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On 30 July 2012, Majestic SEO released their latest tool to add to their collection of keyword and SEO tools.

While there will most likely be a few improvements and changes to the initial release, I’ve made a video that gives you a good overview as to how the tool works and what data it returns.

The whole premise behind the keyword checker tool is to allow you to check the competition strength of the keywords which you specify.

For free accounts, you can specify a maximum of 50 keywords and silver level users can specify up to 150 keywords.

In essence, the tool returns the number of domains and URLs for where the keyword appears in the title, anchor text and in the URL. The data comes from the Majestic SEO database and claims to be more accurate than other search engines (primarily Google) which report estimated figures.

Do I think the keyword checker tool is useful? Watch the video below to find out.

Video Overview

Do you think this new keyword checker tool will be useful to you or not? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think.

Cheers

I was recently doing some keyword research when I thought I’d come across a really good keyword for a new Amazon store that I’d been planning on building.

However, after checking the search trends (in particular the regional differences), I quickly realized that the keyword was nowhere as good as I initially thought it was.

Given that keyword research is the foundation for any site, I think trend and regional data are often overlooked in the whole keyword research process.

In this article, I’ll go through why analysing trend and regional data is a very important part of keyword research and why you shouldn’t ignore it.

Keyword Research can be a bit like trying to put a puzzle together.   However if you are missing a piece of the puzzle or have some wrong pieces, then you can never successfully complete it.

Time and time again when I’m reading posts on Internet Marketing forums like the Warrior Forum, I see the same keyword research mistakes come up.

Keyword research is your foundation of SEO and without proper keyword research, the rest of your efforts are most likely to be a waste of time.

So what are the biggest keyword research mistakes?

1) Search Volume

By far the biggest mistake people make with their keyword research is using the wrong monthly search volume figures.

We all know that a good keyword should have good monthly search volume and low competition.   Typically “good search volume” is defined as 3000+ searches a month (this is not a figure set in stone though as it depends on the type of keyword).

Typically what happens is that someone who is doing their keyword research will go to Google Adwords Keyword Tool (GAKT), specify their keyword and see what the monthly search volume is.

Correct?

NO!

The problem is that by default, GAKT returns broad match search results when you really want to look at the exact match search results.

OK, so let’s use an example to explain what the difference is between broad and exact match search results and why it is so important.

For the rest of this article, I’m going to be using the example keyword phrase:

antique coffee table

So if we login to our Google account and go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool,  put in our keyword phrase, we can see the following results:

That’s 12,100 searches a month!  Happy days!

Not so fast.

Click on the checkbox next to [Exact] under the Match Types in the left column and let’s see what results we get:

The exact match search volume is shown for the keyword phrase in square brackets, ie: [antique coffee table]

The global monthly searches for the exact match result is a only 1000, which isn’t too bad, but certainly way less than the 12,100 results for the broad match.   I’ve seen some keyword phrases where the difference is huge; for example the broad match results over 100,000 and the exact match results less than 100.

Just imagine if you built a website and optimized around a keyword that you thought got a lot of searches, only to find that even though your site is ranked at the top of Google, you are getting a  very tiny trickle of traffic.

It can be very disheartening.

Match Types

Alright, I’ve told you that you should always be using the exact match figures, but I have explained why…..yet.

Let’s look at the three different match types and what they mean.

Broad Match

A broad match is where your keywords can appear in any order and don’t have to be next to each other.

The following are all broad match results:

• antique table with coffee grinder
• a coffee table looks great with antique features
• sit at a table sipping coffee and reading books about antique furniture
• give your table and antique look by staining it with coffee

A broad match search is the default search type when you do a Google search (that is, without quotes).

So a broad match search for our example keyword phrase, gives us:

That’s over 9 million results.

The first page of the results will have pages directly related to antique coffee tables, but let’s have a look at some of the results returned further down the search results:

This particular page isn’t specifically about antique coffee tables, but mentions a coffee table and an antique drafting table as it is still a broad match result.

This particular result was buried quite a long way down the search results, so someone searching for antique coffee table would almost certainly never even see it.

The point being, is that if you relied on the broad match search volume in GAKT, that will include all sorts of vaguely related searches that you won’t be optimizing your site for.

Phrase Match

A phrase match result is where your keywords appear in the exact order, but can be surrounded by other words or punctuation.

