and see what the problem is in detail.
To record:
go to the extension and click Record, but make sure your on a page that begins the flow of pages to your site.
Refresh your page.
Navigate through an important flow of pages on your site and click some buttons like add to card to record those actions.
Go to Google Tag Assistant again to click Stop.
Click Full Report.
This shows you if anything is wrong and what the problem is within that flow of pages/actions. Pretty neat stuff!
Builtwith
The Builtwith chrome extension does exactly what the name says. It profiles the website and tells you what technology the site is built with. I’m not just talking about the CMS (although that is part of it).
How It Works
When you open the extension, you can see all of this stuff and more:
Analytics
CMS
Web Server
Framework
Advertising
Analytics and Tracking
JavaScript Libraries & Functions
Mobile
Content Delivery Networks
Etc., etc., etc.
Each section covers the technology used in each category and is accompanied by a link and a description.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool often. As an SEO I need to know what kind of platform the website I’m analyzing is built on. I also need to know which tools they use. My site recommendations need to change if they’re using WordPress vs Drupal or even coding the site by hand (it happens more often than you think). This impacts whether I recommend a specific plugin, or give instructions for coding.
It also helps for me to understand how they’re tracking actions on their site. Is it all through GA or are they using Google Tag Manager? Maybe it’s Adobe Analytics. If it’s GTM, my recommendation might be to upload one of our Recipe packs instead of providing instructions for tracking Events in Google Analytics.
This extension helps me move forward as I work without having to dig into the code much to find the answers. It also helps me to better customize my recommendations for each website.
Moz Toolbar
The MozBar has helped me out on a number of client calls and SEO audits when I need to quickly answer a question about info on a page such as page title, heading tags, how many no-follow links there are and where they’re located as well as Page Authority and Domain Authority.
How It Works
The information you’ll be able to see is based on your account subscription. If you have a free account with Moz, this is what you’ll see:
Custom Searches
Link Metrics
Page Overlay
On-Page Links (Followed, No-Followed, External, or Internal)
Social Metrics
Data Export (CSV)
If you have a MozPro subscription, you get a ton of extra info in the toobar.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool every day, but it’s most useful for website audits, especially when I have to drill down to a specific page or two.
Current title tag and meta description when I’m writing new ones to improve CTR.
Page and Domain Authority
Links to and from that page
Is there schema on the page?
Is the page redirecting properly?
Does the page have a canonical tag? Is it the right one?
Are the heading tags descriptive and organized?
Are they using alt text? Does it have keywords in it?
What’s the page load time?
I could go on forever…
It definitely comes in handy during competitive audits! Keyword help, anyone?
Redirect Path
If you’re performing a full website audit, this chrome extension won’t be helpful, but if you’re looking at a single page or a small group of pages it comes in handy. Redirect Path displays different kinds of errors like 404s and 301s (and many more), as well as client side redirects. You can see them quickly and all in one place.
How It Works
You just click the icon and it gives you a dropdown displaying all redirect paths for that page. You can click on any of them to get more detailed information like server, modification date, content type, language, etc.
How/When I Use It
I love this tool because it shows you all of the paths at once, in order. So maybe it was a 301 redirect to a 404 page, which is very helpful to understand. It also looks at JS and meta refresh redirects.
It’s fantastic for testing rewrite rules, landing page redirects, finding redirect chains, etc. Oh, and it has a copy to clipboard feature, which is pretty awesome.
Web Developer Checklist
You can use the Web Dev Checklist extension to get a quick review of the site you’re looking at. With a single click, you’ll see everything from best practices to usability and code quality. There’s a big list!
How It Works
When you click the icon, you’ll get a dropdown like the one below. Pretty quickly, you get an idea of where the site falls short and where its on its game.
How/When I Use It
I use this in meetings a lot. Sometimes new clients will want to know, “are we doing this”? “Are we using this thing?” And I can say, nope, but we can! For example, they might say, “How can I get more info on my pages in SERPs? I keep seeing stuff below my competitors’ result”. And I open that up and say “we can get more info into SERPS by using Schema. It doesn’t look like your page has that yet”.
Or maybe they say “There’s a page showing up in SERPs that I don’t want in there. How do I remove it”? I open up my Web Developer Checklist and see that they aren’t using robots.txt. Easy fix. I’ll then offer to make and send them a robots.txt file for review and then add it to Search Console to fix the problem.
TableCapture
TableCapture is a super helpful Chrome extension that converts html tables so they can be pasted into Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or Open Office.
How It Works
While on a page with an HTML table, click the icon for TableCapture. It opens up a dropdown with a list of tables on the page for you to choose from.
