Blogging ain’t easy! To build a successful blog you need to work hard and put in a lot of time.
It’s clear that you can’t achieve anything without working towards it. If you are doing something, again and again, it becomes a chore. Which nobody wants to do, but don’t have any other options.
However, as a blogger, there are shortcuts you can take to skip the mundane and repetitive tasks. That too, without compromising on the quality. And, these shortcuts are achieved by using some Google Chrome Extensions.
Google Chrome is by far, the most used web browser. It’s an amazing web browser, but its real power lies in having extensions for almost everything. Even I’m using Google Chrome and having almost 16 extensions at the moment.
Although, I’m using only 9 out of 16 extensions present in this list. Here are my top picks for Google Chrome extensions that every blogger must use. (You will find some extensions better than others, each one to their own, I guess.)
There are thousands of Chrome extensions present in the Google Chrome store. But these are the best and useful ones for bloggers only. They are the absolute best in their category. The list will be updated as I use more extensions.
Note – Don’t install too many extensions at the same time. Using many of them at the same time will slow your web browser. Only use the ones you need and find useful. Uninstall which you haven’t used for weeks.
Best Google Chrome Extensions For Bloggers & Internet Marketers (2019)
#1 Grammarly
Starting the list with the extension that I can’t imagine to live without, Grammarly is a chrome extension which helps you fix all the grammatical errors you have in your articles. If you want error-free writing then this is a must-have extension.
Here’s the truth: it sucks to find small spelling or grammar mistakes when you have published your articles and your readers have read it. It’s also embarrassing when you send emails but later find mistakes in it which can’t be undone.
Grammarly is not only great for proofreading articles, but it’s can also be used in whatever you write on your chrome browser. you will never get embarrassed for silly spelling mistakes if you use Grammarly. The extension can be used with the free plan.
See, if you’re a blogger from a non-English speaking country like India it’s hard to have command over good English. Even bloggers who write exceptionally great content started out learning how to write and it took some time to master.
All the bloggers I know use Grammarly extension for finding and editing small spelling mistakes. There’s no bad thing in using extensions which help you to write better. If you want to level up your writing skill you should use Grammarly.
#2 Keywords Everywhere
This is the second most useful extension I’ve ever used. Keywords Everywhere, as the name says will help you suggest keywords whenever you search anything on Google and this will also tell their search volume. It’s a great tool for bloggers.
With the help of this tool, you will get the related keywords which you can use as LSI Keywords in your content and their search volume. It’s one of the flawless extensions ever made for bloggers and marketers.
This tool can be also used for searching for new niches, content, and keywords. If you install this extension, you won’t ever need to visit the Google keyword planner for finding keywords volume. It will save you a lot of time.
It’s also not limited to Google, the other sites it supports are YouTube, Amazon, eBay, etc. This is a perfect tool for bloggers, it doesn’t matter if you’re a newbie or pro you must use it. You can also extract the keywords and use them later.
Apart from all this, it’s a free tool. Yes, a free tool which comes with so many features better than some paid tools. You can also check the demographics of the keywords. It extracts the data from the Google Keyword Planner, so it’s pretty good.
#3 SimilarWeb
Want to know how much traffic your competitor’s website gets? It can get a little long to know your competitors’ traffic when you check it from website traffic checker tools. Want to follow a simple method which just takes some clicks?
Then install the SimilarWeb chrome extension. This way you can easily know the traffic estimates of any website you want. And the best part that it works even with the free version and is almost accurate.
With the help of this chrome extension, you will be able to see any site’s traffic and other key metrics. The other key metrics you can see with SimilarWeb are – engagement rate, site’s rank, traffic sources, top keywords, etc.
Although, not a single web traffic estimater is 100% accurate. Suppose you see that a website has 100k visit then the exact number can be anything – maybe 20% more or 20% less. These can be a great way to get an idea.
After installing and activating the extension, all you need to do is visit any website. After that click on the extension, you will see all the data. It’s one of the best tools to check traffic of any website and also quite simple to use.
#4 MozBar
It’s impossible that you don’t know about Moz if you’ve tried to learn about SEO. After all, they rank for some of the most competitive marketing guides. They do also offer a lot of SEO tools in their Moz Pro site.
