Chrome extensions are incredibly useful (and often underrated) tools for marketers. They allow you to tailor your daily online experience to your specific needs, your job, and your productivity. As a marketing consultant, there are plugins out there that can help you, your clients, and potential prospects.
There are many extensions that can help you do things like: gain more competitive insights for your clients, quickly audit and report on a prospect’s website performance, instantly record a short personalized 1-to-1 video to send in a cold email, analyze SEO, security, and design flaws on a website, the list goes on.
There’s a huge library of plugins out there, and it’s easy to become overwhelmed when looking through the extension store. So which ones are really worth adding to your stack?
I want to share some of the best extensions you can add to your marketing consultant toolkit. These tools will help you focus, find new customers, and make informed decisions about your marketing strategies (The links below are all for Chrome versions but many also have Firefox and Safari versions.)
1. Similar web
SimilarWeb can give some basics on traffic to a site including the breakdown of traffic channels and similar websites. It’s a competitive digital intelligence tool for a complete 360-degree view of your industry, competitors, and customers.
2. Quick SEO
Quick SEO checks backlinks and few other handy things. It provides you easy access to important SEO signals and data like PageRank, Backlinks, Alexa Rank, and Traffic estimate.
3. METASEO Inspector
METASEO Inspector is useful to inspect the meta data and schema found inside web pages that are usually not visible while browsing. The extension shows you alerts when the meta data is not within certain ranges, for example when the description tag is too short, or too long.
4. Built With or What Runs
These tools are website profilers. Either of these tools can give you a pretty quick analysis of the technology behind a site like WordPress and what plugins are present with a click of a button.
Above: Built With
Above: What Runs
5. MyWebAudit
This is a paid tool that runs a complete analysis of a site and produces a pretty report you can brand and use. MyWebAudit runs automated checks that provide a done-for-you audit system. It identifies the major design, SEO, security, and performance issues that cost businesses money.
6. Lighthouse
This is Google’s site speed test tool that can quickly produce some ideas about what might be slowing a site down.
7. WhatsMySerp
WhatsMySerp shows related search volume and CPC data right in the browser for most search phrases. You get unlimited on-demand keyword research data inside Google search results.
8. Facebook Pixel Helper
This tool shows if Facebook Pixel is installed. The extension works in the background to look for conversion or Facebook pixels and provide real-time feedback on the implementation.
9. Loom Instant Video
This allows you to launch Loom from any web page and is handy if you’re doing site reviews to capture what you are seeing on a site. You can record your screen, voice, and face to create an instantly shareable video in less time than it would take to type an email.
10. Email Hunter
This tool allows you to find email addresses associated with any website. Along with the email addresses, you can get the names, job titles, social networks, and phone numbers. All the data has public sources detailed in the search results.
11. Color Picker
This tool makes it easy to identify web colors, saving, and editing them on a given site a quick and simple job.
12. What Font
What Font helps you discover the fonts used on a website. It allows you to know the font name, its family, color, style, size, position.
13. Video Speed Controller
Fast-forward, rewind, adjust playback speed on any video. This video speed adjuster adds controls to web videos that allow to increase or decrease playback speed.
14. Grammarly
This tool checks your grammar in email and any other online app. You’ll get real-time feedback from Grammarly on Gmail, Google Docs, Twitter, LinkedIn, and nearly everywhere else you find yourself writing.
15. Calendly
If you use this scheduling tool, the extension makes it easy to drop your calendar links into any doc or email.
There’s my list, but hopefully, you’ve found at least one Chrome extension that can help you become more effective at your job. Are there any essential or obvious ones I missed? Let me know in the comments.