The following are all phrase matches:

• Why antique?  Coffee table for sale.
• antique coffee-table
• antique coffee, table free.

When you do a Google search in quotes, you performing a phrase match search.

So using our keyword phrase, the phrase match search gives us 123,000 results compared to just over 9 million results for the broad match search.

All of the search results will contain the phrase antique coffee table.

Here is one of the results on the very last page:

Notice that there is punctuation in the keywords, but the word order is the same.

Exact Match

The first and most important thing to point out is that exact match only relates to GAKT.

There is no direct way to use exact match in a Google search.

Exact match is pretty self explanatory.  It includes searches for that exact phrase.

As we’ve seen, the broad match search figures can be much, much larger as they include so many other vaguely related searches.  By using exact match search figures, you get a much more accurate idea of the actual search traffic you are going to be targeting and optimizing for.

2)  Competition

Once you’ve found a good keyword, you need to know what sort of competition you are up against to get ranked on page 1 (and there’s no point in aiming for page 2 or lower).

The two main mistakes I’ve seen with gauging competition are:

i) Number of Search Results

This advice goes along the lines of put your keywords in quotes and check the number of results returned, if they are less than [insert some random number here], then it is a low competition keyword.

Now there is some element of truth in this method.  If a keyword search in quotes (phrase match) returns 10 million results and another returns a few hundred results, it’s reasonable to assume the keyword with 10 million results will be harder to rank for.

However, that is a very poor way of judging the competition.

As you are obviously trying to rank on page 1, the sites on page 1 are really your only competition.  You need to look at various factors such as on-page and off-page SEO for the top 10 results to gauge how difficult it would be to beat them.

It doesn’t really matter if there are a million results. If most of them are poorly optimized, then you have a very good chance of outranking them.

ii) GAKT Competition Bar

Quite a number of people don’t understand what the competition bar in the GAKT results actually means.

Let’s look at the results for our example keyword again.

You can see the competition bar for the exact search is almost 100%.

Some people incorrectly interpret this as the competition strength for trying to rank for the particular keyword.

What it really means is the Adwords competition for that particular keyword, ie: the number of people trying to bid on that particular keyword for their adwords campaign.

While it can be a useful metric to look at if you are building Adsense sites, it has very little to do with the competition strength of sites for that keyword.

3) Commercial Intent

Assuming you find a good keyword with low competition and a good number of exact match search results, there is one more piece of the keyword research puzzle that you can get wrong.

This is where commercial intent (“buying keywords”) comes in.

If you have a site ranked on page 1 and are getting lots of traffic but little to no sales, it could be down to the keywords you original chose didn’t have a very high commercial intent.

By commercial intent, I mean how likely is the person searching for that term looking to purchase something.

People may be just searching for advice, information or free products, in which case, there’s not much point in creating a website targeting their searches.

So what are some of the ways of determining commercial intent?

1. Put yourself in the mind of the person doing the search.  If you were doing a search for a particular keyword, are you looking for something to buy (or potentially purchase if you came across something that looked really good)?
2. Keywords targeting specific models.  For example, if someone searches for “LED TV’s”, they are most likely in a research phase to find out more about LED TVs.  However, if someone searches for a specific model of LED TV, they are generally looking for a place to confirm their decision and hopefully purchase from.
3. Look at the CPC and Competition columns in the GAKT.  Generally if a keyword has a good CPC (say, more than $2) and high Adwords competition, it’s generally a good indication that the keyword phrase has a high commercial intent, otherwise people wouldn’t be bidding on it.

Video Summary

For those of you who prefer viewing videos rather than reading articles, the following video gives a summary of what I’ve written in this article.

Getting Keyword Research Right

While keyword research is always going to be an inexact science, by avoiding the common mistakes I’ve listed above, hopefully it will increase your chances of creating a successful site that gets good conversions.

Cheers

 SECockpit Background

I’ve written this SECockpit review in the hope it will give you enough information to make an informed decision as to whether SECockpit is the right keyword research tool for you.

It’s certainly not my aim to give you an unrealistic and hyped up review of SECockpit that you’ll see on some other sites.

I’ve been lucky enough to use SECockpit since the very first limited release.  I’ve seen the product develop and evolve into the fully featured keyword research tool it is today.