Then you can choose to copy the table or open up Google Docs to paste it. It pastes beautifully with no problems.
Oh, I forgot to mention that, if the table includes links, you can choose to bring them in with the table information. You can find that under Options. Click Extract link URLs from table cells. Be aware that it will pull the link in beside it, not as anchor text. For example: Link test (http://ift.tt/2z8K0po).
Here’s a page with a few tables on for you to test: http://ift.tt/2xpafDz.
FYI: George, the developer, is super helpful. If you have any questions, he’s on top of it pretty quickly.
How/When I Use It
I find this extension super helpful for any kind of research, like reviewing competitor websites, gathering lead gen ideas, etc. I’ve heard it can be really useful for financial analysts and journalists, too.
When I’m doing PPC work, often a client will say, “I only want to target people in these locations”. Then I’ll need to pull together a list of zip codes. So I can go to a table with a list of them, use TableCapture and get the list into an uploadable format for AdWords. It’s so much easier than doing it manually.
Ghostery
The internet can be a scary place. Everything you do is tracked by someone. Many webmasters are gathering information on how you interact with their websites and collecting data about your preferences so they can build a profile for you and optimize their marketing and advertising methods. Ghostery allows you to combat that tracking, to an extent. It’s designed to improve your privacy by allowing you to see which website is tracking what and lets you make more informed decisions regarding what you share.
How It Works
When you open the extension, you get a list of trackers the website is using. It also gives you the option to block those trackers for a better browsing experience.
How/When I Use It
While most people probably use this to block ads, I use for other reasons.
First, it’s really helpful for troubleshooting slow loading pages. If a page loads too slow, I can turn off trackers to see if that is what’s effecting the load time.
Second, I use this to stay up-to-date in SEM. When I’m doing competitor research, I can see which ad networks our clients’ competitors are using and if they’re remarketing/retargeting.
Page Load Time
Speaking of page load times, this one is another favorite of mine. The Page Load Time extension does exactly what it sounds like: it shows you the time it takes to load the page you’ve just navigated to. When you open it up, everything gets broken down for you so you can see why the page is loading slowly.
How It Works
It’s always on, so whenever my page finishes loading, the chrome extension displays the time it took. If you click the icon, you’ll get a little window showing the events and how long each took to load and in which order.
How/When I Use It
Page Speed is a Google ranking factor. That means if your site/page is too slow, it’s not showing up in SERPs. On top of that being a Google priority, slow load times are also a bad user experience. Nobody wants that and we certainly don’t want it for our clients.
Whether I’m look at it for SEO or for SEM, I need to know why the page is loading slowly. So I pop open Page Load Time to ID the culprit and get to work on showing the client how to fix it.
Character Count
Character Count tells you how many characters you’ve highlighted on a webpage. It sounds simple but it’s glorious.
How It Works
All you do is click the chrome extension to turn it on, highlight some text on a page, and the number of characters you’re looking at appears at the top right corner of the browser.
How/When I Use It
I can’t even begin to tell you how many times per week I use Character Count. I write a lot of ad copy and review a lot of websites, so it comes in handy to know how many characters are on a page.
If I’m advertising for a client, the first step is to look at the page they want traffic to land on. I skim the site and look for text that clearly defines the goal of the page and highlight it. Is it short enough to be a headline in AdWords? Maybe it will fit in the description if not.
I also use character count for writing meta descriptions. Again, the copy on the page is the key. I want the general idea of the page in less than 155 characters. Can I find that somewhere?
You might also want to look into Word Count if you do this kind of work often.
Keywords Everywhere
Keywords Everywhere is a keyword research tool that allows you to find similar keywords and provides Google search volume and Cost per Click data for that term, so it’s great for SEO and SEM. It keeps me from having to switch back and forth between all of my keyword tools, too, which is a time saver.
How It Works
The Chrome Extension is always on, so every time you do a search you’ll get Google volume for that keyword as well as CPC data.
You can also see keyword data in the following platforms. It doesn’t just apply to Google Search.
Supported websites:
Google.com – the data is shown right under the search textbox
Google Search Console – the data is shown in the Search Analytics page
Google Analytics – data shown in the Organic and Search Engine Optimization -> Queries pages
Google Trends – data shown in the queries widget
Google Keyword Planner – data shown in a new column
Google Search – data shown under main keyword as well as related searches
YouTube – data shown under the searchbox
Amazon – data shown under the searchbox
eBay – data shown under the searchbox
Etsy – data shown under the searchbox
UberSuggest – data shown alongside keywords in this awesome keyword suggestion tool
AnswerThePublic.com – data shown in popup on each spoke of the wheel, data also shown in the alphabetic listings
Soovle.com – data shown next to each keyword all over the page
KeywordShitter.com – data shown under the main text area next to keywords
Majestic – Anchor Text Report
Moz Open Site Explorer – Anchor Text Report
How/When I Use It
After I do a Google search for a keyword I’m thinking about using, I can go to the bottom of the search results and get all of the similar words that people search for and save them via the Add All Keywords button on the right of the screen.
