Chrome Extension #1: Google SERP Counter

The Google SERP Counter chrome extension is simple in nature but extremely useful.

That’s why for me it’s definitely my favorite of this list of free chrome extensions.

When it comes to SEO in particular, we all love to see our real-time rankings.

The only problem is that most tools and software out there show you rankings that are outdated or in some cases just completely incorrect.

Not only that, but they’re overpriced and just too expensive for someone just starting out building a website and writing blog posts to start to rank and bring in search traffic from Google.

So what does Google SERP Counter do?

Well, it simply displays the ranking number next to a serp result after typing in a specific keyword.

Let’s take a look at what shows up in the search results with the serp counter installed and “serp counter” as the keyword.

You can see from the top 3 results that there are nifty little numbers displayed next to each result.  

This is great…  But how can you quickly find where your domain shows up in the results without clicking through each page and scanning all the results?

Well, here’s a cool trick!

First, click on Settings -> Search Settings.

Next, change the slider to be 100 results per page and scroll down to save the settings.

Finally, hit CTRL+F (or CMD + F on a Mac) to do a search and start typing in your domain.  And just like that you can now get the ranking of your domain for a specific keyword within seconds!

This method works best if you perform the searches in a new browser.  

I hope this helps you to easily see where you rank for specific keywords that you’re keeping a close eye on.  Download Google SERP Counter for free here. 

Chrome Extension #2: Keyword Surfer

Keyword Surfer is a pretty sweet free chrome extension that’s very similar to Keywords Everywhere and is built by my good friends over at Surfer Seo.

However, the main difference though is that Keyword Surfer is free and has even more useful metrics in my opinion.🙂 

To explain how it works and how you can use it, let’s do a Google search for “seo” with the Keyword Surfer Chrome extension installed.You’ll notice from the image above that there’s four main items Keyword Surfer pulls in data for:

• Search Volume (both global and country specific) in the Search Bar
• Similar Keywords
• Backlinks and visibility correlations
• Related Searches

All of these items are pretty self explanatory in nature.

One thing to point out is that the Keyword Surfer Chrome extension also allows you to easily change the country specific search volume using the settings icon.If you want to dive deeper into data-driven SEO, then I’d encourage you to sign up for the $1 trial of Surfer SEO as well.  

Chrome Extension #3: SEO Minion

SEO Minion is a powerful on-page SEO tool.

It helps you analyze the SEO of your own site and can help with analyzing your competition as well.

The way I like to do this is if there is someone I’m trying to model then I take a quick look through the data inside SEO Minion.

So, let’s take a look at Brian Dean’s site Backlinko. 

Taking a look now at his post on page speed, you’ll see that I’ve got SEO Minion running and ready to play around with.

The 6 main categories that SEO Minion pulls data for are:

• Analyze On-Page SEO
• Highlight All Links
• Check Broken Links
• Hreflang Checker
• SERP Preview
• Google Search Location Simulator

The main thing I want to focus on that’s most interesting is the Analyze On-Page SEO.

Upon clicking on the analyze on-page SEO within SEO Minion, you can see that all the interesting SEO data gets pulled up.

The two main things I look at here are the word count and the headings.

For Brian Dean’s post, you’ll notice that there are 31,226 words for the word count.

The thing to note here is that this number includes all of the comments, which for this post in particular is a large word count.  

If you want a more accurate word count of only the post content, then scroll down and take a look at the next Chrome extension on this list.

For the headings, you can see there are a total of 46 headings. 

The main thing here I like to look at is see whether H1, H2, H3, or H4 headings are being used.  For Brian Dean’s page in particular, there’s just one H1 tag for the title and all the rest are  H2 tags for the post content headings.

Go ahead and watch the video below for more detail on the additional features that SEO Minion offers.