Every craftsman needs their toolbox and inside the toolbox of many SEOs is a wide variety of browser extensions. One of the most valuable browser extensions for SEO is SEO Minion. It is an SEO tool that helps with many of your daily SEO tasks including link analysis, keyword density checks, content length checks, SERP previews, and metadata analysis. In this article, we will go over why SEO Minion is such a powerful plugin and how this SEO tool helps with daily SEO tasks.
What Is SEO Minion?
SEO Minion is a browser extension that works on any Chromium-based web browser. This includes Google Chrome, Opera, Microsoft Edge, Brave, and Vivaldi. The SEO Minion browser extension has many features that you will find useful in everyday SEO tasks like on-page SEO analysis, HTML analysis, the ability to highlight all links on a page, check for broken links, see SERP previews, simulate a Google search from a different location, and even download data about related search results.
SEO Minion is a very powerful plugin that can save you hours every week.
Why SEO Minion’s On Page SEO Analysis Is So Useful
The first and probably most used feature that SEO Minion offers is its on-page SEO analysis tool. With a single click, this feature of SEO Minion will tell you a page’s title tag, meta description, number of words, canonical link, meta robots data, header tags, number of images, open graph data, and Twitter graph data. That’s a lot of information about a page at your fingertips!
Title Tag & Meta Description Analysis
By analyzing the title tag and meta descriptions of each page using SEO Minion, you can quickly identify pages that have poorly optimized meta descriptions or missing keywords in their title tags. When used for competitive analysis, this tool can save you hours of your time viewing page source data to find this information, if it even exists. By analyzing title tags and meta descriptions of your competitors, you can find opportunities to better optimize your content.
Analyzing On Page Header Tags & Word Count
Header tag information is also included in the on-page SEO analysis section of SEO Minion. It neatly organizes the header tags on a page in order from h1 to h6 in the order they appear on the page from top to bottom. Using this tool you can ensure that your pages have a single H1 tag and allows you to quickly count the number of h2 tags you have. By having one header tag with the keyword you want to focus on along with multiple supporting H2 tags, your website will have a higher chance of ranking highly in search results over websites that don’t have an H1 tag or don’t separate their content using other header tags. When writing long blog posts, SEO Minion can help you plan out your content by analyzing the header tags and length of the top-ranking pages. Using this data you can get a rough estimate of how many words your blog post needs to be, how many images you need to include, and how many header tags you should include.’
SEO Minion Can Highlight All Links On A Web Page
Another feature that SEO Minion has is its link highlighter tool. It gives you several options to highlight every link on the page, only highlight internal links, only highlight external links, only highlight do-follow links, and only highlight no-follow links. This tool can be very helpful when conducting an internal link analysis, analyzing anchor text, or checking the health of all the links on a page to ensure none direct users to a 404 page.
This tool can be very useful when you need to quickly count how many internal and external links are on a page and if external links should be set as no-follow. The data on each page can be downloaded to a spreadsheet for you to keep track of your website’s internal link structure and help you get a better understanding of your website’s crawl depth.
Related: How to properly use URL redirects for SEO
SEO Minion Lets You Check For Broken Links
When you’re optimizing your website, broken link checking is something you should always be doing. You never want to send your users to a 404 page both because this provides a negative user experience and because your search rankings will be penalized by search engines link Google. SEO Minion has a very useful feature that highlights every link on your page and color codes each highlight to allow you to quickly identify the type of link making broken link checking quicker than ever. Their default color identifiers for each link are:
- Green for valid links
- Yellow for 404 broken links
- Red for no domain links
- Grey for empty links
- Purple for redirecting links
- Brown for server errors
Using this information you can quickly analyze the link health of your page and make adjustments as needed. If you regularly check all the links to ensure none of them lead to 404 errors then you can be confident your website won’t be penalized by search engines for having a poor link structure.
SEO Minion Allows You To Make SERP Previews In Search Results
Another very useful feature of SEO Minion is its ability to generate SERP previews. SERP, search engine ranking page previews, give you an idea of how your website will look in search results under any search term. All you need to do is enter the search term you want to see your page ranking for and click on “preview SERP.” SEO Minion also gives you the freedom to add more information to the SERP preview including a publishing date, and rich snippet text. You can also preview a different title tag, and meta description in the Google SERP preview window if you want to see how a different title tag or meta description would look in search results.
Google Search Location Simulator
Another amazing feature of SEO Minions is its Google search location simulator. This feature of SEO Minion allows you to preview SERP results from a specific location. This can be another city or even another country. When doing on-page SEO for local businesses, it is important to check search rankings for the location the business operates. National and international businesses can also benefit from using SEO Minion’s Google Search location simulator to get a better understanding of how their pages rank in certain areas and how they can tailor marketing efforts to different geographical needs. By including the location your business operates in as part of your on-page SEO strategy, you will be one step closer to turning a SERP preview into a real Google search result.
How To Download & Install The SEO Minion Extension
Now that we’ve covered all the pros that come with using SEO Minion, we’re sure that you want to install the chrome extension. To install SEO Minion in your browser go to the chrome web store and search for SEO Minion. Once there you can download the SEO Minion extension and add it to your browser with just one click. You can also find more information about the publisher, the languages SEO Minion is available in, and the last time the chrome extension was updated.
Setting Up SEO Minion
Now that you have both of the extensions installed you need to add your Keywords Everywhere API key to the settings page.
You can get an API key with a silver, gold, or platinum plan from Keywords Everywhere.
By clicking “GET API KEY” in the top navigation menu you will see this page. Fill in the field with your email address, accept their TOS, and click the button at the bottom of the page. You will soon receive a link to your APO key in your email.
Return to the Keywords Everywhere page and now choose the “PRICING” option in the main menu. You will then see the following page.
Here click the buy button on any plan and a new page will open giving you instructions to install the Keywords Everywhere extension and how to purchase a subscription plan.
After installing the Keywords Everywhere extension open its settings and validate the extension with the API key you received in your email. Next, reopen the Keywords Everywhere extension and click Purchase a Subscription in the bottom right. This will open another tab where you can choose the plan that suits you. It is important to remember that SEO minion is only included with the Silver and above plans.
After filling out your payment information you will have access to SEO Minion along with all the perks of Keywords Everywhere.
The next step is re-copy your API key and open the SEO Minion settings. You can do this by opening SEO minion from your browser extensions and clicking the gear icon in the top right.
A new page will open with a field at the top of the page to input your API key. Paste the key there and click the validate button. If you’ve followed these steps then you will see the following message.
Learn More About SEO & Tools For Your Daily SEO Tasks
To learn more about how we use the SEO Minion chrome extension or other ways to optimize the way you do your daily SEO tasks check out the rest of our blog. We have plenty of information to help you analyze on-page SEO, check broken links, improve user feedback, and find other free fantastic SEO chrome extensions.
Don’t forget to share this post!
Explore More