All of those keywords show up in my favorites along with the data I need to finish my research. I can then copy or download them into any document of my choice. You can print them too, but I never use that.
It gets better. I can then go into Google Analytics or Search Console and, in any report with keywords listed, I’ll get monthly volume and CPC data for the keywords that are already bringing people to their site.
Keywords Everywhere has a new feature that lets you upload keywords (up to 10,000) and it returns data for all of them.
It might seem like a long process, but I like the extension because I don’t have to sift through a bevvy of keywords that aren’t useful. Most of these are going to be relevant. I encourage you to give it a try. It’s wonderful.
Bonus Extensions
These tools aren’t necessarily related to SEO or PPC advertisers, but they can certainly be useful in this industry.
MockFlow
If you’re into user experience and site layout, but aren’t a designer, this one is essential! MockFlow lets you design wireframe concepts quickly and easily. If you don’t have access to all of that fancy development software, this one will be really helpful.
Color Zilla
http://ift.tt/2z8yBG3
0 notes
Text
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
Working in Search Engine Optimization or Digital Advertising forces you to accomplish tasks quickly. Either everything is an emergency or you just need to find a way to be more efficient because there’s so much to accomplish.
In my experience, Chrome extensions have been one of the easiest ways to take care of those problems so I can get work done faster. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite extensions to help you do the same. Even more, I’ve expanded this blog to include specific scenarios where these tools will make you faster and more productive!
Google Tag Assistant
Tag Assistant is a great tool. It helps webmasters verify that their Google tags are installed and working properly. Sure, you can dig into your code and find that, but this extension makes it so much easier.
Here are the tags the extension will review:
Google Analytics (ga.js)
Google Analytics (dc.js)
AdWords Conversion Tracking
AdWords Remarketing (legacy)
AdWords Remarketing (new remarketing tag)
Doubleclick Floodlight
Google Tag Manager
How It Works
Go to the page you want to check and click on the extension. That will open a dropdown menu which shows you all of the tags installed on that page and if there’s something to worrying about.
Green tags – everything is good. No problems.
Gray tags – there’s no tag found on the page.
Blue tags – there are suggestions for improvement.
Yellow tags – there were minor problems with tag code implementation.
Red tags – there were critical implementation issues.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool in a variety of instances, but the first is tag checking. When I’m conducting an SEO or AdWords audit, one of the things I look for is accuracy of information. If I need to rely on GA or AdWords data, I need to make sure all of the tags are working properly and collecting the information the team needs to analyze properly.
Level of Detail
Tip: When you click on the icon, you can see more details about each problem. If you want more detail than the Tag Assistant gives you by default, you can right click on the chrome extension in your browser and click Options. Then you can choose how much information you want to see when there’s a problem.
Now, when you dig into the issues, you’ll get more detail than you would’ve if you left it on default.
Recordings
Another cool feature is recordings. But before we start on that, we need to fix two settings.
Follow Links Across Tabs – right click on the extension and go to Options. Right under Global Options, check the box for Recording: Follow Links Across Tabs.
Validation and Debug – Open the Chrome Extension and click on the 3-dot menu to the right side. Turn on Auto Validation and GA Debug.
All of the above allows you to automatically analyze tags across tabs and pull information from the debugger (which we need for detailed information).
Now, when there’s a problem with one of your tags, you can open up tag assistant and see what the problem is in detail.
To record:
go to the extension and click Record, but make sure your on a page that begins the flow of pages to your site.
Refresh your page.
Navigate through an important flow of pages on your site and click some buttons like add to card to record those actions.
Go to Google Tag Assistant again to click Stop.
Click Full Report.
This shows you if anything is wrong and what the problem is within that flow of pages/actions. Pretty neat stuff!
Builtwith
The Builtwith chrome extension does exactly what the name says. It profiles the website and tells you what technology the site is built with. I’m not just talking about the CMS (although that is part of it).
How It Works
When you open the extension, you can see all of this stuff and more:
Analytics
CMS
Web Server
Framework
Advertising
Analytics and Tracking
JavaScript Libraries & Functions
Mobile
Content Delivery Networks
Etc., etc., etc.