Firstly, in case there’s any confusion, there is no relationship between SEO cockpit and SECockpit.  It’s a bit unfortunate that the names are so similar, but I guess there’s only so many combinations of product names you can come up with that have SEO and Cockpit in them.

SECockpit is a product from the SwissMadeMarketing team of Shane Melaugh and Sam Haenni.

Some of you will know Shane from his previously released products such as Backlink Battleplan and Sam has recently partnered with Shane as the brilliant technical person.

SECockpit was made available via invitation, so it has had a lot of real world testing before the public launch on July 5th.

Click here to visit the SECockpit Official Site

SECockpit Components

SECockpit has two main components:

1. Keyword Research – this is the heart of SECockpit where you do all your keyword searches, analysis, filtering and arranging your results.
2. Project & Task Management – this is where you can track your various projects and automatically assign tasks and track project revenues.

Obviously it is the keyword research component of SECockpit that will be of great interest to most people and the area where I’ll be concentrating on in this article.

SECockpit Overview

The  screenshot below shows the main SECockpit keyword search results.  The green niche bar gives you an idea of the niche strength, which is based on search volume, competition strength and a few other factors.

Keywords where the green indicator is high, are definitely worth checking out.

The competition strength is show by the orange bars.  This is broken down into positions 1-3, 4-7 and 8-10.   Having this breakdown can let you know how easy or not it is to get on page one and more importantly, how much competition there is for the first three spots (which after all, is where you really want to rank).

SECockpit Videos

The best way to get an idea of how SECockpit works and the features it offers is by watching the following videos I made.

In the video below, I give you an overview on how SECockpit looks and operates.

There have been a number of changes and improvements to SECockpit since I recorded this video, but the core functionality hasn’t changed.

There have been improvements in the filtering and keyword options, eg: grabbing keywords from Google Wonderwheel, Google suggest etc.  There have also been additional columns added so that you can see if there are things like Youtube, Amazon, or Google Sniper pages in the top 10 results.

In this second SECockpit video, I go over some of the additional features and options that weren’t available when I made the original video.

What are the advantages of SECockpit?

There’s certainly no end of keyword research tools on the market and I’ve used quite a few, eg: Market Samauri and Keyword Elite.

Now while, those keyword tools are certainly not bad, there’s one attribute they all share – they rely on the data from Google and Yahoo.  This is primarily the Google Adwords Keyword Tool for the search numbers and results and Yahoo explorer for backlink information.

Now SECockpit certainly uses Google Adwords Keyword Tool for getting a lot of its information, but there are some major differences:

1.  The range and diversity of keywords

You can greatly increase the number and diversity of keywords you are searching on by using the SECockpit Google Suggestions and Wonderwheel options.  In particular Google Wonderwheel can be a great source of long tail and related keywords.  SECockpit can dig down to 2 levels in the Wonderwheel, which can potentially find a few great keywords that you wouldn’t normally find with other keyword research tools.

2.  Competition Analysis

Most importantly, the competition analysis uses data supplied by SEOmoz.

If you’re not familiar with SEOmoz, they crawl the web and collect their own search data and metrics which is more complete and more accurate than what Google provides.

Most other keyword tools rely on a combination of data that is mostly supplied by Google for their analysis.

3.  SECockpit is a web Application

This means it is OS independent as it runs in your browser.

It also has the advantage that your local computer won’t get a temporary ban from Google for performing too many requests.

Additionally, as the processing is done in the cloud, the results are fast.  If you were to do the same type of processing on your local computer, it would chew up a lot of resources and take substantially longer to give you results.

4. Integrated Project and Task Management

Now while I don’t yet use the project and task capabilities of SECockpit, I can see that they would be useful for some people, although I suspect most people wouldn’t bother with it as they have their own methods for tracking projects.

SECockpit allows you to create projects around sets of keywords.  It then has built in  task lists based on the type of project that you can use, or create your own.

The screenshot below shows the the project creation:

Interview with Sam Haenni – SwissMadeMarketing Co-founder

In this interview with Sam Haenni, Sam discusses:

• the background behind SECockpit
• technical challenges along the way
• number of keyword searches that SECockpit performs
• future development plans for SECockpit.

SECockpit Pricing

The pricing for SECockpit may be considered expensive for some people, but you need to keep in mind that SECockpit is a premium product and uses a lot of infrastructure to perform the massive amount of processing it does for every keyword analysis.

