Search engine optimization is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of a website’s traffic and exposure of a brand through organic search engine results. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. are basically answer-machines. They scroll across millions of contents and evaluate thousands of factors to determine which content is most likely to answer a search query. In recent years, SEO has evolved as never before. With the changes in search algorithms, the way people search too has changed drastically. Search engine optimization trends have emerged in such a way that they determine the factors that govern the site rankings directly. “Good SEO work only gets better over time. It is just search engine tricks that need to keep changing when the ranking algorithms change.” – Jill Whalen. He was right. SEO is not a one-time solution, to gain more organic traffic and stay atop of SERP businesses should continuously optimize their website to the ever-evolving search engine algorithms. Web developers and website owners are circumventing for a long time to find the best approach to attract search visibility. And now, Google has turned up with a new tracking tool known as the ‘Lighthouse Chrome extension’ to sort this out. In this Article we’re going to look at: 1. What is Google Lighthouse? 2. How does Google lighthouse work? 3. What does Google lighthouse do? 4. How to Install Google lighthouse? Google Chrome: Google Chrome extension: Node Command Line Interface (CLI): 5. How does Google lighthouse help review a website’s performance on SEO? 6. How Google lighthouse helps SEO? 7. How to Implement Google lighthouse Results to improve Technical SEO? So, what is Google Lighthouse? Lighthouse is an SEO tool introduced by Google in mid-2018. It is an open-source, automated tool that runs a number of tests to analyze a website or web application. Lighthouse helps in improving the quality of pages. You can run it against any webpage, public or those requiring authentication to spot factors that affects ranking. It has audits for accessibility, performance, progressive web apps, SEO and more. How does Google lighthouse work? When you give Lighthouse a URL to audit, it runs a series of audits against the webpage. Once completed, it generates a report that outlines the areas where your site performs well and the areas that need improvement. From here, you can use the failing parameters as indicators on how to improve your webpage. The best part here is that each audit has a reference document that explains why the audit is essential and how to fix it. What does Google lighthouse do? Basically, Google lighthouse is an open-source automated free tool that helps improve the performance, quality, and correctness of sites and apps. It can be run as a command-line in a Chrome extension or developer tools. The tool measures specific parameters to carry out the check on elements such as the number of links, traffic, and mobile-friendliness. How to Install Google lighthouse? There are three simple ways to install Google lighthouse. 1. Google Chrome: Running Google lighthouse straight through the Chrome application is one of the simplest methods to install Lighthouse. This way, you can use the tool without having to download or introduce anything extra. To exploit Lighthouse on Chrome, simply click here or follow these basic steps: Go to the website or page you want to run the audit on Right-click anywhere on the page and select ‘Inspect,’ or simply hit the F12 key to open Chrome Dev Tools. Click Perform an audit. Dev Tools will show a list of audit categories, select the ones you wish to run. Click 'Run audits’ to run the Lighthouse. Within 30 to 60 seconds, Lighthouse will give you a report on the page. Review the report. 2. Google Chrome extension: The simple and advantageous method for running Lighthouse is through the Google Chrome extension. The extension lets you run the Lighthouse tool on a page quickly without having to open the developer tools or open a different tab. You can simply click the Lighthouse button in the toolbar. To use the Lighthouse extension on Chrome, follow the steps below. Install the Lighthouse extension from the Chrome Web Store Go to the site or page you wish to review. Then click the Lighthouse symbol on your toolbar (shown in image), and run the tool. After Lighthouse completes the process, a new tab will open up with a report of the results. 3. Node Command Line Interface (CLI): Google lighthouse can also be accessed on the node module or Node.js command line. This is a specialized method and is appropriate for individuals looking to automate Google lighthouse. To run Google lighthouse in Node CLI, you must: Install the Chrome browser Install the Long-Term Support version of Node Run the command-line to install the universal Lighthouse npm bundle to Node.js. Then run an audit: lighthouse <url> Similarly, you can utilize various CLI to modify your reports. How does Google lighthouse help review a website’s performance on SEO? The Google Lighthouse tool helps you audit and review your website’s performance on Technical SEO by measuring the following: Performance: Performance is generally considered as the most valuable metric by the Google Lighthouse tool. The Performance section in the Lighthouse report contains some crucial parameters like page speed that can be used to improve your site’s Google rankings. This also helps to identify the sites that deliberate the desired results. The performance report also includes features that tell how to secure the site. Therefore, the Lighthouse can give a diagnostics report on areas such as boot-up times, network payloads, and DOM size. Progressive Web App: The Progressive Web App is Google's other advanced execution measurements integrated into its Lighthouse tool. Once you introduce your site to the Lighthouse platform, it will check and report back if the web app offers better user experience. Some of the areas examined include the use of custom splash screens, loading speeds, and brand colors. Moreover, the report generated tells whether the site is reliable and