Each section covers the technology used in each category and is accompanied by a link and a description.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool often. As an SEO I need to know what kind of platform the website I’m analyzing is built on. I also need to know which tools they use. My site recommendations need to change if they’re using WordPress vs Drupal or even coding the site by hand (it happens more often than you think). This impacts whether I recommend a specific plugin, or give instructions for coding.
It also helps for me to understand how they’re tracking actions on their site. Is it all through GA or are they using Google Tag Manager? Maybe it’s Adobe Analytics. If it’s GTM, my recommendation might be to upload one of our Recipe packs instead of providing instructions for tracking Events in Google Analytics.
This extension helps me move forward as I work without having to dig into the code much to find the answers. It also helps me to better customize my recommendations for each website.
Moz Toolbar
The MozBar has helped me out on a number of client calls and SEO audits when I need to quickly answer a question about info on a page such as page title, heading tags, how many no-follow links there are and where they’re located as well as Page Authority and Domain Authority.
How It Works
The information you’ll be able to see is based on your account subscription. If you have a free account with Moz, this is what you’ll see:
Custom Searches
Link Metrics
Page Overlay
On-Page Links (Followed, No-Followed, External, or Internal)
Social Metrics
Data Export (CSV)
If you have a MozPro subscription, you get a ton of extra info in the toobar.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool every day, but it’s most useful for website audits, especially when I have to drill down to a specific page or two.
Current title tag and meta description when I’m writing new ones to improve CTR.
Page and Domain Authority
Links to and from that page
Is there schema on the page?
Is the page redirecting properly?
Does the page have a canonical tag? Is it the right one?
Are the heading tags descriptive and organized?
Are they using alt text? Does it have keywords in it?
What’s the page load time?
I could go on forever…
It definitely comes in handy during competitive audits! Keyword help, anyone?
Redirect Path
If you’re performing a full website audit, this chrome extension won’t be helpful, but if you’re looking at a single page or a small group of pages it comes in handy. Redirect Path displays different kinds of errors like 404s and 301s (and many more), as well as client side redirects. You can see them quickly and all in one place.
How It Works
You just click the icon and it gives you a dropdown displaying all redirect paths for that page. You can click on any of them to get more detailed information like server, modification date, content type, language, etc.
How/When I Use It
I love this tool because it shows you all of the paths at once, in order. So maybe it was a 301 redirect to a 404 page, which is very helpful to understand. It also looks at JS and meta refresh redirects.
It’s fantastic for testing rewrite rules, landing page redirects, finding redirect chains, etc. Oh, and it has a copy to clipboard feature, which is pretty awesome.
Web Developer Checklist
You can use the Web Dev Checklist extension to get a quick review of the site you’re looking at. With a single click, you’ll see everything from best practices to usability and code quality. There’s a big list!
How It Works
When you click the icon, you’ll get a dropdown like the one below. Pretty quickly, you get an idea of where the site falls short and where its on its game.
How/When I Use It
I use this in meetings a lot. Sometimes new clients will want to know, “are we doing this”? “Are we using this thing?” And I can say, nope, but we can! For example, they might say, “How can I get more info on my pages in SERPs? I keep seeing stuff below my competitors’ result”. And I open that up and say “we can get more info into SERPS by using Schema. It doesn’t look like your page has that yet”.
Or maybe they say “There’s a page showing up in SERPs that I don’t want in there. How do I remove it”? I open up my Web Developer Checklist and see that they aren’t using robots.txt. Easy fix. I’ll then offer to make and send them a robots.txt file for review and then add it to Search Console to fix the problem.
TableCapture
TableCapture is a super helpful Chrome extension that converts html tables so they can be pasted into Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or Open Office.
How It Works
While on a page with an HTML table, click the icon for TableCapture. It opens up a dropdown with a list of tables on the page for you to choose from.
Then you can choose to copy the table or open up Google Docs to paste it. It pastes beautifully with no problems.
Oh, I forgot to mention that, if the table includes links, you can choose to bring them in with the table information. You can find that under Options. Click Extract link URLs from table cells. Be aware that it will pull the link in beside it, not as anchor text. For example: Link test (http://ift.tt/2z8K0po).
Here’s a page with a few tables on for you to test: http://ift.tt/2xpafDz.
FYI: George, the developer, is super helpful. If you have any questions, he’s on top of it pretty quickly.
How/When I Use It
I find this extension super helpful for any kind of research, like reviewing competitor websites, gathering lead gen ideas, etc. I’ve heard it can be really useful for financial analysts and journalists, too.
