The best SEO Chrome extensions

Let’s face it — the ugly reality of the internet is that SEO (search engine optimization) is king. People rely on search engines like Google to find what they’re looking for, and they’re most likely to click or tap on whatever’s near the top of their results, no matter whether something further down is more credible or useful. If your company needs SEO exposure, these are some of the best SEO Chrome extensions out there.

The best SEO Chrome extensions

As a rule, SEO extensions are about two things: gauging current performance, and determining what’ll improve your content’s exposure. There are a variety of ways to tackle both issues, but we feel the extensions below are easy picks.

• Glimpse
• GrowthBar
• BuzzSumo
• SEOquake
• Lighthouse

Be aware that search engine operators like Google and Microsoft are constantly refining their algorithms, and that different extensions might frame data differently, or even produce different results. When in doubt, doublecheck using first-party tools.

Glimpse

Glimpse promises things like real-time search volume data from Google Trends, an extensive list of people-also-search keywords, and the ability to quickly pounce on trending topics. News SEO is updated daily, which may offer an advantage over some other tools.

The extension also makes it easy to see competition statistics, and export Trends data to Google Sheets or a CSV file. Perhaps more importantly for some, Glimpse’s interface is extremely clear — you should have no problems identifying patterns and what keywords you need to aim for.

GrowthBar

GrowthBar provides a dashboard of SEO data for targeted websites including backlinks, Google and Facebook advertising, and just about any piece of keyword information you could want. The real kicker though is the integration of OpenAI’s GPT-3, which means you can use the extension to write entire SEO-based blog posts. You’ll need to verify its language and facts, but that’s true of any AI writing tool. If you do decide to churn out blog posts, the extension can automatically insert headers, links, and even images. 

Note that GrowthBar isn’t free. After a seven-day trial, it’s $29 per month. 

BuzzSumo

While BuzzSumo will certainly gauge performance for blog posts and similar content, there’s a stronger emphasis on social media here, the big names being YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and X/Twitter. Its dashboard offers readily visible engagement data, such as retweets and replies for posts on X. You’ll also see compact stats whenever you browse Google Search results.

BuzzSumo is free to try for 30 days, but after that you’ll need to pay for a subscription, and it’s not cheap. Tiers start at $199 per month or $1,908 per year, and rise all the way up to a 30-user Enterprise license that’s $999 monthly. Higher tiers are required for some features, such as Slack integration or a YouTube analyzer.

SEOquake

Like Glimpse, SEOquake is focused on rapid snapshots of SEO data. That translates into a comprehensive dashboard, as well as link and keyword metrics, and compressed bulletpoints in Google Search results. You can export SERP results as a CSV file.

Something SEOquake puts an emphasis on is the idea of of auditing a page, including checking its mobile device compatibility. You’ll get separate Passed, Error, and Warning flags, the last of which can identify areas for improvement, such as the length of your meta description.

In a sense there’s nothing that dramatic going on, but SEOquake is fully free, so there’s no worry about being upsold on anything. In fact it includes social stats for Facebook, so it dips a toe into BuzzSumo’s pond.

Lighthouse

We’ve got Lighthouse here for a couple of reasons, the first being that it’s open-source. It’s free, transparent, and even something you can potentially contribute to yourself if you’ve got the necessary coding skills.

We should note that it doesn’t provide much (direct) SEO insight, usually just summarizing a page with a score out of 100. What you really turn to Lighthouse for is overall performance — you’ll also see stats for elements like accessibility and speed, including whether a page’s layout shifts, and how long it takes to become interactive. A well-built page should be clickable in about 2 seconds or less, to give you an idea.

These aspects do matter in the grander scope of SEO. Sluggish and otherwise badly-behaved websites can get pushed down in search rankings, so even if you don’t end up settling on Lighthouse, you should probably give it a try if you’ve been worried about how your site is truly experienced by visitors.