Google adds new SEO Audit category to Chrome’s Lighthouse extension
The popular auditing tool used by developers and search marketers now enables users to run basic SEO checks against site pages.
Webmasters, web developers and SEOs are getting a new feature in the widely used website auditing tool Lighthouse. Google announced today the addition of an “SEO Audits” category to the Chrome extension. You can access the new audit category via the “Options” button in the extension.
By no means a replacement for a comprehensive SEO audit, the new feature does provide feedback on basic/fundamental SEO best practices, returning a report that checks for:
- Descriptive anchor text.
- Titles, description.
- If the page can be crawled by Google.
- HTTP status code.
- Valid hreflang and rel=canonical tags.
- UX — legible font sizes, plugins.
- … and makes recommendations for additional reports.
From a sample report I ran against Starbucks.com:
SEO Audit Report from Lighthouse Extension
According to the post, they’ll be adding more features to the SEO audit, and they are actively soliciting user feedback in the Github project and webmaster forum.
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