When I’m doing PPC work, often a client will say, “I only want to target people in these locations”. Then I’ll need to pull together a list of zip codes. So I can go to a table with a list of them, use TableCapture and get the list into an uploadable format for AdWords. It’s so much easier than doing it manually.
Ghostery
The internet can be a scary place. Everything you do is tracked by someone. Many webmasters are gathering information on how you interact with their websites and collecting data about your preferences so they can build a profile for you and optimize their marketing and advertising methods. Ghostery allows you to combat that tracking, to an extent. It’s designed to improve your privacy by allowing you to see which website is tracking what and lets you make more informed decisions regarding what you share.
How It Works
When you open the extension, you get a list of trackers the website is using. It also gives you the option to block those trackers for a better browsing experience.
How/When I Use It
While most people probably use this to block ads, I use for other reasons.
First, it’s really helpful for troubleshooting slow loading pages. If a page loads too slow, I can turn off trackers to see if that is what’s effecting the load time.
Second, I use this to stay up-to-date in SEM. When I’m doing competitor research, I can see which ad networks our clients’ competitors are using and if they’re remarketing/retargeting.
Page Load Time
Speaking of page load times, this one is another favorite of mine. The Page Load Time extension does exactly what it sounds like: it shows you the time it takes to load the page you’ve just navigated to. When you open it up, everything gets broken down for you so you can see why the page is loading slowly.
How It Works
It’s always on, so whenever my page finishes loading, the chrome extension displays the time it took. If you click the icon, you’ll get a little window showing the events and how long each took to load and in which order.
How/When I Use It
Page Speed is a Google ranking factor. That means if your site/page is too slow, it’s not showing up in SERPs. On top of that being a Google priority, slow load times are also a bad user experience. Nobody wants that and we certainly don’t want it for our clients.
Whether I’m look at it for SEO or for SEM, I need to know why the page is loading slowly. So I pop open Page Load Time to ID the culprit and get to work on showing the client how to fix it.
Character Count
Character Count tells you how many characters you’ve highlighted on a webpage. It sounds simple but it’s glorious.
How It Works
All you do is click the chrome extension to turn it on, highlight some text on a page, and the number of characters you’re looking at appears at the top right corner of the browser.
How/When I Use It
I can’t even begin to tell you how many times per week I use Character Count. I write a lot of ad copy and review a lot of websites, so it comes in handy to know how many characters are on a page.
If I’m advertising for a client, the first step is to look at the page they want traffic to land on. I skim the site and look for text that clearly defines the goal of the page and highlight it. Is it short enough to be a headline in AdWords? Maybe it will fit in the description if not.
I also use character count for writing meta descriptions. Again, the copy on the page is the key. I want the general idea of the page in less than 155 characters. Can I find that somewhere?
You might also want to look into Word Count if you do this kind of work often.
Keywords Everywhere
Keywords Everywhere is a keyword research tool that allows you to find similar keywords and provides Google search volume and Cost per Click data for that term, so it’s great for SEO and SEM. It keeps me from having to switch back and forth between all of my keyword tools, too, which is a time saver.
How It Works
The Chrome Extension is always on, so every time you do a search you’ll get Google volume for that keyword as well as CPC data.
You can also see keyword data in the following platforms. It doesn’t just apply to Google Search.
Supported websites:
Google.com – the data is shown right under the search textbox
Google Search Console – the data is shown in the Search Analytics page
Google Analytics – data shown in the Organic and Search Engine Optimization -> Queries pages
Google Trends – data shown in the queries widget
Google Keyword Planner – data shown in a new column
Google Search – data shown under main keyword as well as related searches
YouTube – data shown under the searchbox
Amazon – data shown under the searchbox
eBay – data shown under the searchbox
Etsy – data shown under the searchbox
UberSuggest – data shown alongside keywords in this awesome keyword suggestion tool
AnswerThePublic.com – data shown in popup on each spoke of the wheel, data also shown in the alphabetic listings
Soovle.com – data shown next to each keyword all over the page
KeywordShitter.com – data shown under the main text area next to keywords
Majestic – Anchor Text Report
Moz Open Site Explorer – Anchor Text Report
How/When I Use It
After I do a Google search for a keyword I’m thinking about using, I can go to the bottom of the search results and get all of the similar words that people search for and save them via the Add All Keywords button on the right of the screen.
All of those keywords show up in my favorites along with the data I need to finish my research. I can then copy or download them into any document of my choice. You can print them too, but I never use that.
It gets better. I can then go into Google Analytics or Search Console and, in any report with keywords listed, I’ll get monthly volume and CPC data for the keywords that are already bringing people to their site.