favorable for users. Accessibility: Basically, what this metric does is, it features potential changes needed to improve the availability and client experience of your mobile app or site. Google lighthouse gives suggestions on how to make the website user-friendly. For example, it checks the font, proper labeling, the background and foreground color. Following the accessibility improvement report, will guarantee that your visitors can explore and utilize your site with ease. Best Practices: Here, Lighthouse snips through your site and informs you whether you have adopted the best web practices. Through optimization, Google lighthouse suggests some tools and advances which can boost your site’s ranking. In simple words, Lighthouse reports guides on the best methods to optimize a site’s performance. SEO: The latest and most dynamic of the highlights in Google's Lighthouse tool is the SEO metric. Lighthouse uses Google’s ranking factors to find how well your website is optimized. These factors include crawling, indexing, content quality and mobile-friendliness. As of now, Lighthouse checks: Is the webpage not blocked from indexing? Does the webpage have a successful HTTP status code? Are there any unwanted plugins? Do links have descriptive text? Does the document have valid Hreflang tags Does the document have a < title > component? Is there a Meta description? Etc… How Google lighthouse helps SEO? Ever since Google announced the release of the amazing Lighthouse tool, the question most people ask is, how does it help in SEO? To understand this better, you must know how the new extension works. Gathering: Once you launch Google lighthouse, it go through your site and check on your protocol in terms of the web script used, control page, and emulation. Audits: Once the Lighthouse has evaluated the protocol, an audit is conducted. Artifacts do this. In the auditing phase, Lighthouse gives a scorecard that indicates the metrics that need improvement or is doing well. The feedback given here should be guiding you to the next phase, which is categorization. Categories: The Google lighthouse then issues a detailed report based on the four parameters, i.e. best practices, Progressive Web Access checklist, performance, and accessibility. So the web developer can identify the areas he has scored best and the areas that require more input. Overall, the data given should make optimization on search engines much easier. How can a Lighthouse report help you? The report Google lighthouse creates will provide you with recommendations and opportunities for optimization and will guide you through the areas where you can focus on saving time. For this use the Lighthouse scoring calculator to understand what thresholds you must be aiming to achieving good Google Lighthouse performance score. How to Implement Google lighthouse Results to improve SEO? Once you have the Google lighthouse report, the first question that comes to your mind will be how to use it to improve your website’s Technical SEO. And what solutions will address the issues the Lighthouse Audit revealed? Well, now is the time to develop an excellent strategy to improve your site. This strategy should address different considerations based on the scores for each category. For example, if your performance score is low, you may want to consider minifying scripts or reducing file requests. If your accessibility score is low, you may need to check your robots.txt for errors. The best approach is to deal with each score individually while also trying to remain mindful of how they work together. Take Away! Google lighthouse is a useful SEO tool. It is certainly an excellent resource for both performance metrics and quality controls. The whole concept around Google lighthouse revolves around tracking and improving your site on search SEO. A high score in Lighthouse is a clear proof of an efficient SEO. If you are struggling to implement Lighthouse results, or if you are new to SEO, take the help of a reputed SEO Company like White Digital that can help improve mobile functionality, website speed, and accessibility.
Search engine optimization is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of a website’s traffic and exposure of a brand through organic search engine results. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. are basically answer-machines. They scroll across millions of contents and evaluate thousands of factors to determine which content is most likely to answer a search query.
In recent years, SEO has evolved as never before. With the changes in search algorithms, the way people search too has changed drastically. Search engine optimization trends have emerged in such a way that they determine the factors that govern the site rankings directly.
“Good SEO work only gets better over time. It is just search engine tricks that need to keep changing when the ranking algorithms change.” – Jill Whalen.
He was right. SEO is not a one-time solution, to gain more organic traffic and stay atop of SERP businesses should continuously optimize their website to the ever-evolving search engine algorithms.
Web developers and website owners are circumventing for a long time to find the best approach to attract search visibility. And now, Google has turned up with a new tracking tool known as the ‘Lighthouse Chrome extension’ to sort this out.
In this Article we’re going to look at:
1. What is Google Lighthouse?
2. How does Google lighthouse work?
3. What does Google lighthouse do?
4. How to Install Google lighthouse?
5. How does Google lighthouse help review a website’s performance on SEO?
6. How Google lighthouse helps SEO?
7. How to Implement Google lighthouse Results to improve Technical SEO?
Lighthouse is an SEO tool introduced by Google in mid-2018. It is an open-source, automated tool that runs a number of tests to analyze a website or web application. Lighthouse helps in improving the quality of pages. You can run it against any webpage, public or those requiring authentication to spot factors that affects ranking. It has audits for accessibility, performance, progressive web apps, SEO and more.
