If you follow this blog, you will know how important it is to periodically analyze your websites to identify aspects to improve, technical inefficiencies, problems that prevent excellent navigation within them. Carrying out a good SEO audit is a fundamental step to achieve maximum efficiency in your web projects, especially when it comes to local SEO to make your site more visible and better navigable.
To do this, we need specific SEO analysis tools that provide us with advanced and reliable information to decide how to perform an in-depth analysis.
Lighthouse is a very intuitive tool that comes to us to analyze our portal from a very reliable technical point of view. Let's find out how it works.
What is Lighthouse, SEO analysis tool?
Lighthouse is an open source project powered by Google aimed at increasing the loading speed of web pages. It is an automation tool designed to guide site owners on how to resolve common issues that harm the browsing experience. Lighthouse is not among the most complete suites among those intended for SEO analysis of web pages, but it stands out for its ease of use that makes it suitable for the study of optimization within the reach of all types of users.
The tool works on both public pages and those that require authorization to access.
This tool is an interesting solution for the SEO analysis of constantly evolving pages: in February 2018, Google added the new SEO function that reports a lot of valuable information for the examination of readability and ease of consultation.
How to use Google Beacon
Google Lighthouse can be used in several ways, through:
- Command Line – Allows you to use Lighthouse faster via shell scripts
- Chrome DevTools – Allows you to intuitively perform page optimizations and run reports in an easy-to-use format, through the browser.
Then press the combination Ctrl + Shift + I to access the developer tools, then go to More tools, a panel will open on the right. From the menu at the top, scroll down to Audit - As a Google Chrome extension
- Node Module: integrates Lighthouse into its functions
Lighthouse is a very intuitive performance analysis tool - you simply provide a URL to the tool and it will generate a series of page efficiency analyses.
The tool offers interesting insights into readability, UX/UI, and mobile-friendliness, whether pages can be crawled correctly.
SEO analysis through Lighthouse: what information it offers
Lighthouse is a very useful tool to get a rough first idea of the technical situation of websites, e-commerce, blogs, web applications and portals in general.
This free SEO analysis tool offers interesting information to help you discover what is wrong with the navigability of our web pages. The automated analyzes carried out with this tool direct us to the aspects that affect the readability and usability of the content to improve our site in the eyes of Google, and obviously of the users.
Each audit related to specific aspects produces reports that illustrate in detail the respective optimization aspects.
Lighthouse considers 5 aspects to evaluate the performance of web pages and improve their performance
Performance
This report highlights one of the most important aspects regarding consulting web pages. Perform a page performance analysis:
- Time of interaction with the site
- Production time of the "first" representation
- speed index
- Time-lapse: allows you to take a “photograph” that shows the evolution of the page over time from the browser's point of view
Progressive web app
This report analyzes everything that affects scalability, accessibility, and page navigation, specifically various aspects such as:
- The ability to rotate the screen without affecting usability
- Page loading time based on 3G connection
- The correct use of Web Services
In short, everything that affects the quality of mobile browsing.
Better Practices
This report analyzes the quality of web development practices.
Accessibility
This report analyzes the factors that affect page accessibility, such as:
- Screen reader display effectiveness
- The effectiveness of visualization by people with sensory deficits
Reporting a score that is higher the greater the accessibility obtained.
SEO
This report offers very interesting information on aspects of SEO optimization that will surely interest website owners.
Reports on the status of meta tags that can influence positioning, such as information, title, and keywords.
The SEO report includes many elements including:
- The size of the fonts to evaluate whether they are adequately readable
- The presence of the Title, of the goal Description
- The correct HTTP status (check if it returns status code 200)
- The presence of descriptive text in the anchor text of the links
- The correct instructions of the Robots.txt file
- The possible presence of non-indexed content that may affect the ranking
- Presence of a valid hreflang
- Presence of a valid canonical tag
- Any plugin incompatible with the display of the pages
- Check if the page is mobile-friendly using Google's mobile-friendly site tool
- Verify correct implementation of structured data through the structured data testing tool
Pros and cons of Lighthouse
This tool is very understandable for anyone and offers immediately understandable information.
However, like any application, Lighthouse also has advantages and disadvantages that we will now summarize, to give you a way to understand if it can be a suitable SEO analysis platform for you.
Lighthouse benefits
- It is a free tool for basic web page analysis
- Provides an immediately understandable technical analysis of the site divided by specific areas
- Adoptable even by people without developer skills
- Allows you to immediately check the main technical difficulties underlying positioning
Disadvantages of Lighthouse:
- The tool offers basic information on the SEO aspects of the website but without reaching the peaks of exhaustiveness of other platforms for expert users.
- It does not provide real information about other aspects of the website, such as content quality and matching search intent.
- It does not replace other suites more appropriate for more complete SEO analysis
As you can see, Lighthouse is a very interesting and easy-to-use tool to improve the performance and accessibility of pages, with a good compromise between ease of use and correctness of the results obtained.
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