Keywords Everywhere has a new feature that lets you upload keywords (up to 10,000) and it returns data for all of them.
It might seem like a long process, but I like the extension because I don’t have to sift through a bevvy of keywords that aren’t useful. Most of these are going to be relevant. I encourage you to give it a try. It’s wonderful.
Bonus Extensions
These tools aren’t necessarily related to SEO or PPC advertisers, but they can certainly be useful in this industry.
MockFlow
If you’re into user experience and site layout, but aren’t a designer, this one is essential! MockFlow lets you design wireframe concepts quickly and easily. If you don’t have access to all of that fancy development software, this one will be really helpful.
Color Zilla
http://ift.tt/2z8yBG3
0 notes
Text
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals
Working in Search Engine Optimization or Digital Advertising forces you to accomplish tasks quickly. Either everything is an emergency or you just need to find a way to be more efficient because there’s so much to accomplish.
In my experience, Chrome extensions have been one of the easiest ways to take care of those problems so I can get work done faster. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite extensions to help you do the same. Even more, I’ve expanded this blog to include specific scenarios where these tools will make you faster and more productive!
Google Tag Assistant
Tag Assistant is a great tool. It helps webmasters verify that their Google tags are installed and working properly. Sure, you can dig into your code and find that, but this extension makes it so much easier.
Here are the tags the extension will review:
Google Analytics (ga.js)
Google Analytics (dc.js)
AdWords Conversion Tracking
AdWords Remarketing (legacy)
AdWords Remarketing (new remarketing tag)
Doubleclick Floodlight
Google Tag Manager
How It Works
Go to the page you want to check and click on the extension. That will open a dropdown menu which shows you all of the tags installed on that page and if there’s something to worrying about.
Green tags – everything is good. No problems.
Gray tags – there’s no tag found on the page.
Blue tags – there are suggestions for improvement.
Yellow tags – there were minor problems with tag code implementation.
Red tags – there were critical implementation issues.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool in a variety of instances, but the first is tag checking. When I’m conducting an SEO or AdWords audit, one of the things I look for is accuracy of information. If I need to rely on GA or AdWords data, I need to make sure all of the tags are working properly and collecting the information the team needs to analyze properly.
Level of Detail
Tip: When you click on the icon, you can see more details about each problem. If you want more detail than the Tag Assistant gives you by default, you can right click on the chrome extension in your browser and click Options. Then you can choose how much information you want to see when there’s a problem.
Now, when you dig into the issues, you’ll get more detail than you would’ve if you left it on default.
Recordings
Another cool feature is recordings. But before we start on that, we need to fix two settings.
Follow Links Across Tabs – right click on the extension and go to Options. Right under Global Options, check the box for Recording: Follow Links Across Tabs.
Validation and Debug – Open the Chrome Extension and click on the 3-dot menu to the right side. Turn on Auto Validation and GA Debug.
All of the above allows you to automatically analyze tags across tabs and pull information from the debugger (which we need for detailed information).
Now, when there’s a problem with one of your tags, you can open up tag assistant and see what the problem is in detail.
To record:
go to the extension and click Record, but make sure your on a page that begins the flow of pages to your site.
Refresh your page.
Navigate through an important flow of pages on your site and click some buttons like add to card to record those actions.
Go to Google Tag Assistant again to click Stop.
Click Full Report.
This shows you if anything is wrong and what the problem is within that flow of pages/actions. Pretty neat stuff!
Builtwith
The Builtwith chrome extension does exactly what the name says. It profiles the website and tells you what technology the site is built with. I’m not just talking about the CMS (although that is part of it).
How It Works
When you open the extension, you can see all of this stuff and more:
Analytics
CMS
Web Server
Framework
Advertising
Analytics and Tracking
JavaScript Libraries & Functions
Mobile
Content Delivery Networks
Etc., etc., etc.
Each section covers the technology used in each category and is accompanied by a link and a description.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool often. As an SEO I need to know what kind of platform the website I’m analyzing is built on. I also need to know which tools they use. My site recommendations need to change if they’re using WordPress vs Drupal or even coding the site by hand (it happens more often than you think). This impacts whether I recommend a specific plugin, or give instructions for coding.
It also helps for me to understand how they’re tracking actions on their site. Is it all through GA or are they using Google Tag Manager? Maybe it’s Adobe Analytics. If it’s GTM, my recommendation might be to upload one of our Recipe packs instead of providing instructions for tracking Events in Google Analytics.
This extension helps me move forward as I work without having to dig into the code much to find the answers. It also helps me to better customize my recommendations for each website.
