Time, energy, money – bookmarklets can save you a LOT of it.
What are bookmarklets? They are the buttons that look like bookmarks on our toolbar, but are actually snippets of code that are ready to be executed on any page you visit.
If you’ve ever used a tool like Instapaper, you would be familiar with bookmarklets and how they can perform powerful functions at the click of a button.
Bookmarklets make your job much easier, especially in the realm of SEO when you are constantly analyzing clients, competitors and anyone in between.
As an example, if you want to check the number backlinks to particular site, the contrast between the two methods are clear–
You can either:
- Copy the URL
- Open your preferred SEO tool
- Click to the backlink segment of the tool
- Paste the URL
- Click the Submit button
OR
You can just click the button while you’re on the page 👍🏻
If SEO is a significant part of your job description, you would be self-loathing to conduct your research any other way. It may not feel like much of a difference between the short amount of time it would normally take to complete a traditional action against our proposed methods, but over the course of just one year you could save HOURS of time and resources.
We’ve created a number of bookmarklets for internal use, which we hope in sharing today will help in your SEO journey also — To create a bookmarklet, all you need to do is drag the buttons into the bookmarks bar.
Let’s see what they are!
Disclaimer: You will need a SEMrush account for these functions to work.
Organic Keyword Rankings
So, you want to know every keyword a site ranks for?
One click and you’ll have an entire list of keywords a website ranks for, including what position they currently hold along with peripheral data you may find useful such as search volume, keyword difficulty & volume trends:
Organic KeywordsInbound Link Profile
Perhaps our most used bookmarklet, this one allows for a quick overview of a domain or page backlink profile, including important metrics like:
- Number of links
- Types of incoming links (text, image, etc.)
- Follow vs. Nofollow ratio
Be sure to utilize the appropriate one when necessary:
Backlinks (Page) Backlinks (Domain)Anchor Text Link Profile
While it’s important to know how many links you have and what form they take, it’s equally vital to know what anchors they are comprised of.
Not only will this bookmarklet list the anchors that link back to your site, it will also display the most frequently used terms found in those anchors, which search engines often use to contextualize what your website is about and what it could rank for:
Anchor TextsReferring Domain Link Profile
More than just discovering which unique domains are linking to a site, a referring domain link profile will also break down via percentages which countries most links are coming from, along with the top level domain (TLD) distribution of said domains — whether it be .com, .net, .org or any other popular extensions.
In addition, you can quickly identify where most links are originating from, and promptly decide if it’s something you want to emulate or disavow:
Referring DomainsTop Pages
If the name isn’t obvious, top pages identifies the most popular pages on a site by way of traffic.
Furthermore, top pages can also be arranged by number of keywords each page ranks for, along with direct links they have amassed — even displaying the percentage of traffic they contribute to the site:
Top PagesPaid Advertising
Usually in relation to competitive analysis, this bookmarklet is extremely helpful when you need to understand:
- If your competition is paying for advertising
- Which keywords they are bidding on
- What positions they are bidding for
- How much traffic they received from advertising
- How much they spent
- What their advertising history looks like
Knowing if, when & how the competition is running ads is a great way to understand the market and how you can position your site to succeed in the long term:
Paid AdsAdvertising Copy
What’s fantastic about historical advertising data is the copy & creative that went along with it.
Having access to the exact ads that related sites have run (or are continuing to run) is almost like a cheat code in seeing not only what works, but how it can be scaled and maximized for scale while also avoiding what has not seemed to work as well:
Ad CopyFinal Thoughts
There you have it!
These SEO bookmarklets which can save you time, energy and money in your online marketing efforts. We hope you’ve been inspired to take a streamlined approach to your research — even if you don’t have a SEMrush subscription, you can still use these principles and apply them to any tool you currently work with.
