SE Cockpit is yet another tool to hit the market with the intention of being your new primary keyword tool. This tool is currently in Beta slated for release in the next month or so.
Don’t confuse this tool with SEO Cockpit (more of a SEO tracking tool) as they do entirely different things. You won’t find much on SE Cockpit right now but I feel it’s relevant to add this to the list of tools I have reviewed here.
This tool does much of what we want out of a niche marketing tool.
It will:
- Finds keywords
- Assesses niche value
- Assesses competition strength
- Lets us know if domains are available
Let’s start with the keyword portion of this tool as its always the most important. The screenshot below is pulled from their website and in working through as much information as I am able to pull from their documents here is what I gather.
They pull keywords from variety of different sources, some unique ones such as Google suggest.
Let’s highlight some of the more unique features of this tool. First is the green bars listed in the “niche” column. They show a green bar which is indicative of niche competition. The more green the bar is the more opportunity there is to break into that niche.
This is a factor looking at the number of searches and “competition for the keyword”. Overall its kind of hidden unfortunately as I would love to know more.
They also breakup the competition which is also somewhat interesting. Most tools will report on competition to hit the top 10 but SE Cockpit breaks the competitive landscape into positions 1-3, 4-7 and 8-10.
The orange bars are data pulled from SEO Moz and this is what is used to assess competition in this tool. I would guess its using MozRank and a number of other factors. I am not really all that sure all the variables they are combining here to get to this competition indicator. I do like that they show level of effort to hit the top 3 vs the top 10.
They have a few other interesting features which can help you take advantage of a new niche you are interested in breaking into. They check for availability of a blogspot domain and a youtube channel although you can rank with a term without having those.
It also will show you if domains are available with the keyword in it.
Doing this on a regular basis, I have to admit I prefer Niche Finders domain tools over this. I get all domains containing the keyword not just the exact matched ones. More importantly I get options to source aged domains which is a huge time saver.
So on the competition. I have to admit I have used the SEO Moz tools and they are quite good. The concept of Linkscape is a great one and I find that I can source great links through competitive analysis of ranking websites using it.
As a utility, I look at backlink opportunity from niches I am in using tools like the ones at SEO Moz all the time. The question remains then is how can I get from a keyword list, to a decision on moving forward with it.
I am a little concerned with the source data when I see reports like this:
So if competition is sourced from this data, there is obvious weighting towards domain authority. While I know that sites like wikipedia and amazon carry a lot of authority, I also know that I can optimize pages above them without a HUGE amount of effort. Notice that site #3 gets to that position with half the domain authority and 40 links…thats not a lot of work.
This is why anchor text needs to weigh in the competition factor.
This is also why I like Niche Finders algo a little better. I feel that its reviewing a lot more variables I would normally consider when assessing competition. I am willing to bet that I can look at this niche based on factors like allinanchor position and by using linkscape to review anchor text usage I would find its really not that competitive. For this term, the orange bar to hit sites 1-3 was very small (low comp) but the orange bar for sites in 4-10 looked pretty competitive. Guess I am not sure how that can happen…
I will be keeping an eye on how this tool evolves and essentially how the SEO Moz tools evolve as that’s the basis for the success of the tool here.
Until then I will keep using Niche Finder!