But there’s one tool from Moz that you can use as a web extension and that’s the Mozbar. It’s a free tool which lets you know about important SEO metrics like domain authority, page authority, spam score, etc.
The other metrics you can know with the help of MozBar are – follow or nofollow links on a web page and internal or external links. MozBar is great for looking sites from where you can build backlinks. It’s also great for spying.
You can also use the MozBar for finding keywords that you can rank. How? You can search for a keyword that has good search volume, after that, see the DA and PA of the ranking websites. If they are within your reach you can target those keywords.
If you’re working on SEO then you can’t miss out on the MozBar extension. While the DA and PA are some metrics made by Moz they clearly give an idea of how to rank your websites. You just need to use them the right way.
#5 Hunter.io
You know what’s one of the most irritating things about being a blogger is? Yes, it’s finding the email addresses of website owners. Finding real emails of website owners is important if you want to grow professional relationships with them.
It’s a boring and tedious task which takes hours to complete. But there’s a solution for this too. (Like everything.) The only way to outreach and grow relationships with fellow bloggers is to connect with them and it can only be done via email.
This is something that you shouldn’t ever ignore. And to make this task easier, we have the Email Hunter extension. With the help of this tool, you will be able to find the real email address of website owners in a few clicks.
It’s a freemium tool which means you can find up to 100 email addresses monthly without paying anything. However, if you need to find lots of email address then you will have to pay a small fee. But that’s nothing compared to the final results.
Email Hunter (or Hunter.io) reduces the amount of time you spend finding an email address. You can put that time into more productive use. Saving your time and finding the right email address is what’s this tool made for. (It’s great at it.)
#6 StayFocused
There’s a problem: It’s damn easy to get distracted with social media sites like FB, Quora, etc. This is something which always happens to me, I think a lot of people also suffer from the same problem. We all waste too much time on social media.
After all, these sites are addicting. And just like any kind of addiction, these aren’t good as we procrastinate too much because of them. Wasting your time on social media isn’t going to pay your bills, it’s the hard truth.
However, there is a solution to this problem and it’s called the StayFocused chrome extension. With the help of this extension, you will be able to get rid of your social media addiction and focus more on work.
StayFocused will make you more productive by limiting the time you spend on time-wasting sites. If you use this extension you will never waste your time again updating your FB status, watching Netflix or YouTube, surfing pages of Reddit, etc.
With StayFocused you can block entire sites, you can also fix the time you can spend on these sites. If you’re a master of wasting your time then this is a must-have extension for you. You will become more productive that’s for sure.
#7 SEOquake
SEOquake is a free to use Google Chrome extension which will help you get key SEO metrics, with other tools like Site Audit, etc. It’s one of the extension I use on a daily basis. And, it’s developed by the team at SEMRush.
Some of the things you can do with this tool are – site audit, examine external and internal links, export all the data into a file. It works the best if you have a SEMRush subscription if you don’t have that it’s still good.
With SEOquake you can also check your website’s Alexa rank, SEMRush rank, keywords indexed on Bing and Google. From the extension’s menu, you can also directly visit a page’s web archive page, it will tell you the site’s history.
Using this tool is simple, it will be located on the extension’s bar. Whenever you visit a page just click on it, you will see the SEOquake dashboard which consists of many small tools. There are many details you can get with its help.
Within the dashboard, you will get a brief SEO overview, with Page, Domain and Backlinks details. It’s a handy tool for marketers and SEO specialists. We bloggers can also use this tool to spy on our competitors. (It’s just made for that.)
#8 Ahrefs SEO Toolbar
Ahrefs SEO Toolbar is a direct reply to SEMRush’s SEOquake chrome extension. However, it’s not a free Chrome extension to use it you will need to have a premium plan of Ahrefs. If you don’t you won’t be able to use it.
Like Ahrefs dominates the SEO backlink checker tools, their extension is also pretty powerful. With its help, you will be able to get the metrics of any web page with just a few clicks. We are a huge fan of Ahrefs. (Just saying.)
This extension isn’t only limited to Chrome, you can download it into Mozilla FireFox as well. The Ahrefs SEO toolbar is pretty fast and loads the results within seconds. Unlike some other extension which takes ages to load.
It’s not fast but pretty powerful too, there are a lot of metrics present in this tool. Some of the metrics are – Ahrefs rank, Domain rating, URL rating, total no. of backlinks, etc. These are the only things you will need to know if you want to beat your competition.
