Google offers a constantly updated set of tools to help with SEO.
These tools help publishers understand why their pages are performing poorly and provide specific advice on how to improve their webpage performance to boost rankings.
Here are the top 5 SEO tools from Google.
1. Lighthouse
Lighthouse is a webpage performance improvement tool built into all Chrome-based browsers. This tool is accessible from within the Chrome Dev Tools panel.
Multiple ways to access Google Lighthouse tools
- On Windows machines, press the F12 function button.
- On Windows or Mac, right-click the page and[検査]and select[Lighthouse]Select a tab.
- For Mac: Command+Option+C
- On Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS, press Ctrl+Shift+C.
- In Chrome, click the 3-dot menu in the upper right corner, then Other Tools > Developer Tools
Google Search screenshot, August 2021
Screenshots of Chrome Dev Tools, August 2021Lighthouse offers 5 feedback categories
We currently offer five categories of SEO performance feedback.
- performance.
- Progressive Web App.
- best practice.
- accessibility.
- SEO.
Accessibility is not strictly an SEO-related metric, but it is related to a good user experience for site visitors with disabilities.
Feedback from these five categories will improve the search visibility of most web pages.
Lighthouse’s SEO section provides 10 points of feedback on what matters to Google.
Some metrics reported by Chrome Lighthouse
- Viewport meta tag.
- title element.
- meta description.
- HTTP status code.
- Descriptive text on the link.
- Page status if crawling and indexing was successful.
- Validate hreflang.
- Validate rel=canonical.
- Check mobile friendly.
- Validate the readability of fonts on mobile devices.
- Check mobile tap targets.
- Check if the document bypasses the browser plugin for viewing.
- Check crawling and indexing.
- Check Robots.txt.
- Check if the page sends a successful HTTP status code.
Why Use Lighthouse SEO Tools
We don’t deny that, Lighthouse is a lightweight site review tool.
But it’s an important site review tool. This is because it represents Google’s opinion on 10 metrics to watch.
If Google feels these metrics matter, so should you.
To get the most out of this tool, be sure to check out the Lighthouse Performance Metrics technical SEO guide.
2. Test your site
Google’s Test My Site audit tool provides two metrics:
- Estimated load times on 4G mobile networks.
- Recommendations to speed up your website.
Screenshot of Test My Site, August 2021This is a great tool for getting a quick snapshot of your website’s speed health.
It’s a good starting point to get a complete picture of mobile optimization.
The tool can also email you a complete report with suggestions for speeding up the tested web pages.
Why use Test My Site
You can get similar information using Page Speed Insights.
However, the My Site Testing tool does provide information in an easy-to-understand manner so that non-developer stakeholders can easily understand mobile site performance issues.
But it’s also nice to have an easy overview for developers.
For more information on what needs fixing, visit Google’s Page Speed Insights.
3. Page Speed Insights
Page Speed Insights is a tool that provides a Core Web Vitals performance score for your lab.
Core Web Vitals are key metrics created by Google to describe user experience on web pages.
This information is important because fixing the highlighted issues improves your SEO, sales conversions, ad clicks, and (if you successfully fix performance bottlenecks) slightly increases your ranking factor.
This online tool identifies the cause of slowness and suggests solutions to the problem.
It shows you which scripts and style sheets are slowing down your site, which images are too large, and offers many other tips to speed up the affected web pages.
Why Use Page Speed Insights
Page Speed Insights not only provides useful solutions to hidden technical issues affecting page speed, but is also a resource for learning what those issues are.
Each highlighted issue links to a Google Developers page that provides more background information and instructions on how to fix the issue.
4. Safe Browsing Test
Google crawls billions of pages every day to check for malware. This tool will report if your site has malware.
The tool also provides the date the site was last checked for malware.
Some sites are tested more often than others.
Why use the Safe Browsing test tool?
Many people don’t think of website security as an SEO issue.
But website security quickly becomes an SEO issue when Google starts removing URLs from its index because the site was hacked.
Therefore, website security should be considered part of SEO. Not securing your site can seriously impact your search visibility.
5. Google Trends
Google Trends provides information about keyword popularity and segments the information by time and region.
Time segments let you know how seasonality affects your keywords. It can also indicate if a keyword is losing popularity.
If you see a downward trend for a keyword, this could indicate that searchers are losing interest in that search due to a product or trend.
Why use Google Trends
Google Trends is also important for competitive research. Shows how often you search Google for your competitor’s brand name.
Hourly trend lines indicate how stable this trend is (up, down, or stable).
Clearly, a competitor’s trend line on the downtrend is appropriate. An uptrend line is bad.
A stable trendline (most common) means your competitors are doing well, and among many considerations, you should identify your competitors’ weaknesses and turn them into strengths.
For more tips, check out 10 ways to use Google Trends to improve your SEO.
Leverage Google’s SEO tools to improve rankings, visibility and user experience
SEO professionals tend to accept a lot of what Google says with a fair amount of skepticism about what helps (or doesn’t) rank, but it would be foolish not to take advantage of the tools Google provides. That’s it.
These tools let you know exactly what Google wants in a quality site, web page, and user experience.
Use this to your advantage and optimize to match Google (and your audience’s) expectations as closely as possible.
Other resources:
Featured Image: ImageFlow/Shutterstock
