We're happy to announce that we are introducing another audit category to the Lighthouse Chrome Extension: SEO Audits.
Lighthouse is an open-source, automated auditing tool for improving the quality of web pages. It provides a well-lit path for improving the quality of sites by allowing developers to run audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps compatibility and more. Basically, it "keeps you from crashing into the rocks", hence the name Lighthouse.
The SEO audit category within Lighthouse enables developers and webmasters to run a basic SEO health-check for any web page that identifies potential areas for improvement. Lighthouse runs locally in your Chrome browser, enabling you to run the SEO audits on pages in a staging environment as well as on live pages, public pages and pages that require authentication.
Bringing SEO best practices to you
The current list of SEO audits is not an exhaustive list, nor does it make any SEO guarantees for Google websearch or other search engines. The current list of audits was designed to validate and reflect the SEO basics that every site should get right, and provides detailed guidance to developers and SEO practitioners of all skill levels. In the future, we hope to add more and more in-depth audits and guidance — let us know if you have suggestions for specific audits you'd like to see!
How to use it
Currently there are two ways to run these audits.
Using the Lighthouse Chrome Extension:
- Install the Lighthouse Chrome Extension
- Click on the Lighthouse icon in the extension bar
- Select the Options menu, tick “SEO” and click OK, then Generate report
Running SEO Audits in Lighthouse extension
Using Chrome Developer tools on Chrome Canary:
- Open Chrome Developer Tools
- Go to Audits
- Click Perform an audit
- Tick the “SEO” checkbox and click Run Audit.
Running SEO Audits in Chrome Canary
The current Lighthouse Chrome extension contains an initial set of SEO audits which we’re planning to extend and enhance in the future. Once we're confident of its functionality, we’ll make the audits available by default in the stable release of Chrome Developer Tools.
We hope you find this functionality useful for your current and future projects. If these basic SEO tips are totally new to you and you find yourself interested in this area, make sure to read our complete SEO starter-guide! Leave your feedback and suggestions in the comments section below, on GitHub or on our Webmaster forum.
Happy auditing!
Posted by Valentyn, Webmaster Outreach Strategist.