Moz Toolbar
The MozBar has helped me out on a number of client calls and SEO audits when I need to quickly answer a question about info on a page such as page title, heading tags, how many no-follow links there are and where they’re located as well as Page Authority and Domain Authority.
How It Works
The information you’ll be able to see is based on your account subscription. If you have a free account with Moz, this is what you’ll see:
Custom Searches
Link Metrics
Page Overlay
On-Page Links (Followed, No-Followed, External, or Internal)
Social Metrics
Data Export (CSV)
If you have a MozPro subscription, you get a ton of extra info in the toobar.
How/When I Use It
I use this tool every day, but it’s most useful for website audits, especially when I have to drill down to a specific page or two.
Current title tag and meta description when I’m writing new ones to improve CTR.
Page and Domain Authority
Links to and from that page
Is there schema on the page?
Is the page redirecting properly?
Does the page have a canonical tag? Is it the right one?
Are the heading tags descriptive and organized?
Are they using alt text? Does it have keywords in it?
What’s the page load time?
I could go on forever…
It definitely comes in handy during competitive audits! Keyword help, anyone?
Redirect Path
If you’re performing a full website audit, this chrome extension won’t be helpful, but if you’re looking at a single page or a small group of pages it comes in handy. Redirect Path displays different kinds of errors like 404s and 301s (and many more), as well as client side redirects. You can see them quickly and all in one place.
How It Works
You just click the icon and it gives you a dropdown displaying all redirect paths for that page. You can click on any of them to get more detailed information like server, modification date, content type, language, etc.
How/When I Use It
I love this tool because it shows you all of the paths at once, in order. So maybe it was a 301 redirect to a 404 page, which is very helpful to understand. It also looks at JS and meta refresh redirects.
It’s fantastic for testing rewrite rules, landing page redirects, finding redirect chains, etc. Oh, and it has a copy to clipboard feature, which is pretty awesome.
Web Developer Checklist
You can use the Web Dev Checklist extension to get a quick review of the site you’re looking at. With a single click, you’ll see everything from best practices to usability and code quality. There’s a big list!
How It Works
When you click the icon, you’ll get a dropdown like the one below. Pretty quickly, you get an idea of where the site falls short and where its on its game.
How/When I Use It
I use this in meetings a lot. Sometimes new clients will want to know, “are we doing this”? “Are we using this thing?” And I can say, nope, but we can! For example, they might say, “How can I get more info on my pages in SERPs? I keep seeing stuff below my competitors’ result”. And I open that up and say “we can get more info into SERPS by using Schema. It doesn’t look like your page has that yet”.
Or maybe they say “There’s a page showing up in SERPs that I don’t want in there. How do I remove it”? I open up my Web Developer Checklist and see that they aren’t using robots.txt. Easy fix. I’ll then offer to make and send them a robots.txt file for review and then add it to Search Console to fix the problem.
TableCapture
TableCapture is a super helpful Chrome extension that converts html tables so they can be pasted into Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or Open Office.
How It Works
While on a page with an HTML table, click the icon for TableCapture. It opens up a dropdown with a list of tables on the page for you to choose from.
Then you can choose to copy the table or open up Google Docs to paste it. It pastes beautifully with no problems.
Oh, I forgot to mention that, if the table includes links, you can choose to bring them in with the table information. You can find that under Options. Click Extract link URLs from table cells. Be aware that it will pull the link in beside it, not as anchor text. For example: Link test (http://ift.tt/2z8K0po).
Here’s a page with a few tables on for you to test: http://ift.tt/2xpafDz.
FYI: George, the developer, is super helpful. If you have any questions, he’s on top of it pretty quickly.
How/When I Use It
I find this extension super helpful for any kind of research, like reviewing competitor websites, gathering lead gen ideas, etc. I’ve heard it can be really useful for financial analysts and journalists, too.
When I’m doing PPC work, often a client will say, “I only want to target people in these locations”. Then I’ll need to pull together a list of zip codes. So I can go to a table with a list of them, use TableCapture and get the list into an uploadable format for AdWords. It’s so much easier than doing it manually.
Ghostery
The internet can be a scary place. Everything you do is tracked by someone. Many webmasters are gathering information on how you interact with their websites and collecting data about your preferences so they can build a profile for you and optimize their marketing and advertising methods. Ghostery allows you to combat that tracking, to an extent. It’s designed to improve your privacy by allowing you to see which website is tracking what and lets you make more informed decisions regarding what you share.
How It Works
When you open the extension, you get a list of trackers the website is using. It also gives you the option to block those trackers for a better browsing experience.
