SEOQuake: the guide to get more from your SEO

The race to rank on the first page of search results keeps getting tighter. Search engines are also getting pickier as user habits change, which makes organic visibility harder to win. To sit near the top, you have to look at how competitors do SEO and audit your own site so you know what to fix. A solid starting point is a free tool that still covers the basics well. SEOQuake is a browser extension that does that. Here is how to get the most out of it.

The benefits of SEOquake

SEOquake is one of the SEO tools web professionals reach for most. It is free and works in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera. In a few clicks you get a lot of information about the page you are on and about the site as a whole, including concrete recommendations to improve rankings. SEOquake is a first-pass SEO audit tool: it gives you a global view of your key pages and of your competitors’, and it points to improvements once it has surfaced weaknesses or SEO opportunities.

SEOquake ships a simple interface that formats the data and presents the main KPIs clearly. This SEO tool lets you:

• Quickly read the main metrics (many of them pulled from Semrush, which is handy if you do not have a paid Semrush account)

• Compare results on a SERP

• Run an on-page audit, including a check that the page works on mobile

• Export a full report of a page’s internal and external links

• Measure keyword density in the content and see the semantic field being worked

• Check traffic and interactions coming from social networks, and more

Those features save real time when you collect SEO data, whether you are looking at one page or a whole site.

The SEOBar and the SERP Overlay

The SEOBar is the front-end of SEOQuake. It appears as you browse a site and gives you the site’s data in a few clicks. It sits at the top of the browser window, under the address bar and any bookmarks bar, and it surfaces the basic KPIs. The metrics shown in the SEOBar are customizable and can be shown or hidden.

• Google Index, Bing Index (and even Baidu): how many of the site’s pages those engines have crawled and indexed

• The number of backlinks (pulled from Semrush)

• The site’s creation date and ownership (whois)

• Shares and likes on the main social networks (Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn…)

• The Semrush Rank and the number of ads

The SERP overlay, or SERP Overlay, is the second half of the tool. When you browse Google, it appears under each listed result and shows that result’s main metrics. You get detailed numbers for every SERP, which you can sort and export as CSV. That is the data you need before you write the list of optimizations that should move your pages.

The Page SEO Audit, or “Diagnosis”

The SEO audit is how you keep each page optimized. In many cases you will still want an SEO agency such as Semji, but running tools yourself to catch technical problems is useful. You start to see the weak spots on your site and how much work they represent. Those weak spots can be SEO technical (backlink count versus competitors), content-related (markup, length…), or about user experience (internal linking…). SEOquake’s “Diagnosis” feature flags issues across those three areas and suggests first fixes.

Split into three sections, this “page SEO audit” lives under the Diagnosis tab. It reports on the page’s on-site criteria, its mobile compatibility, then the site’s broader technical health.

Page analysis

• URL length and makeup: forbidden characters such as “#”, spaces, “&”, and so on, plus the character count

• Whether a canonical tag is present, so any inbound link equity can be pointed at a preferred page

• Whether image alt attributes are filled in

• Whether the page uses iframes or Flash, which can keep engines from reading the content

• Size and makeup of the meta header tags: title, description, keywords, which matter for attracting the reader, improving click-through, and setting the page’s semantic context

• Heading structure and the page’s text-to-HTML ratio

• Whether other markup is present, such as microformats, schema.org, or Open Graph

For each item it audits, SEOQuake gives a first-level optimization tip. To read them, click the “Tips” button to the right of each item.

Mobile compatibility

Mobile compatibility is now a requirement for Google and for search engines in general. Since 2015, mobile has overtaken desktop for web browsing, and in 2017 Google moved to Mobile-First Indexing. That means it indexes and serves the mobile version of pages first.

Every page therefore needs a mobile version or a Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Page) format. SEOquake checks whether such a version exists, but it does not go as far as measuring load time. You can still do that with Google’s free tools, such as PageSpeed Insight.

The extension also checks for the Meta Viewport tag, which is what makes responsive sites work on any device. That check matters for how pages rank in Google.

Site analysis

The third part of SEOquake’s on-site Diagnosis looks at the site as a whole.

• Whether an XML sitemap is present and configured, so search engines get the full list of URLs to index

• Whether a robots.txt file is present, with the directives meant for crawlers such as Googlebot

• Detection of the page’s language or languages, which matters for indexing, machine translation, and voice search

• Specification of the site’s doctype, for example “HTML5”

• Specification of a page encoding, such as UTF-8, so browsers can render the page more reliably

• Whether a Google Analytics tag is present

• Whether a favicon is present, the small icon next to the title in the browser tab that helps a visitor recognize your site among open tabs

Internal links and external links

SEOquake lists every internal link on the audited page in a dedicated tab. For each link, the extension shows the anchor text, the URL, the link type (on text or on an image), and a set of parameters that you can customize. You can add or hide parameters with the button at the top left, next to the CSV export option.

SEOQuake does not stop at on-page analysis. The free SEO tool also lists backlinks, meaning links that point to the audited page. That external-link report lives in the tab of the same name: “External”. It is structured like the internal-link report and lets you customize the parameters shown: the various engine indexes, social shares, site age, the page’s own backlinks…

With that data you already have a first view of your link profile and a starting point for a link-building strategy. Apply the same tables to competitor sites and you get a picture of their backlinks and partner sites. If those sites already link to your competitors, they might link to you. You now have a list of sites to contact as possible link partners.

Keyword density

One of SEOQuake’s tabs covers keyword density. It lists every keyword on the diagnosed page, ranked in descending order of frequency (the most frequent at the top). That ranking lets you see the page’s semantic theme at a glance.

Keywords are grouped by how many words they contain: 1-word, 2-word, 3-word phrases, and so on. The density values shown are both the occurrence count of the keyword and a percentage of the full text on the page.

Keyword density still plays a role in how a page ranks. In principle any density is acceptable as long as the terms are inserted naturally and the page still reads well (smooth, no obvious repetition). Common SEO advice still puts the range between 3% and 8% density on a page. Past 11%, the risk rises that Google treats the page as spam, notably through the Panda algorithm. SEOquake therefore gives you an overview of a page’s semantic field and a way to pick precise content optimizations.

Compare URLs and domains

You may be polishing landing pages for a specific goal. You may also have found competitor pages worth studying. Either way, you can pull the same page-level information for a group of URLs, laid out in a table and exportable as CSV. The “Compare URLs/Domains” tab lets you compare many pages on the customizable criteria the tool audits. Think of it as a batch analysis, in the same spirit as Ahrefs if you have used that.

For URLs, here are a few of the fields the analysis extracts:

• Google Cachedate: the last date Googlebot crawled the page

• Facebook Likes and Google +1: likes and reactions the page earned on Facebook and Google+

• Access to the page source, and more

For domains, SEOQuake compares information such as:

• Google and Bing Index

• Number of backlinks

• Estimated traffic

• Domain age

• Alexa Rank: the Alexa Rank score, a PageRank-style metric based on unique visitors versus page views, with 1 as the best score

• The SEMrush Rank: the site’s SEMrush score, based on traffic from the top 100 Google search results

Track those scores regularly and you can judge whether your SEO work is landing, while also watching what competitors are doing. Ready to install SEOQuake in your browser?