Market Samurai Vs. Brad Callen’s Niche Finder – Which is Better?
Picking keywords is the single most important job that anyone in the world of SEO has to do. If you pick the wrong ones, you will find that your efforts will be for naught at creating new blog posts or even websites. After all, while you can do well without Google, it’s not a practical option for most of us meaning that you do need to do good keyword research.
The Old Standby
Most of us use the Adwords keyword tool to search for keywords. It works well at finding appropriate keywords and their competition levels. The tool works well at finding you synonyms as well, which allows you to increase the number of potential LSI keywords. The best part about it of course is that it’s also completely free to use.
The bad part about Adwords is that the program is somewhat limited since it’s designed to allow you to find keywords for Adwords campaigns rather than for SEO purposes. This means it won’t necessarily show you competition levels from an SEO standpoint (it shows you levels for Adwords campaigns) and it won’t show you a list of top ranked websites which use that keyword so you can see the competition.
Enter the Alternatives
There are a number of alternative programs which will give you that ability, though none of them are in fact free to use. The market leader is Market Samurai, which I’ll discuss in a moment, though another popular option is Brad Callen’s Niche Finder (I happen to use SECockpit, which I’ll discuss in a moment as well).
Market Samurai
As I said, the leader in this field is Market Samurai. The software gives you a complete listing of keywords and LSI alternatives, pulling from both Google Adwords and the Google Wonder Wheel to create a complete list of possible keywords.
The software also gives you access to a list of websites which use the keywords in question, allowing you to see what kind of competition there is for the keywords you are using. The program is available for a one time cost of $149, though they do give you a free trial for 7 days and if you sign up during the trial, they give you a discount.
Brad Callen’s Niche Finder
Similar to Market Samurai, Brad Callen’s Niche Finder (that’s the full name – another program called Micro Niche Finder exists as well, but I know nothing about it) also offers you a complete list of LSI keywords. It also happens to include a neat feature, which lets you see how easy it might be to rank for any particular keyword that you want to rank for. The big advantage from what I can see is that this program is just $99 as opposed to the $149 that Market Samurai charges.
SECockpit
Even though I didn’t mention it in the title, I want to put in a note about SECockpit as well. It’s still in experimental stages of development and is much pricier than the other two. The basic program is $49 per month with their executive level service being $99 per month.
The big advantages that SECockpit has over the other two options are first that it’s web based. This means that you’ll be able to run as many searches as you like using the software (with the other two, they access Google and Google can limit you after a while) and they also offer access to SEOMoz information about the competition, which again, you can’t find with the other two.
Bottom Line
I’d be inclined to go with Brad Callen’s Niche Finder if you’re not doing a serious amount of SEO work. The software does the job and is the cheapest of the bunch. On the other hand, if you do want to do a heavy amount of keyword research, I suggest looking at SECockpit, but only if you’re really going to get enough use out of it to make it worth spending the money each month. As for Market Samurai, it may be the market leader, but that doesn’t necessarily make it the best choice around…
Hi,
I’m trying to find out more about the accuracy of the Google AdWords tool. The thing is if you look at a word like: “Cheap” you see that it has 68.000.000 world wide searches. There is no way that many people will type in just the word “cheap”, so the number of searches must be a some of all related searches that have cheap in them like “cheap tickets” and “cheap cars” If you are using this tool to find a target keyword you can be misled and find that you don’t get much traffic when you get the #1 spot
On average around 40% of all traffic goes to the #1 spot so if you reach #1 for “cheap” in all country’s one might think he will get 272.000.000 visitors a month, What I am discovering is that this theory is not correct and I have found that you can expect around 0.4% – 10% of the traffic that the Google tool promises onces you get the #1 spot. (There is more testing to be done) I do think that for long tail keywords you can expect to get a higher percentage of the amount of traffic that the keyword tool promises, because the Google tool can compare it with less similar fraises. Do you agree with me or have anyting to add?
Regards,
Ben
I actually have a post going up on this exact subject very soon. Adwords is not the most accurate tool out there. The best thing to do is use one of the tools which automatically parse what Adwords shows you so that you can get a truer picture of the facts.
272.000.000 should be 27.200.000.
Maybe you can place the comment section above the links to other posts, that way more people will post a comment I think.
Regards,
Ben
An interesting suggestion. Thanks for the advice. However, I think most people prefer to read the blog post before they comment.
Hi there
I came across this and thought it would be worth commenting.
I’m sure you know a lot of MS customers have been experiencing issues with key word ranking checks.
There are some other solid platforms out there; online tools would probably be best as you don’t have to worry about your proxy servers. Analytics SEO, Raven, SEOMoz and WebCEO are a few examples.
I work for Analytics SEO and we’ve setup a coupon code for market samurai users who have been affected by this issue. We may or may not be what you are looking for – but you can try it for nothing! In fact most tools these days have a free trial. If you want to trial our platform don’t hesitate to get in touch – tim.thomas@analyticsseo.com
Regards
Tim
Thank you for sharing. I personally prefer to use Niche Finder anyway, but I’m sure some of our readers will find this useful as well.
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