Keyword Research Tools

The building blocks of making money online come from knowing what keywords will generate you that cash. It is possible to do this for free, but the process of finding profitable keywords can be extremely long and tedious if you are doing everything on your own in a manual fashion. There is so much copying and pasting, waiting, and flicking back and forward between screens that it isn’t long before the whole thing gets boring and frustrating.

Keyword research is probably the most important part of your whole internet marketing strategy, because without keywords it is very difficult to get traffic to your sites. Personally, I love it when I find a new set of keywords for a particular niche that I know I can turn into money at some point down the track. And the reason I can feel so passionate again about this part of the process is because I have found 2 tools that automate the whole process. One offers a very simplistic approach, with ultra simple data returned to you after the search, the other has so many features that you could find yourself flooded in data and statistics! Now, a couple of clever guys have come up with two tools that will give you all the information you could want in one place.

I use both. Mainly because I personally think that double checking my stats is just doing my due diligence. But in reality, either of the below tools can, and most likely are used independantly, and to great effect. If you want to generate large numbers of highly profitable keywords, there is nothing on the market that compares to Market Samurai or Micro Niche Finder.

Micro Niche Finder (MNF)

Micro Niche Finder is quite simply the easiest keyword research tool to use anywhere. It is literally possible to open the application, type in a possible keyword (you don’t even have to do that – it has a hot topics button that will generate ideas for you!), and it will return your other related keywords, complete with search data.

There are other pieces of data you can find too, simply by clicking on the various links. It has a very simple traffic light system for easy, medium and hard to rank for results, and for the colour blind out there, it returns a Strength of Competition (SOC), which is a numerical value – 1 being extremely little competition and thus should be easy to rank for, up to, well I am not entirely sure where the scale finishes, but I ignore anything after an SOC of 20, and have seen results returned in the high thousands.

MNF includes plenty of other features, like organising your saved searches into project folders, linking directly to ezinearticles once you have decided on your keyword, so that you can view the content if you are in need of it, finding domain name availability… there really are tons of useful added features. And the software comes with lifetime updates, which represents superb value for money.

Another plus point is that Micro Niche Finder is not a subscription service. You pay once, and then it is yours, updates included. For someone starting out, it is a great tool to pick up and explore the world of keywords. For the more experienced who might be thinking of outsourcing some of your work, this tool would provide any employee with a very easy way to do your keyword research for you.

Excellent training videos, and super quick help if you have any issues all contribute to an excellent overall package.

If you want straight forward, no nonsense, high quality results, with a few handy extras thrown in along the way, Micro Niche Finder will give you exactly that. Visit the home page here.

Market Samurai (MS)

Launched a couple of years ago now, Market Samurai has firmly planted itself in the top tier of the keyword research tools. This is also a pay once and receive lifetime benefits program. The difference here is that the depth of results available is staggering. Not only does it return keyword search data, and competition data, it has a feature to let you analyse the competition on page one, both visually and statistically, so that you can see at a glance if you have found a good keyword, and what your ‘chances’ are of ranking well for it.

There are plenty of other features to help you with your keyword finding, and your ongoing development of your sites. One of the most time saving aspects (amongst the many) is that you can actually track the ranking of your site (or any site actually) against particular keywords. This is, in my opinion, brilliant. Before this I was spending a lot of time trawling through Google results to try and find my site. Now it can be done with a couple of clicks.

The Market Samurai team have also released features which allow you to post automatically to your blog from MS with their WordPress integration, there is a module on how to monetise the keywords you find, and you can even hook up MS to a social bookmarking service so that the vast majority of your work can be completed in one interface.

If you are looking for something with plenty of statistics, and data coming out of every tab, Market Samurai will certainly give you that. If you are unsure, then the training is second to none, and the ticket system is very helpful if you are really stuck.

I use this particular tool almost daily, and it allows me to keep detailed analyses of all of my projects, as well as allowing me to conform the results from free web based tools, and my other recommended tool Micro Niche Finder. View the Market samurai page here.