I have seen a number of new keyword research services on offer that utilize SECockpit as the tool they use for keyword research.  In these cases, the SECockpit monthly fee would be quite easy to cover and make a sustainable business model.

SECockpit Final Thoughts

It takes quite a bit for a keyword research tool to impress me, but I could see the value and worth of SECockpit from day one and having used it extensively, I can vouch for the results I’ve gotten.

One tip I would give is to not get too hung up on trying to find “diamonds”.  When I initially started using SECockpit, I discarded any keywords that didn’t have a “diamond” ranking.  This was a mistake as I was missing lots of good keywords.

I personally think keywords with “diamond” rating are generally quite difficult to rank for as the SECockpit algorithm is biased towards the number of daily searches.  That means if a keyword has a large number of daily searches and relatively low (that’s lowish for a high competition keyword) then it may get a “diamond” rating.

In general, it’s probably fair to say that “diamond” keywords are high reward, medium/high effort keywords.

While some people might be put off by the SECockpit pricing schedule,  you need to consider the power of SECockpit and the tools you are getting for your money.   At the very least, you could sign up for one month, to try it out and see if you agree that it’s the best keyword research tool available.

Bottom line is that I have no hesitation in stating that SECockpit is by far and away, the best keyword research tool I’ve ever come across.

>> Click here to find out more about SECockpit<<

Cheers

Niche Finder is a new keyword research tool created by Brad Callen.

The keyword research tool market is very competitive with many products on offer, so how does Niche Finder stack up against the competition and where does it fit in the niche research market?

The first thing to point out about Niche Finder is that it is a tool designed specifically for keyword research without all the extra stuff that can sometimes over complicate a product.  Brad claims that his aim with Niche Finder was to design a tool that was very simple to use, yet very effective.

Has Brad succeeded with that claim?

Niche Finder Overview

Features of Niche Finder

I personally think one of the best features of Niche Finder is that it is very simple to use and find good keywords.

There’s no learning curve like a lot of other keyword research tools.

The interface is very clean as you can see from the screenshot below.

Once all of the data has been retrieved, you can easily sort any of the columns or add filters to narrow down the information.

One feature that is very handy for narrowing down suitable keywords is the difficulty score.  This is a score between 1 and 100 that indicates the difficulty of ranking for that particular keyword.  The first column also shows the niche difficulty with colors.

green = easy

yellow = medium

red = hard

So if you were working on a large set of keywords, you can simply add a filter to exclude all keywords in the “hard” difficulty range, so that you can concentrate on more manageable keywords.

Obviously, you do need a little caution with completely relying on the difficulty rating.  What I do is if I find a good keyword, ie: good amount of global monthly searches and low/medium difficultly, I do a sanity check by cross referencing with some other keyword tools I use, plus a good old Google search and eyeballing the top 10 results.

That said, I’ve found the difficultly ranking to be quite good and is certainly a very handy guide when sifting through lots of keywords.

Demonstration of Niche Finder

I originally wrote this review in Dec 2010.  Since then, Brad has added a number of new features to Niche Finder.   Most notably, getting backlink data from Majestic SEO and domain availability information from Domainface.

Below is the Brad Callen’s video demonstrating the latest features of Niche Finder.

Below is my original review video.  While Niche Finder has changed a bit since I recorded the video, the core functionality of Niche Finder hasn’t changed.

Final Thoughts on Niche Finder

Like a lot of internet marketers, I own and use a variety of tools and services for keyword research.  Most notably, my other favourite keyword research tool is SECockpit.

What I like about Niche Finder is its simplicity.  Generally, if I’m researching a new niche, I’ll fire up Niche Finder first, then when I’ve found some potential keywords, I’ll inspect them further with some of my other tools like Traffic Travis.

If you already have a keyword research tool that you are very happy with and good results from, I wouldn’t necessarily suggest you purchase Niche Finder.  However, if you are looking for your first keyword research tool or another method to compliment your keyword research, then I think Niche Finder is a pretty solid investment.

>>Click here to check out Brad Callen’s Niche Finder Tool<<

Cheers

A very important aspect of keyword research is gauging the number of competing sites.

Typically, almost everyone will do a keyword phrase search in quotes to get an idea of the number of sites that contain that particular keyword phrase.

On the back of that, doing an allintitle search, can be very useful as it will give you an idea of the number of sites that have that keyword phrase in their page title.  This is important as page titles carry more weight than the same keyword phrase contained within the article body.

