SEO can be really overwhelming, especially if it isn’t in your wheelhouse or you are just getting started – Heck, it can be overwhelming even when you’ve been at it a while!

If you are one of those people who really don’t know where to begin with SEO, start with downloading the SEOQuake plugin! (Good for Chrome and Firefox). I personally think this is the best SEO plugin you can get for Chrome and for your SEO!

SEOQuake is a powerful plugin tool by SEMRush that helps manage and review your website’s SEO health. You can get detailed information on exactly what’s going on with your SEO, and how to fix any issues that you are having. You can also use this tool to take a look at what your competitors are doing in regards to their SEO campaigns, plus much more!

Just a FEW of these uses include the ability to see:

Where competitors' website visitors are coming from (social vs. SEO vs. paid ads)If they are running any Google ads, you can see them in this plugin!The number of backlinksWebsite Title Tags, Meta Descriptions and Keywords

This tool is a gold mine! Watch this video for a walk through and see how I specifically use SEOQuake on the daily!

(**Sidenote: This plugin DOESN’T pick up on best practices as it relates to keyword usage… check out these blog posts for this information!!)

Best Practices & Explanation of Heading Tags (h-tags)

Best Practices for Title Tags

(SEE VIDEO BELOW)

1. Before you do anything go download the plugin!

2. You will then need to sign up for a free SEMRush account

3. Go check out what your competitors are doing and what's going on with your own website too! (the details for how to do this are in the video below)

SEOQuake is SO important for your SEO!! It allows you to see what your competitors are doing, what they aren't doing so you can do it better, and how your own website SEO currently is! And the best part is that you don't have to be an SEO specialist at all! All you have to know is how to install what I think is the best Chrome plugin for SEO and know how to use it, which I detail out in the video below.

Enjoy, and please comment with any questions you have in regards to this!

Here’s the video transcript:

SEOQUAKE Tutorial TRANSCRIPT

"I am here to show you a walkthrough on SEOQuake. It’s the Chrome plugin, you can also use it for Firefox, that I use on a daily basis for my SEO.

I’m on this website now so I will just use that. Once you have installed the plugin, it will show up on your toolbar up top on the right. At least for Chrome. I’m not sure where it is for Firefox.

So click here (clicks on icon), and then what I look at is… I love looking at backlinks for my own website to see how it changes changes, but also for my competitors’ websites, or my clients’ websites, especially if I’m doing an initial audit this is one really good way. Especially if you’re on the phone with a client and you need to quickly look at something without having to do a full and deep audit.

So you can look at the number of backlinks here, see where traffic is coming from. You can see if your competitors have any display advertisements running, which these people don’t.

Traffic analysis.

This is another good one. So where are they advertising, where are they bringing in traffic from, and what do their analytics look like, which is awesome.

So I also do that, and then I also use page information. So let me just go back really quickly (goes back to analyzed landing page). So you can also get to this page by right clicking and going to SEO quake down here… and then going to “Diagnosis” or “Page Information” or any other location you want.

(on diagnostic page) You have to take this with a grain of salt because you still have to know what you’re doing when you look at this.

From this we can see there’s no canonical set for this page so that might be something they want to look at.

Their title tag is looking good, so you can see right here it gets a little checkmark. But you still need to know what a good title looks like. SEO Quake will tell you it has this many characters therefore it’s great; however, it won’t tell you “hey, you shouldn’t be using that keyword, you should be using another keyword, and the placement of it [the keyword] So this one is good but a lot of title pages, title tags, they will have, if it’s the home page, just “Home” and their Company… and that’s not good enough. And SEO Quake won’t pick up on that. Just a little headsup.

And same with the meta description, it just looks at character count. And also right now for Google, it used to be 300 characters for the description length was optimal, but now they moved it down to 150 so just keep that in mind too.

So there are little quirks with this plugin but it’s such a great tool, especially if you need it on the fly or really quickly need to see what’s going on.

And then here you have your headers. Here it says you’ve implemented it but again it doesn’t tell you if it’s proper or not.

So 100%, 90% [looking at current Heading Tags in SEO Quake] You probably don’t want those as your heading tags, and also you only want one H tag per page. So you know, again, it shows you just the gist of it but nothing too crazy.

It also shows you if any of your images are without alt-text. Again, it doesn’t show you if the alt text is keyword appropriate.

Text vs HTML ration. I honestly don’t really follow this. I don’t think it’s the best tool for this. But it shows you things like if you have schema or structural markups. And then also, the most important part, it shows you if your website is compliant. If it’s built properly, and if you have certain basic SEO tactics in place.

So that was the diagnostics and you can also look at “Page Info” which again it shows you your external links, and then the keywords that Google is picking up for this page. Pretty quick and easy. Honestly if you have not installed this, I highly recommend doing it, just getting in there everyday and looking to see what your competition is doing. And helping out your clients with it, and yourself.

Alright guys have a good day."