SEOquake for Easy Competitor Analysis
Competitor research is an important aspect of our work at UpBuild, providing us key information which shapes the strategy for many of our client deliverables. When it comes to landing page recommendations or competitor research, I like to use SEOquake’s chrome extension.
What is SEOquake?
SEOquakeis a browser plugin created by the very popular digital marketing platform,SEMrush, which allows you to access important SEO metrics and insights of a particular page, SERP (Search Engine Results Page) analysis, and keyword analysis with a single click.
You can also obtain more in-depth information by viewing their SEO Page Audit which opens in a new browser tab. The breadth of information you’re given is invaluable, all the while distilling the key metrics into one place, making it easy to find, digest and utilize at once.
How to Find It
You can find SEOquake in theChrome web store. Simply find it and add it to your Chrome bar. Easy!
How to Use It
SEOquake is pretty intuitive; there are no special boxes to check and no steps to take in order to correctly set up the tool. You can use it ‘right out of the box’ and have a handle on it quickly.
Simply browse to a page you want to analyze and click the SEQquake icon in your toolbar. Once pressed, you’ll immediately see the Page Overview screen pop up.
Page Overview
The page overview is exactly what it sounds like: a general overview of some of the SEO metrics found on a page.
The first information you’ll see is the ‘Parameters’ tab. This overview is helpful if you want some quick stats on the domain, number of pages indexed by Google or Bing, SEMrush rank, number of backlinks, as well as certain social signals such as Facebook likes, Google + likes, and more. Admittedly, some of these metrics are more useful than others, and while I don’t need to see how many Google+ likes a page has, quickly viewing the number of backlinks a domain has is worth the view.
But this is just the beginning: the ‘Page Overview’ tab goes even deeper! You can also choose to look at ‘Backlinks’, ‘Display Advertising’, and ‘Traffic Analysis,’ all without ever having to open a new window or tab.
Backlinks
The backlinks tab feature gives you a look into the overall backlink profile of a page and it’s domain. You’ll get an immediate glance into the number of referring domains, total backlinks, and even referring domains by country or by TLD distribution.
Display Advertising
The display advertising feature gives you an overview of the total number of ads, publishers, and advertisers for the domain. Just click on any result to take you to SEMrush for further analysis.
Traffic Analysis
Great for competitor research, the traffic analysis tab gives you an overview of the overall visits, traffic sources, and other traffic stats. If you’re left wanting more analysis, simply click on the ‘View Full Report’ button which will take you to a full traffic report on SEMrush’s site.
Let’s Dig Deeper- Navigating the Top Tabs
This next section dives into the top-level tabs. Clicking on these sections will automatically open one new browser tab, giving you more extensive analysis.
Page Info
For a quick glance at how the content of a page is optimized, press the ‘Page Info’ tab seen on the top left-hand corner of the page overview.
The Page Info section is one of the sections I use most for on-page content optimization. This section provides you with basic information such as the page title and metadata, but also the number of internal and external links and the most frequently occurring words as you scroll down the page.
When optimizing pages, it’s incredibly helpful to see a competitor’s total number of words as well as the keywords they are targeting. SEOquake also breaks up keywords by the number of words, allowing you to see patterns in your competitor’s keyword usage.
Being able to look at keyword phrases and find terms that co-occur with any given keyword helps to understand what Google looks for and can help inform why a competitor is ranking better for a certain term.
Diagnosis
The ‘Diagnosis’ tab provides even more information regarding a page and its domain. This real-time mini SEO-audit gives you analysis on three major sections, which then gets broken up into several other results:
- Page Analysis: How well-optimized is the page you’re looking at? Does the title have enough characters, are canonical tags in place and working, is there a meta description and is it using the right amount of characters, what is the usage of HTML headings, ALT attributes on images, and more.
- Mobile Compliance: Does the page use AMP? Is the page using a viewport meta tag that’s compatible with most mobile browsers?
- Site Compliance: How well-optimized is the domain? This tool looks at the Robots.txt file, XML sitemaps, specified language, doctype, and more.
If the page or domain is not correctly implementing any of these items, SEOQuake places a green checkmark or red warning sign to let you know which items are missing or incorrect. Additionally, they provide you with tips on each list item, which is especially helpful when you are auditing your own site.
Internal Links
This section allows you to quickly analyze the internal linking of a page, showing you the total number of links, the internal link URLs, and even the total number of backlinks for each URL.
External Links
The “External Links” section allows you to quickly analyze where each page is linking out. Similar to the ‘Internal Links’ section, you can analyze the linking sites and see what their backlink profiles look like.
Compare URLs and Domains
If you’re curious as to how your URL compares to your competitor’s, this tool allows you to view an array of stats like the number of pages indexed in Google, number of backlinks and more.
While this is nifty, I do wish it was a bit more comprehensive in its comparison in regards to on-page optimization — perhaps adding comparisons between keyword density and the amount of text per page in addition to the current parameters would be helpful.
SERP Overlay
The SERP overlay feature allows you to examine each search result without ever having to leave the SERP. A bar under each result tells you to specific information such as the Domain Score (the importance of a domain based on the number of links pointing back to the domain), Trust Score (the trustworthiness of a webpage or domain based on the number of links coming from highly trusted websites), and other parameters.
If you want to change your parameters, just navigate to the upper left-hand corner of your screen and click on the ‘parameters’ bar. From here you can check, or uncheck the metrics you want to be displayed in the SERP overlay.
The self-proclaimed ‘SEO Toolbox of your Browser’, SEOquake is one of my favorite Chrome extensions, providing a wealth of information accessible at your fingertips, making competitive research easier than ever.
The ability to glean so much data all in the same place saves you time and comes from the trusted source of SEMrush. But perhaps most importantly, it saves you the trouble of 100 open tabs overcrowding your poor browser.
That being said, if this tool is so great, why should you pay an SEO? While auditing tools can be extremely helpful, they can’t replace the same analysis or understand the nuance that professionals can. While tools can provide you with generic recommendations, SEO’s are able to confidently fix issues related to your specific needs. SEOquake can provide you with the basic groundwork of what needs to be done, allowing you to ask necessary questions of your SEO and work together to solve the bigger issues.
