The fast-paced world of digital marketing means we need tools at our fingertips to help automate, predict, replicate and scrape where we can. 

We put the feelers out amongst Team Fusion to find out their must-have Google Chrome Extensions that make our jobs just that little bit easier. 

First off, we’re heading over to our paid media…

Search & Paid Media Chrome Extensions

1) Redirect Path

This handy tool lets you know if you’ve been redirected whenever you hit a landing page. Good to use when testing to see if any ads need their final URLs updating (boosting quality score in the process).

2) Ghostery

Ghostery is a powerful privacy extension that can block ads, suppress tracking code, and show a list of sites that are trying to track you and serve you advertisements. By doing so, it speeds up your browsing experience.

3) Facebook Pixel Helper

Establishing a tracking pixel on Facebook is an incredibly important prerequisite to quality data gathering, but what if your pixel breaks? The Pixel Helper extension can flag this for you, negating the need for manual checks.

4) Google Tag Assistant

When activating Google Tag Assistant, you’ll see an analysis of each of the tags active on your website of choice. It can also display additional information about tags at a glance, making troubleshooting easy.

5) UET Tag Helper

This nifty extension from Microsoft Advertising is another highlight for our paid team (who absolutely love their tags). Once clicking the UET (Universal Event Tracking) Tag Helper extension, you’ll see a breakdown of which tags are active on the page and whether they’re working. You can also get quick insights into whether your Dynamic Remarketing lists are correctly configured, as well as your conversion goals.

6) Trendtastic

Content Marketing Chrome Extensions

7) Colorzilla

With Colorzilla you’re only one click away from finding out the colour of any pixel on a webpage. Unbelievably speedy for when you’re looking to match client presentation colour palettes or mocking up a quick bit of creative.

8) Whatfont

In a similar vein, it can be difficult to know your clients’ web font without trawling through their brand guidelines. That’s what Whatfont can help you with- after only one click.

9) Edit Anything

This extension is as abstract and crazy as it sounds. You can literally edit anything on a rendered webpage, replacing copy, deleting elements, and the likes. It’s really useful for visualising changes to page copy and for ideating around design changes on the fly.

10) Grammarly

Not the wordsmith you hoped you were? Fear not! Grammarly goes where Spellchecker only dreamt it could – everywhere you go.

Whilst copywriters may roll their eyes at Grammarly’s claim that ‘everyone can be a great writer’ it sure does help when you’re firing off a quick email and forget to include a pesky comma along the way. 

11) GoFullPage

This effective screen capture tool can capture an entire webpage. It’s handy given most screenshot programs limit you to capturing only what you can see without scrolling.

12) Momentum

Maintaining momentum for long periods of time is difficult when you’re busy. That’s where the Momentum extension can help. It opens a new tab featuring a personalised dashboard of to-do’s, inspiration, and even throws in a weather forecast – helping you to procrastinate productively.

Technical SEO Chrome Extensions

To throw a few quick helpful extras in from our tech team, check out the following:

13) Alt Text Tester

Gone are the days of traipsing through a page’s source code to identify whether images have alt text. With Alt Text Tester, you can hover over images to see not only whether it has alt text, but what that text is – speeding up page optimisations.

14) View Rendered Source

This helpful tool enables you to spot the difference between a page’s source code, and its fully rendered final form. Handy if you’re trying to identify issues that may affect how a page is crawled and indexed.

15) Wappalyzer

Wappalyzer is a fantastic extension that can tell you a lot about a website without you having to trawl through its source code. This plugin can reveal virtually everything about a websit’s technology stack – including which CMS it is using, its hosts, which analytics integrations it has, and the list goes on. It can also show you a site’s security certificates and metadata at a glance.

Speed up your day-to-day with the right extensions

We hope you’ve enjoyed our top picks for the best chrome extensions- as voted by all the digital marketers at Fusion Unlimited. There are hundreds of hidden gems out there so we’re sorry if your favourite pick didn’t make our list – but please be sure to let us know what you would’ve included via our socials.

If you enjoyed reading, check out our blog for the latest SEO and marketing insights.

TikTok has introduced the ‘Promote’ ad option to all business accounts

Similar to Facebook’s popular ‘Boost’ option, TikTok has launched its own quick advertising option called ‘Promote’.

This can help businesses to quickly place themselves in front of new audiences, grow their following and increase website visits.

The option is only available to public videos that use original or commercial sound – which means that if you’re thinking of using a trend or a sound that is copyrighted, you will not be able to promote your video.

According to TikTok, all you have to do is select the video you want to promote, chose your campaign goal, and wait for the positive results to come in. The three campaign goals you can choose from are:

• More video views
• More website visits
• More followers

 The app further states:

Promote is available to help businesses reach more people and grow their community with their TikTok videos. You can now turn any organic TikTok video into an ad, and start reaching new audiences, build a following and drive traffic to your website.

Promote will also give you access to basic tracking information such as:

• The number of views your video gained because of the promotion
• Number of likes, comments and shares on the promoted video
• Number of people that have visited your website through the video
• Age and gender of the people interacting with your video

Instagram is replacing swipe-up stories links with link stickers

Instagram’s constant effort to improve Stories interaction has led the app to replace the current swipe-up link with a link sticker option.

This new option works the same way as other stories tools such as polls, locations and mentions – which means that users will now have more creative control over the way they use link stickers.

The tool is great for accounts that want to get reactions and feedback from followers, as the swipe-up link did not previously provide that.

