In the second of my posts on growing SEO Ranking Factors in 2019, I want to touch on Google’s Lighthouse tool. As Google tries to turn more and more of your user experiences into specific metrics, the Lighthouse tool is an open window into much of the data that they are using to determine UX. It touches on speed and accessibility and SEO, among other things. Though many of these things are more technical in nature, it at least shows at a more granular level what may be going wrong and offers methods to solve issues. The suggestions may still be over the head of the average business person, but a good developer can come in and help fix some of the issues that pop up.  Keep in mind the lighthouse tool looks at things on a URL basis, not the whole domain. Though often similar issues are found throughout the same site and one fix can fix the problem on many pages, it isn’t always the case. It also doesn’t mean everything is fine and dandy if you just throw your homepage into the tool and it comes out with high scores. Often your deeper pages have very little in common with your homepage.

Adding Lighthouse to Your Chrome Browser

You can actually add the Lighthouse tool to your Chrome browser as a plugin and then just hit the icon when you want to analyze any page that you have open. The application is quite simple on desktop, even if the solutions may be a bit more complex. Any time Google gives you an open window to the way they view your site, you should use that glimpse and learn from it, and more importantly, improve from it.  If you would rather not have to worry about this stuff and want to hire us to help you move forward in the world of SEO, give us a call.

Lighthouse Glimpse at Google