How SEOs Can Benefit From Google Lighthouse

The majority of website owners and web developers have been thwarting to check on the best approach to exert visibility and use it on the search engine. For that reason, Google has come up with its new tracking tool known as the Lighthouse Chrome extension to ease out web developers’ functions. First, let us understand the basic concept of the Lighthouse.

Google Lighthouse

As you may have gotten a gist of what Google lighthouse from a brief introduction above, it is a part of Chrome DevTools. Google lighthouse is the first multifaceted tool designed to assess website optimization provided by Google directly. Pre-existing tools like a mobile-friendly test, page speed insights, structured data testing tool, etc., primarily focused on one area solely. Whereas Google Lighthouse goes beyond that and mainly focuses on performance, it examines a given page from different angles. To perform multiple audits and provide a clear assessment takes a considerable amount of aspects into consideration.

Now let us understand how SEO Can Benefit from Google Lighthouse:

In June 2016, Google introduced the very first Lighthouse version. It did not catch much attention in the SEO service world because the latest version was quite limited in terms of user interface and features. Since then, the Lighthouse did go through several changes- the latest version of Google Lighthouse is not a tool targeted strictly at developers. If it were, it would probably be accessible from the command line only; relatively, it has an excellent user interface that you can use from the browser level without any coding knowledge.

The Lighthouse SEO check

Lighthouse does not merely perform; it also has an accessibility test, suggestions on enhancing your site based on best practices, and a PWA analysis. Another striking Lighthouse feature is the basic SEO check. With lighthouse SEO check, you can run a simple SEO audit to uncover fundamental SEO issues the site possibly may have. It gives you the user suggestions to fix them. The SEO metric offers essential tools to examine your page’s streamlining for search engine results rankings.

At present, Lighthouse checks:

• The mobile-friendliness of a page
• If the structured data is substantial
• Does it have a <meta name=”viewport”> tag with width or initial-scale?
• Does the document have a <title> component?
• Is there a Meta depiction?
• Does the page have an effective HTTP status code?
• Do links have clear anchor text?
• Does the document utilize legible text dimensions?
• Is the page not impeded from indexing?
• Is the robots.txt legitimate?
• Does the image mentioned on site have an alt tag?
• Does the document have a substantial hreflang implementation?
• Does the archive have a valid rel=canonical arrangement?
• Are there any undesirable plugins like Java or Flash?

Although the pointers mentioned above seem to be quite essential, Lighthouse checks will alert you of any SEO problems to fix. These include the Google mobile-friendly test and structured data testing as well.

• Gathering: Once you launch Lighthouse, the crawlers go through your browser and checks on your protocol in terms of the emulation, web script used, and control page. After integrating the DevTool Protocol, the gatherers give out artifacts utilized in auditing.

• Audits: Once the extension has been evaluated on the protocol, an audit is then conducted- artifacts do that. At the auditing phase, the tool gives some scorecards indicating the metrics that require improvement or do well. Here the feedback provided should guide within the next stage, which is categorization.

• Categories: The Lighthouse then issues a comprehensive report supported the four parameters, i.e., Progressive Web Access (PWA) checklist, best practices, performance, and accessibility. Therefore, the web developer can quickly identify the areas he has scored best and where some more input is required. Overall, the info provided should make optimization on search engines far more accessible

How to Use Google Lighthouse?

Chrome Add-On method for Google Lighthouse

1. First, you have to search for Lighthouse in the Chrome web store.
2. Then you have to select the “add to Chrome” icon and then click “Add extension.”
3. Once you select the extension, click on the puzzle icon on the top-right corner of your browser.
4. Following that action, select the Lighthouse icon.
5. Then click on “Generate Report.”
6. A new tab will open with your report.

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