Instagram says that this new option will give creators more creative options to drive traffic to their desired page, as the new link sticker can be placed anywhere on the story, resized and toggled to different styles.

LinkedIn is shutting down Stories

After a year of experimentation, LinkedIn has decided to retire its Stories option and move towards its next video project.

Unfortunately for the app, Stories did not gain much traction from its professional user base. Research conducted by the platform found that users want more creative tools to make engaging videos, as well as wanting their Stories content to live beyond the 24-hour time limit.

LinkedIn says:

We’ve learned a ton through Stories. Now, we’re taking those learnings to evolve the Stories format into a reimagined video experience that’s even richer and more conversational.

The app further states that they want to embrace mixed media and creative tools of Stories and integrate them more tightly with users’ professional identity.

This is highly possible after the platform’s acquisition of Jumprope, a how-to video platform.

YouTube has added video chapter listings in search

YouTube is looking to enhance its search option and help people find relevant content through the introduction of video chapters.

These video chapters divide content into small sections, each with an individual preview, depending on what each portion of the video is about. This means that users will be able to see the content of each video right on the search page.

Each section will include some written information, giving users the full context of the video. This is a great tool for SEO as creators can also add their own information based on keyword search and maximise their video discovery.

This is great as users don’t have to watch the full video to get their query answered or skip through a different section; they can just directly click to the part of the video that interests them the most.

To find out how we can help your business with content creation, social media management, and SEO – get in touch with our expert team here. Alternatively, browse through our blog to discover all the latest news and trends in digital marketing.

Join Fusion’s SEO team as we round up last month’s major industry updates.

Google Updates How Title Tags Are Generated

In late August Google announced that they had “introduced a new system of generating titles for web pages” in a new post within the Search Central blog. The statement came following widespread speculation across the industry, with webmasters and SEOs initially noticing that something had changed around the 17^th of August.

According to Google, while title tags could previously alter to match a user query, with the new system this will no longer happen. Instead, webpages will now display the same title tag regardless of the query, in order to produce “titles that work better for documents overall”.

In addition, Google is now making greater use of on-page elements to generate title tags, in particular “text that humans can visually see when they arrive at a web page”. This includes key on-page elements like H1s and other header tags, alongside content that is “large and prominent through the use of style treatments” such as pull-quotes or text within links. The rationale is to avoid instances where manually input HTML title tags are too long, contain boilerplate text, or have obvious instances of keyword stuffing.

Google has made use of on-page elements to produce title tags for years, but early analysis suggests that this is now happening with far greater frequency. One limited case study indicates a 77% drop in HTML title tag usage following the change, although the search engine maintains that the updates are limited and that HTML tags are still used “more than 80% of the time”.

Despite the update, Google says that webmasters should still focus on “creating great HTML title tags”. Google also acknowledge that the new system is still being refined, and are welcoming feedback from webmasters.

Safe Browsing Dropped As Page Experience Signal

Last month Google stated that the Safe Browsing requirement would no longer form part of its Page Experience signal. The announcement came as part of a post on wider changes made to Search Console’s Page Experience report, which also included news on the the removal of the Ad Experience tool.

In the post, Google explain that as issues such as malware or third-party site hijacking are “not always in the control of site users[..]we’re clarifying that Safe Browsing isn’t used as a ranking signal and won’t feature in the Page Experience report”. This means that the signal was not considered within the recent Page Experience update, which completed its rollout on 31^st August.

To further make clear the factors which now form part of the Page Experience signal, Google released the updated graphic below:

Safe Browsing issues will still be flagged within other areas of Google Search Console and should of course remain a wider consideration for SEOs and webmasters.

Google Search Console Experiences Data Loss

Google Search Console experienced a widespread data loss issue in late August, resulting in many site owners reporting dramatic drops in clicks and impressions to their websites.

The issue impacts the 23^rd and 24^th of August, and according to Google was due to an “internal problem”. In a post within the Search Console support hub, Google explain that “Users might see a significant data drop in their performance reports during this period. This does not reflect any drop in clicks or impressions for your site, only missing data in Search Console.”.

Although many initially assumed that the issue was a glitch or reporting delay, this appears to be real data loss, with Google’s John Mueller stating the traffic information is unlikely to be backfilled:

Google Search Console is relied on widely to provide detailed insight into organic performance, and the data loss means that many SEOs may be reporting slightly lower than average levels of traffic for August. Although unfortunate, this is purely an artificial drop, and it’s safe to assume that clicks & impressions for the impacted dates will be slightly higher than GSC reports.

Google Made 4500 Changes To Search In 2020

According to a recent post by Danny Sullivan, in total around 4500 changes to Google Search were made within 2020. These changes likely cover everything from smaller user interface changes to larger algorithm updates, with many unlikely to be noticed by everyday users. 

The announcement came within a wider post announcing the launch of an updated How Search Works portal, which is to give insight into how Google approaches “the big, philosophical questions, along with the nitty-gritty details”. Explaining, Sullivan writes:

“On the site, you can find details about how Google’s ranking systems sort through hundreds of billions of web pages and other content in our Search index — looking at factors like meaning, relevance, quality, usability and context — to present the most relevant, useful results in a fraction of a second. And you can learn about how we go about making improvements to Search. (There have been 4,500 such improvements in 2020 alone!)”

Although only a brief comment, with around 3200 changes made in 2019, and 980 reportedly made in 2014 , this indicates that Google is rapidly increasing the rate at which it updates search.

If you found this update useful, check out our latest blog posts for the latest news, and if you’re interested in finding out more about what we can do for your brand, get in touch with the team today.

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