This is going to be an in-depth guide about how to use Orca SEO, the SEO extension that my colleagues and I are building.
Before I go over each and every one of the extension features, I want to take a step back and discuss why we decided to build it in the first place, and what the future holds for Orca.
The idea for Orca came after we saw that our freelance writers are relying on too much SEO tools to conduct their research for their content and once they are done with the articles to review them and look for errors.
We also wanted a quicker and more effective way to double-check our digital PR agency, and we also wanted to spot technical issues that our developers might miss when launching a new page or fixing some issues.
The future of Orca SEO is going to be big. We are going to implemnt API’s connections and also connections with GSC & GA4 so you will have everything that you need under one extension rather than alt+tab all the time.
The overview screen (the first screen you will encounter when clicking on the Orca extension) consists of the following:
Navigation tabs: Overview (default), Headings, Links, Images, Schema, Social, Advanced
Let’s focus on the overview screen with the following information:
1. HTML Lang
2. Word count
3. Head title
4. Meta description
5. Canonical URL
6. Robots
7. Search location
This is pretty straight forward. It will show you the language used on the current page.
Use case: Identify whether a page’s HTML is defined in the right language. Extremely useful for eCommerce sites & travel.
How many characters are being used on the page.
Use case: Identify how much text is on the page. This is good when you are comparing your own page with competitors who are ranking higher, can give you a hint if you should update your page and add more content.
The Title of a page.
Use case: The page title is important and it should emphasize the purpose of the page & should also correlate with the keyword the page is trying to rank for. Treat the head title as the first impression you want to leave.
Treat the meta description as the blurb of a book.
Use case: The meta should describe what the page is about. It is also the description that might appear in Google search results and therefore it should be enticing so more people would click on it and increase the CTR.
Canonical URL is the URL of a page that Google chooses as the most representative from a set of duplicate pages.
Use case: If you have a product page, a blog post and a glossary term about the same topic, choose the most relevant page that you want to rank on Google and set it as the Canonical URL.
Checks and optimizes your robot meta in the specific web page for effective search engine crawling.
Use case: Understand if a page is not indexed (usually due to developer mistake).
You can use these buttons to open Google/Bing in different locations to see results from different countries without using a VPN!
Use case: Many times you will need to log into VPN to see results from different countries, this is a simple syntax in the search address that we use so you can compare your results in different regions.
This function is super useful for content writers. It will allow you to export with 2 clicks all of the headings in a single content piece. It will also show you the structure of the headings from H1 onwards.
Use case: Export the top 5-10 competitors pages you want to compete with to Google sheets. Compare between headings, understand what headings/topics you must in your content. Everybody loves links! Especially we at Orca, and this is by far the most versatile function
The Links feature is simple yet powerful. It will allow you to highlight & extract all of the internal/external links within a page. It will also allow you to highlight “no-follow” links.
PRO Tip: You can right click on the mouse to highlight internal/external links.
Use case – For in-house SEO’s:
If you are working with an agency, and you are reviewing their content and you want to make sure the internal links are in place & with the right anchor text, this is the feature you are looking for.
If you are curious about what external links employees or agencies are using, you can also use this feature to double check the content.
Use case – For Digital PR agencies looking for publications that are accepting guest posts:
Just highlight the external links or extract them, filter the URL’s to find your competitors’ pages & if the anchor is too good to be true then congratulations, you just found a new website you can pitch a story to and get a link to your client!
The images tab will allow you to understand what images are being used on a page, whether they have an alt, what is the url address for the image & export all images into a list.
Use case:
Understand how many images are being used by a page, whether the images are being made by a graphic designer or just free stock images. You can also understand what alt names are being used for the images to enhance SEO optimization.
Schema markup,(or just Schema) is code you add to your webpages to help search engines better understand what your content is all about.
Use case:
Schema can help websites & in the future, AI tools, to better crawl and understand what your content is all about. It’s important to use the right schema for your pages. It’s also important to understand that pages without schema can perform really well, but for the sake of your SEO efforts, just use it.
Use case:
Analyzes OpenGraph tags for enhanced social media sharing.
Open any page that you visit in your favorite tool/website.
Pro tip:
You can right click with the mouse to open the page you are inspecting.
Use cases:
Gain more insights about specific page from multi services & websites that are available.
Social
Understand how the open graph meta tags snippets are displayed when shared on social media.