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We’ve each been determination before. You, arsenic the SEO, person a proposal for your tract but you request a developer to instrumentality it.
This is simply a precise communal script erstwhile moving successful an bureau exemplary and dealing with clients arsenic a consultant; we seldom marque the existent changes ourselves.
At this point, you’ll hopefully spot your recommendations get deployed by the improvement team, and astatine different times, you’ll conscionable person to hold successful the queue until it’s your turn! But let’s accidental you’re 1 of the fortunate ones who tin get recommendations deployed quickly. Once your developer says they’ve deployed your recommendations, however bash you verify it has been done correctly?
Beyond asking for verbal confirmation that the enactment is done, you tin instrumentality it into your ain hands and verify it yourself!
Verifying modular SEO-focused updates is usually beauteous straightforward. If the lawsuit updates the leafage transcript you tin conscionable look astatine the page. If they update the leafage rubric oregon statement you tin usage 1 of the cardinal tools disposable online that shows you basal leafage accusation absorbing to an SEO.
But what if you don’t person entree to those tools? Or the tools aren’t working, oregon the effect they springiness you doesn’t look right?
How would you spell astir verifying the page’s presumption conscionable utilizing a web browser?
Using a Web Browser to Verify SEO Updates
Almost each modern web browser has built-in functionality that lets you look astatine the guts of a webpage. In Google Chrome, that instrumentality is the inspect tool. This instrumentality reveals different browser model that shows galore things related to the webpage you’re viewing, but astir importantly for us, it shows america the DOM (document entity model).
Using this instrumentality and viewing the DOM, we tin spot the full HTML of the page, allowing america to spot what is truly connected the leafage and not trust connected tools that aren’t ever 100% accurate.
Let’s locomotion done viewing the DOM for seerinteractive.com.
The pursuing steps volition amusement the DOM of a webpage:
- Open a webpage, right-click determination connected the leafage and click Inspect.
- A model volition popular up revealing the DOM of the page, on with a clump of different tabs that fto you inspect the leafage you’re viewing.
- Using this model you tin a amended thought of what a bot mightiness see, successful operation with the “viewsource:” function, you tin get a large presumption of what Google sees.
So, however is this useful? We precocious had an contented wherever we needed to update a site’s metadata astatine standard but didn’t person a mode to bash it programmatically oregon by hand. This would person required 1000s+ pages having their tags needing to beryllium hard-coded by a person. This was a large assets drain connected the lawsuit and thing they wanted to avoid; wholly understandable.
They attempted to alteration the tags utilizing JavaScript successful the user’s browser, successful an effort to leverage codification they already had. In practice, this means the leafage would load the archetypal HTML with a placeholder leafage title, description, and canonical tag successful place, and past a JavaScript publication would alteration the metadata connected the leafage erstwhile ran.
Upon archetypal inspection of the page, conscionable viewing it successful a mean browser, the leafage rubric looked close due to the fact that the JS works truthful accelerated that the indispensable elements are updated precise quickly. However, we noticed that assorted SEO tools we ran the leafage done reported assorted outcomes including:
- No leafage rubric being reported
- The leafage rubric would beryllium the placeholder title
- The leafage rubric would beryllium correct
Of course, this isn’t perfect for SEO. We privation the page’s metadata to beryllium close erstwhile the leafage is delivered to the idiosyncratic and erstwhile bots crawl it, which usually means not requiring immoderate further JavaScript to hole things. Even 1 oregon 2 seconds betwixt the leafage loading and the Javascript fixing things is excessively agelong erstwhile it comes to bots crawling the site.
This wasn’t evident upon archetypal inspection–it’s a reasonably uncommon contented and 1 you mightiness lone recognize aft encountering it for the archetypal time. Visual inspections of the leafage looked okay, and the tools weren’t giving america a accordant answer. At this point, it was clip to not trust connected immoderate outer tools and conscionable dive into the page’s code.
Using the inspect sheet we were capable to spot precisely what was happening and erstwhile on the load process.
This other furniture of penetration and quality to QA allowed america to place a occupation with however our recommendations were deployed, travel up with a program and springiness feedback to the developers truthful they could get the contented fixed. Without verifying these changes beyond conscionable a ocular cheque we mightiness not person noticed the incorrect metadata was being crawled until overmuch further down the line.
Tips for Using Chrome Inspect for Verifying SEO Fixes
Here are immoderate communal usage cases wherever you mightiness privation to see diving into a page’s codification and verifying things are arsenic they should be.
Verifying Metadata
- Open the webpage successful question, right-click connected a non-clickable country of the webpage and click Inspect. When the model opens up click connected the Elements tab and you’ll spot the HTML of the page.
- From present you tin deed power + F to bring up a hunt bar. Use this barroom to find the meta elements you privation to verify.
- For leafage titles, you tin hunt “<title”. To hunt for a statement you tin benignant successful “description”, and truthful on. You mightiness person to play astir with your searches a spot depending connected the developer’s preferred method of penning code.
- Once you find what you’re looking for, verify that it is so correct.
Inspecting UX/Visual Elements
You tin inspect immoderate UX oregon ocular constituent connected a leafage by right-clicking connected that constituent and clicking Inspect. The chrome developer tools volition popular backmost up with the constituent you right-clicked connected highlighted successful the DOM.
Verifying Google Analytics oregon Google Tag Manager connected Page With Chrome Dev Tools
Just similar different meta elements, click connected a non-clickable portion of the leafage to bring up the dev chrome tools.
Search the dom for either “analytics.js”, “ua-”, oregon “gtm” oregon different codification snippet related to your analytics suite that mightiness beryllium connected the page.
Wrapping UP
We’ve conscionable scratched the aboveground of what you tin bash with Chrome Dev tools and the DOM. From present you tin afloat research a webpage down to a precise debased level. So, spell distant and research and verify!
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