One of the tools I got really familiar with over the past few years is Market Samurai. As you likely already know I am a bit of an SEO geek and when new stuff comes out on the market I tend to gravitate towards it right away. Hey, if it helps me automate or speed up my business then its well worth the month.
Well Market Samurai launched with a LOT of hype behind it and the owners of those tools did quite a bit to support it with proper training and such. I am not going to cover the promotion (tries to find places to put your links), monetization (finds affiliate products), rank tracking, sourcing (scraper I would advise against this btw) and publishing of content tools since they do not help me at all with niche marketing.
Also I mentioned this before, if you have the wrong keywords none of those tools matter. Lets review some of whats available in this tool and how this it can help us with our niche marketing efforts.
Keyword research
This is a pretty standard tool included in most of these and I often find that they pull the data from the same sources. Most are coming from Google so when you think about it half of data from all these tools comes from the same source. Your seed keyword list actually shows you no other information than the keywords.
You need to go into the “analyze keywords” are for this.
Once on this screen you are greeted with a LOT of options to choose from involving traffic filters, adwords filters like CPC, some “SEO” filters, and some “commercial” filters.
Here are my immediate thoughts on these because there is a lot here which means nothing to me getting terms to rank for:
- Organic filters are mostly search volumes and trends, most other tools show me that with the keyword list which I prefer.
- Adwords filters are not relevant to me at this time, I am not looking for an Adwords tool here. Also these pull from Google mostly.
- The competition filters are very cryptic and sound valuable…but I fear they are not. They are all numbers with no real relationship to actual SEO competition. I.E. number of competing sites in Google, number of competing pages with the same title, etc… NONE of this has anything to do with true SEO competition for a keyword. I wish it was that easy!
- Commercial filters are all based on very unreliable tools like Microsoft’s OCI tool.
The problem I have here is that I can’t choose a low competition/high traffic keyword from this list which I know is easy to rank for. I need to do a deeper dive which takes time.
That is the intent of Tool #2: SEO Competition
This is really where the meat of this tool is to be honest with you. For me, this is why I wanted this tool.
So how do we assess SEO competition?
It’s a factor of a TON of things such as:
- Domain age
- Number of domain and page backlinks
- On page optimization
- Page rank (actual not posted of course)
- etc…
The appeal of this tool is that it puts all this information on a single screen for me. For any given keyword I can review the top 10 ranking URL’s and how they stack up for the factors I am interested in.
This is what I get, some call it the SEO competition matrix.
- Red means its more competitive
- Yellow less
- Green even less
So the takeaway is that if you check a keyword and its all red, it’s going to be tough. In most cases that’s true but here’s the catch.
MOST users of this tool are not experience enough to evaluate the information to make an informed decision at this point.
- What if its half yellow and half red?
- What if the backlinks column is all red and everything else is green?
- What if the top site has all green and the others are all red, how is that possible and does that mean I can overtake them easily?
On top of that we have information which isn’t helping us out. We have PR which is an outdated metric and can easily SKEW your decision. We have cache age which tells even less about SEO competition. I get a list of if the keyword is used in a few on page positions as a yes or no. I get DMOZ and Yahoo listings which 1 is impossible to get into and 1 I can pay my way in.
What’s worse for me is that this is for 1 keyword. I have to manually review these results for EVERY keyword I think has a shot and up to this point I have no clue what can and cannot work. I find I was eliminating keywords based on factors which have nothing to do with competition only to find later that they were in fact easy to rank for.
Market Samurai does a number of other things as well but as it turns out its not a tool to use if you want to move quickly into a niche and really root out those quick traffic keywords.
For that I am sticking with Niche Finder. Here’s why:
- Niche finder does the keyword research part with a more diverse database (I often find better terms there).
- I can easily source a keyword rich domain to get rolling in that niche ASAP.
- I can tell SEO competition without having to dive deep into all the SEO metrics keyword by keyword. Niche Finders algorithm takes all the necessary factors and calculates a score showing me how hard its going to be for me to rank quickly and get targeted traffic.
- More importantly, it does all this from a single interface. It’s not run this tool, then run that tool, then analyze. I can check hundreds of keywords at once. There is a lot to say for scale!
I have yet to find a tool which does this better than Niche Finder! I think Market Samurai has the right idea here, they just make it too hard for me to get the info I need.