But wait… There s one more thing you will like about it. If you search anything into google it will show you the total search volume and the keyword difficulty. how cool is that? You won’t need other tools to check the search volume.
#9 Save to Pocket
How many time does it happen that you’re researching for an article, you read several articles and later forget about them. If you ask me this has happened to me a lot of times. I think this might be the problem of many bloggers out there.
This is where this Chrome extension will come to the rescue. Save to Pocket allows you to save articles, videos and more to your Pocket account. You can then read or view the saved files whenever you have the time.
It’s a freemium tool, which means it’s free to use to some extent, if you want more features you will have to pay. The paid version costs 44.99$/year and with it, you will get an ad-free experience, search by text and other features.
As a blogger, you will have to read a lot, this tool is made for avid readers who want to read anything they want at any time. It’s simple this tool will help you save useful and interesting article which you can read later.
It’s one of the best google chrome extension which will boost your productivity. You will always be organized and can do research properly when you save articles to Pocket. You can also save articles on one device and read on the other one.
#10 Google Publisher Toolbar
There are many ways to monetize a site, but the most popular and common way is to use Google AdSense. If you’re also one of those bloggers who use Google AdSense to make money from their blogs you will love this extension.
It’s an official Chrome extension from Google so you don’t have any kind of risk using this. What this tool does is to give an overview of your Google publisher account from your website i.e, your overall statistics such as views, earnings, etc.
You can also get other details with the help of this tool, you can know your ad sizes, the ad types, earnings from each ad and much more. You can also block any kind of ads which you don’t like directly from this tool’s dashboard.
This is one of the best tools which Google has made for its publishers. Often we see great tools for only advertisers by big companies but it’s nice that Google sometimes cares for their publishers. It’s rare though.
The stats are updated in real time, as soon as the stats show in your AdSense account it will be shown at this tool. You can also check who’s showing ads on your site and what’s their bid. I also use this tool for one of my sites and it’s a handy one.
#11 Link Miner
So, you would know about the broken-link building method, I assume. If you don’t here a brief summary – you find a broken link on a website which is in your industry, you contact the site owner and suggest them to change the link with your blog’s post.
It’s a simple yet effective way to acquire backlinks that too of the highest quality But there’s an issue, how do you know which link is broken and which isn’t? You can’t visit all the webpages on an article as it will consume a lot of time.
This is where Link Miner shines, it’s different from the tool created by Mangools (who also created KW Finder). You can download the Link Miner extension for the Chrome store and let it do all the hard work of finding broken links for you.
It is a free tool, with its help you will be able to find broken links and you will also see metrics for them. You can also export all the broken links to a text file. You can also use Link Miner to find total no. of internal and external links on a page.
Not only that, but you can also see the total metrics when you do a Google search. There is no need to open a page to check out the metrics. It’s one of a kind tool, there are many tools but they don’t do what this tool does the best.
#12 LastPass
How many times do you forget the passwords you have created? I guess many times, as a blogger we have to make lots of accounts whether they’re email accounts, affiliate accounts or our site’s login accounts. They’re not less in numbers.
See, we have to create many accounts and it’s just impossible to remember the passwords of all accounts. You’d be superhuman if you can remember all of them, I can hardly remember 4 or 5 passwords at a time. This is where LastPass shines.
LastPass is a tool which will make your life easier, with this tool you will be able to save all of your passwords in a safe lock. It’s not like you will be saving all of your passwords in an unsafe place. The store will be encrypted i.e, almost impossible to hack.
Originally, LastPass is a web-based tool but they also have a Google Chrome extension. It’s a freemium tool if you want more storage and other features you will have to pay a small monthly fee. They are among the best password managers.
You should use the free version to try them out, we’re sure you will love them. The features on the free plans are – secure pass vault, access on all devices, secure notes, pass generators, etc If you’re someone like me who forgets (useful) things easily it’s a great tool.
#13 VidlQ Vision / Social Blade
You may know (or not) there’s a method to rank YouTube videos and make them appear much higher in search results, it’s called YouTube SEO. It’s different than the regular SEO we do for blogs and websites.