When you give Lighthouse a URL to audit, it runs a series of audits against the webpage. Once completed, it generates a report that outlines the areas where your site performs well and the areas that need improvement. From here, you can use the failing parameters as indicators on how to improve your webpage. The best part here is that each audit has a reference document that explains why the audit is essential and how to fix it.
Basically, Google lighthouse is an open-source automated free tool that helps improve the performance, quality, and correctness of sites and apps. It can be run as a command-line in a Chrome extension or developer tools. The tool measures specific parameters to carry out the check on elements such as the number of links, traffic, and mobile-friendliness.
There are three simple ways to install Google lighthouse.
Running Google lighthouse straight through the Chrome application is one of the simplest methods to install Lighthouse. This way, you can use the tool without having to download or introduce anything extra.
To exploit Lighthouse on Chrome, simply click here or follow these basic steps:
The simple and advantageous method for running Lighthouse is through the Google Chrome extension. The extension lets you run the Lighthouse tool on a page quickly without having to open the developer tools or open a different tab.
You can simply click the Lighthouse button in the toolbar. To use the Lighthouse extension on Chrome, follow the steps below.
Google lighthouse can also be accessed on the node module or Node.js command line. This is a specialized method and is appropriate for individuals looking to automate Google lighthouse. To run Google lighthouse in Node CLI, you must:
Similarly, you can utilize various CLI to modify your reports.
The Google Lighthouse tool helps you audit and review your website’s performance on Technical SEO by measuring the following:
Performance is generally considered as the most valuable metric by the Google Lighthouse tool. The Performance section in the Lighthouse report contains some crucial parameters like page speed that can be used to improve your site’s Google rankings. This also helps to identify the sites that deliberate the desired results.
The performance report also includes features that tell how to secure the site. Therefore, the Lighthouse can give a diagnostics report on areas such as boot-up times, network payloads, and DOM size.
The Progressive Web App is Google's other advanced execution measurements integrated into its Lighthouse tool. Once you introduce your site to the Lighthouse platform, it will check and report back if the web app offers better user experience. Some of the areas examined include the use of custom splash screens, loading speeds, and brand colors. Moreover, the report generated tells whether the site is reliable and favorable for users.
Basically, what this metric does is, it features potential changes needed to improve the availability and client experience of your mobile app or site. Google lighthouse gives suggestions on how to make the website user-friendly. For example, it checks the font, proper labeling, the background and foreground color. Following the accessibility improvement report, will guarantee that your visitors can explore and utilize your site with ease.
Here, Lighthouse snips through your site and informs you whether you have adopted the best web practices. Through optimization, Google lighthouse suggests some tools and advances which can boost your site’s ranking. In simple words, Lighthouse reports guides on the best methods to optimize a site’s performance.
The latest and most dynamic of the highlights in Google's Lighthouse tool is the SEO metric. Lighthouse uses Google’s ranking factors to find how well your website is optimized. These factors include crawling, indexing, content quality and mobile-friendliness.
As of now, Lighthouse checks:
Ever since Google announced the release of the amazing Lighthouse tool, the question most people ask is, how does it help in SEO? To understand this better, you must know how the new extension works.
Once you launch Google lighthouse, it go through your site and check on your protocol in terms of the web script used, control page, and emulation.
Once the Lighthouse has evaluated the protocol, an audit is conducted. Artifacts do this. In the auditing phase, Lighthouse gives a scorecard that indicates the metrics that need improvement or is doing well. The feedback given here should be guiding you to the next phase, which is categorization.
The Google lighthouse then issues a detailed report based on the four parameters, i.e. best practices, Progressive Web Access checklist, performance, and accessibility. So the web developer can identify the areas he has scored best and the areas that require more input. Overall, the data given should make optimization on search engines much easier.
The report Google lighthouse creates will provide you with recommendations and opportunities for optimization and will guide you through the areas where you can focus on saving time. For this use the Lighthouse scoring calculator to understand what thresholds you must be aiming to achieving good Google Lighthouse performance score.
Once you have the Google lighthouse report, the first question that comes to your mind will be how to use it to improve your website’s Technical SEO. And what solutions will address the issues the Lighthouse Audit revealed? Well, now is the time to develop an excellent strategy to improve your site. This strategy should address different considerations based on the scores for each category. For example, if your performance score is low, you may want to consider minifying scripts or reducing file requests. If your accessibility score is low, you may need to check your robots.txt for errors. The best approach is to deal with each score individually while also trying to remain mindful of how they work together.
Google lighthouse is a useful SEO tool. It is certainly an excellent resource for both performance metrics and quality controls. The whole concept around Google lighthouse revolves around tracking and improving your site on search SEO. A high score in Lighthouse is a clear proof of an efficient SEO. If you are struggling to implement Lighthouse results, or if you are new to SEO, take the help of a reputed SEO Company like White Digital that can help improve mobile functionality, website speed, and accessibility.