Here at UpBuild, we strongly believe there’s no shame in finding smart ways to make your job easier. For SEO, the MozBar Chrome Extension does exactly that. Whether you’re putting together a comprehensive competitor analysis or just tidying up some on-page SEO elements, the MozBar Chrome Extension gives you a concise view of the data you need directly from the web page.
What Is MozBar?
MozBar is a browser extension for Google Chrome that follows you around the web and provides useful data insights for SEO purposes. MozBar is powered by Moz, which is a widely used resource for SEO and digital marketing. The Chrome extension draws data form Moz’s database and provides it to you as you click and view different web pages. It is a massive help when it comes to page analysis, competitor research, finding link metrics, & analyzing search rankings.
How to Get It
In order to use MozBar, you will first need to create a Moz account. Moz offers a free account, which will give you access to the basic features of MozBar. Purchasing a paid subscription to Moz will allow you to use all of MozBar’s advanced tools including its keyword difficulty tool, page optimization, and advanced link metrics.
To add the MozBar Chrome Extension to your browser, simply visit the Chrome Web Store using Google Chrome, and click “Add To Chrome”. Once you have added it to your browser and logged in using your Moz credentials, you’re ready to roll!
Now let’s see this thing in action!
Page Analysis
The Page Analysis tool on MozBar provides you with tons of information on a web page from page load time to semantic markup. You can quickly audit page titles and meta descriptions with their character counts, and check headings for keyword optimization. The Page Analysis tool also gives you general attributes including the URL of Google’s cache of the page, rel=”canonical” tags, and page load time.
Are you working on building links to a website? MozBar shows you the link metrics on a given page so you can easily pull the number of external followed links or linking root domains to your website. MozBar also provides you with page authority and domain authority scores. This data is excellent for quick competitor analysis, and to monitor the effectiveness of your link-building efforts.
MozBar Page Analysis even shows you the markup data on a page. From this section, you can pull social metadata from Facebook and Twitter, as well as semantic markup via schema.org.
The Page Analysis tools included in MozBar make analyzing on-page SEO incredibly easy. Use the information to find areas where a web page can be improved.
Highlight Links
You can take link metrics a step further with MozBar’s link highlighter. The link highlighter identifies different types of links on a web page and color-codes them to represent followed, no-followed, external, and internal links.
Using this tool is great for link-building research. Round up some websites that would make sense to request a link from, and use the link highlighter to quickly find links from the websites’ pages. From there, you can see what kind of content they typically link to so you know what content of your own to pitch.
You can use the link highlighter on your own website to see where the external and internal links on a page are, to see what pages that page is passing authority to.
Page Optimization
Metrics and analytics are great, but even with this data it can still be unclear exactly what you should do to improve your website’s search performance. MozBar’s page optimization tool gives you action items to work from so you can be sure that you’re getting the right takeaways from the data.
To use the Page Optimization function, enter your target keyword and click “Optimize”. You’ll get a page optimization score based on how well the page is optimized for the keyword you entered. The tool will also give you some pointers on how you can edit your content to be more search-friendly. One caveat to keep in mind when using this tool is that it focuses on how well you’re targeting a particular keyword, and may not understand the nuance of targeting multiple terms or semantically-related terms.
Using MozBar With Search Engines
One aspect of MozBar that we really love is that it performs differently when you use it on a search engine versus a normal web page. When you load MozBar on Google, Yahoo, or Bing, you are presented with data on each link in the SERP.
With this data, you can quickly grab Moz’s Page Authority Score, Domain Authority Score, the number of links, and referring domains for each link in the SERP. You can use this information to quickly size up the competition for your keywords.
Adding A Profile To MozBar
MozBar gives you the ability to create custom search profiles to save your keywords with search parameters such as search engine, country, region, or city. To add a profile, enter your search query in Google, Yahoo, or Bing, then select “Add New Profile” from the dropdown in MozBar.
If you’re an SEO or digital marketer, you know how much of a godsend tools like MozBar can be. You probably also know that there are a lot of extensions and tools that fall short of being worthy of a recommendation. While MozBar likely wouldn’t suffice as your only SEO tool, when you use it with Moz’s full suite of tools you have a solid arsenal of resources at your disposal.