How/When I Use It
While most people probably use this to block ads, I use for other reasons.
First, it’s really helpful for troubleshooting slow loading pages. If a page loads too slow, I can turn off trackers to see if that is what’s effecting the load time.
Second, I use this to stay up-to-date in SEM. When I’m doing competitor research, I can see which ad networks our clients’ competitors are using and if they’re remarketing/retargeting.
Page Load Time
Speaking of page load times, this one is another favorite of mine. The Page Load Time extension does exactly what it sounds like: it shows you the time it takes to load the page you’ve just navigated to. When you open it up, everything gets broken down for you so you can see why the page is loading slowly.
How It Works
It’s always on, so whenever my page finishes loading, the chrome extension displays the time it took. If you click the icon, you’ll get a little window showing the events and how long each took to load and in which order.
How/When I Use It
Page Speed is a Google ranking factor. That means if your site/page is too slow, it’s not showing up in SERPs. On top of that being a Google priority, slow load times are also a bad user experience. Nobody wants that and we certainly don’t want it for our clients.
Whether I’m look at it for SEO or for SEM, I need to know why the page is loading slowly. So I pop open Page Load Time to ID the culprit and get to work on showing the client how to fix it.
Character Count
Character Count tells you how many characters you’ve highlighted on a webpage. It sounds simple but it’s glorious.
How It Works
All you do is click the chrome extension to turn it on, highlight some text on a page, and the number of characters you’re looking at appears at the top right corner of the browser.
How/When I Use It
I can’t even begin to tell you how many times per week I use Character Count. I write a lot of ad copy and review a lot of websites, so it comes in handy to know how many characters are on a page.
If I’m advertising for a client, the first step is to look at the page they want traffic to land on. I skim the site and look for text that clearly defines the goal of the page and highlight it. Is it short enough to be a headline in AdWords? Maybe it will fit in the description if not.
I also use character count for writing meta descriptions. Again, the copy on the page is the key. I want the general idea of the page in less than 155 characters. Can I find that somewhere?
You might also want to look into Word Count if you do this kind of work often.
Keywords Everywhere
Keywords Everywhere is a keyword research tool that allows you to find similar keywords and provides Google search volume and Cost per Click data for that term, so it’s great for SEO and SEM. It keeps me from having to switch back and forth between all of my keyword tools, too, which is a time saver.
How It Works
The Chrome Extension is always on, so every time you do a search you’ll get Google volume for that keyword as well as CPC data.
You can also see keyword data in the following platforms. It doesn’t just apply to Google Search.
Supported websites:
Google.com – the data is shown right under the search textbox
Google Search Console – the data is shown in the Search Analytics page
Google Analytics – data shown in the Organic and Search Engine Optimization -> Queries pages
Google Trends – data shown in the queries widget
Google Keyword Planner – data shown in a new column
Google Search – data shown under main keyword as well as related searches
YouTube – data shown under the searchbox
Amazon – data shown under the searchbox
eBay – data shown under the searchbox
Etsy – data shown under the searchbox
UberSuggest – data shown alongside keywords in this awesome keyword suggestion tool
AnswerThePublic.com – data shown in popup on each spoke of the wheel, data also shown in the alphabetic listings
Soovle.com – data shown next to each keyword all over the page
KeywordShitter.com – data shown under the main text area next to keywords
Majestic – Anchor Text Report
Moz Open Site Explorer – Anchor Text Report
How/When I Use It
After I do a Google search for a keyword I’m thinking about using, I can go to the bottom of the search results and get all of the similar words that people search for and save them via the Add All Keywords button on the right of the screen.
All of those keywords show up in my favorites along with the data I need to finish my research. I can then copy or download them into any document of my choice. You can print them too, but I never use that.
It gets better. I can then go into Google Analytics or Search Console and, in any report with keywords listed, I’ll get monthly volume and CPC data for the keywords that are already bringing people to their site.
Keywords Everywhere has a new feature that lets you upload keywords (up to 10,000) and it returns data for all of them.
It might seem like a long process, but I like the extension because I don’t have to sift through a bevvy of keywords that aren’t useful. Most of these are going to be relevant. I encourage you to give it a try. It’s wonderful.
Bonus Extensions
These tools aren’t necessarily related to SEO or PPC advertisers, but they can certainly be useful in this industry.
MockFlow
If you’re into user experience and site layout, but aren’t a designer, this one is essential! MockFlow lets you design wireframe concepts quickly and easily. If you don’t have access to all of that fancy development software, this one will be really helpful.
Color Zilla
http://ift.tt/2z8yBG3
0 notes
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