See, the normal SEO includes backlinks, On-Page SEO and many other things. But YouTube SEO doesn’t have any of these, it has other factors which help a video outrank a competitor. Here are those factors –
- Average watch time of your video. (Longer video = more watch time.)
- The total number of social shares, which are hard to track for normal people.
- Video Title, Tags, and the description of the video.
- SEO Score of the video and engagement rate, etc.
These were some of the YouTube ranking factors. Now, there’s a tool called VidQ Vision which lets you analyze these factors. If you’re a YouTuber then you can’t afford to miss out on this tool. It’s a must-have Chrome extension.
Another good extension we can think for YouTube is Social Blade. You would know about Social Blade, it’s the biggest site to find stats of other YouTube channels. You can also compare YouTube channels with this tool.
These two are the best Extension for YouTubers that’s why we’re writing about them together. We don’t think one tool is better than the other as they are both supporting tools for each other. Where one lacks, the other supports.
#14 What Runs
WhatRuns is another extension that every blogger must install right away. It helps you to figure out on which platform does a site runs and other important details about it. How many times has it happened you have seen a site and wanted to know about it?
As a blogger, I assume it would have happened a lot of times already. It also happens with me so I can relate to everyone. The many details WhatRuns shows are – site’s platform, site’s themes, and plugins, font details, etc.
With just a single click you can know which theme does a blog uses, what are the plugins powering the site and much more. It’s a handy tool and you won’t ever need to use another tool to get these details.
You can also know the CDN of the website which you’re stalking (Oops! Sorry). You also get to know what tracking method they’re using i.e, if you’re using GA then on the tool it will show that your site is using Google Analytics to track users.
One other thing – you can also follow websites, whenever they will make a change or add anything you will be notified. A good web developer won’t miss a tool like this, and web developing is a skill you which helps if you’re a blogger.
#15 Awesome Screenshot
Want a lightweight tool for taking amazing screenshots (no puns) which don’t take years to load? If yes, then we recommend you to use Awesome Screenshot. It’s the screenshot extension I’ve been personally using for some time. It’s great.
Awesome Screenshot is a simple and convenient screenshot tool. What separates it from other screenshot tools? The thing I like the most about Awesome Screenshot is that it’s fast, unlike other screenshot tools which take years to load.
Not only that, but it also has a ton of features which are not present in any other screenshot tool. It was one a premium tool, but now it’s free to use. You can also record your screen with the help of Awesome Screenshot.
I wish I had found this tool to capture my screenshots sooner, I have so bad experiences with many tools. Some were filled with ads while on some it was hard to take quality screenshots. It’s a powerful tool for taking screenshots.
Some of the features of this tool are – capture visible part of the screen, capture selected part of the screen, capture the entire page, etc. If you have to take a lot of screenshots on your PC (or laptop) go ahead with this tool.
#16 GMass
As a blogger, building relationships with blogger is important (I feel I’m saying this the second time). However, to contact bloggers and do blogger outreach you need to send a lot of emails, which sucks.
We talked about how you can find emails with the help of Email Hunter a while ago. But what’s after finding those emails? It’s simple you will have to send those emails which is a pretty pain in the ass thing if you ask me.
The process of sending emails can be simplified with a chrome extension which is called GMass. It is an amazing tool which will make outreaching easier and will save you hours of work. (That’s awesome.)
You can send bulk emails with the help of this tool while also personalizing each email right from your Gmail’s dashboard. It won’t look like some cheap bulk email sending tools which suck. You can also import data from the Google spreadsheet.
The other features of this tool are – you can track emails, follow them up, etc. The developers are continuously adding more and more features. You can send up to 50 emails/day on the free plan, if you want to send more emails you will need to buy a plan.
Final Thoughts…
There you have it, these are the 16 google chrome extension that every blogger should use. Chrome is currently the most powerful web browser, and if you aren’t using its extensions you’re missing out on a lot.
I hope that these chrome extensions make your work easier. Getting boring tasks done on autopilot also have other benefits like you get more time for important tasks, more time for yourself, etc. I’m certain there will be some extensions I’ve missed.
It’s just impossible to include all the extensions. (I hope you understand.) Now, I have some questions for you –
So, what are your favorite extensions? Are there some awesome extensions I’ve missed and should include in the list? How many extensions are you currently using? Let us know in the comments below.