On-Page SEO Chrome Extension: a 5-Minute Live Page Checklist

Record the final browser URL first. Parameters, redirects, locale folders and trailing slashes can put you on a different variant than the one you intended to audit. Then read HTTP status, meta robots, X-Robots-Tag and canonical together.

A 200 response does not mean “indexable.” A page can return 200 and still carry noindex or canonicalize elsewhere. Conversely, a cross-canonical may be intentional for a duplicate variant. The extension should show the facts; the template strategy decides whether they are correct.

Read the words before the counters. The title should identify the page and distinguish it from close alternatives. The description should earn the click without inventing an offer. The H1 should confirm the visible topic. They can differ; they should not contradict one another.

A length warning is a review cue, not proof of a ranking problem. A 62-character title that names the right product can outperform a tidy 48-character title that says nothing. Check uniqueness at site scale with a crawler; use the extension to judge the active page in context.

Use the heading tree as an outline, not a compliance puzzle. One descriptive H1 is a sensible default. H2s should expose the main questions or sections. Skipped levels matter when they hide structure, not because H2 must mechanically precede every H3.

Then inspect internal links in the content area. Navigation and footer links show crawl paths; contextual links explain relationships. Look for descriptive anchors, accidental nofollow attributes and important destinations that exist only behind a click handler.

Do not write alt text for every image by reflex. Classify the image first: informative, functional or decorative. A missing attribute on one editorial image is a page fix; the same empty pattern on 80 product cards is a component fix.

For structured data, validate syntax and meaning separately. A valid Product block can still describe the wrong SKU, duplicate a second graph or disagree with the visible price. Check entity type, identifiers, relationships and whether JavaScript duplicates the markup after hydration.

Open the rendered HTML comparison only when something earlier does not add up: the visible H1 is missing from source, schema appears twice, a canonical changes after load, or links exist in the interface but not as crawlable anchors.

Search the diff for content, links and directives that affect discovery or interpretation. Ignore analytics noise and generated UI wrappers. The useful output is a short statement such as “product links appear only after an API response,” not “41% of the HTML changed.”