However, if you are looking at the number of results that Google returns, then you could well be relying on incorrect or inconsistent data.

Video Overview

The following video shows you exactly what I’m talking about with the inconsistent Google allintitle results.

Allintitle Results With and Without Quotes

For the purposes of this article, I’ll be using the keyword phrase: search engine optimization

It’s important to note that the results will vary depending on your location and changes to the Google search algorithms, but as far as I can tell, the inconsistent numbers has been around for a while.

OK, so let me show you can example of exactly what I’m talking about.

First, I’ll do an allintitle search for search engine optimization without the quotes

Google reports there are 518,000 results:

Remember that without quotes, Google will be returning pages with any combination of the words “search”, “engine” and “optimization”.  For example, one of the sites listed on page one has the title:

Search Engine Submission Optimization

Now let’s do the same allintitle search, but with quotes:

Now in theory, as this is searching on exact matches, ie: titles with the phrase “search engine optimization”, we should get a lot less results than searching without quotes.

So, what numbers does Google give us?

Yep, you read it right.  That’s over 3.5 million!!

That’s 700% more than broad match allintitle search!

How’s that for inconsistent and misleading results.

OK, so what’s going on with the figures?

Well, it’s important to note that the search results figures that Google gives you on the first page is just an estimate, otherwise it would slow down Google search results if it had to search through the entire set of data for each search request.

A Better Method of Comparison

For any Google search, it will return a maximum of 1000 results.  By that, I mean if you keep clicking on “Next”, Google will give you a maximum of 99 pages (assuming you use the default of 10 results per page) of results.

Most of the time, the maximum number of results pages will be less than 99.

OK, so let’s go back to our example allintitle searches, and view the results in a different manner.

Let’s do our search with:

allintitle:search engine optimization

Now, you could keep clicking on the “Next” link to take you to the last page, but you’d soon get sick of all the clicking.

To speed up the process, click on “Next” to go to page 2 of the results, and then in the URL in your browser, look for where it has:

start=10

and change it to

start=990

and then press Enter.

This will take you to the last page of results and at the bottom of the page, you’ll see:

Now if we repeat the steps and do the search in quotes, you see the results:

So for the search without quotes, we get 857 results and with quotes it is 618.

This is much more consistent and along the lines of the results you’d expect for broad and exact match searches.

What’s the Bottom Line?

Probably the main moral of this article is to not rely too heavily on the results Google gives you.  By all means, do an allintitle search, but if you find the figures it is returning don’t agree with some of the other metrics you have checked, then it’s quite possible it’s just one of those Google quirks to keep us internet marketers on our toes.

A much better metric to check is how many sites in the top 10 results have the exact match title you are searching for.  If there are sites ranking in the top 10 that don’t use your exact search term in the title, then that gives you a reasonable idea it’s something you can go for.

If you’ve had a similar experience of inconsistent results from Google or have an explanation, please make sure you leave a comment below.

Cheers

UPDATE: As of Jan 2011, this specific niche service is no longer available.

Keyword Research

As we all know, keyword research is the most vital element of any successful online business.  However, getting the keyword research right can either be a very tricky task and can take a long time.

Most beginners to Internet Marketing really struggle to get going due to difficulties with keyword research.   Even internet marketing professionals can have days when their keyword research just isn’t working out.

I’ve certain had days, where I’ve spent literally hours hunting down an elusive keyword only to give up due to lack of time to keep drilling down and trying new combinations.

Like a lot of people, I started in affiliate marketing via Google Sniper and my first few attempts at sniper sites were complete failures because I didn’t really have a full grasp on proper keyword research.

With experience and knowledge, my keyword research became much better, but it could still take quite a chunk out of my day.

Keyword & Niche Research Service

Just recently, I discovered a fantastic new keyword research service that really is amazing value (and I’m not just talking that one up)

For just $7, you get given a buyer product niche with the following details:

• Full summary of the how the niche is chosen and what all the numbers mean.
• Niche Keyword.
• Full breakdown of search count, CPC, competing pages etc.
• Available domain names for the keyword.
• SEO analysis and summary of competition.  Only niches that are easy to rank for are chosen.
• Links to related forums for posting regarding the niche.
• Links to Niche forums with good PR.
• Resources to use for your content.
• Summary of what type of approach to use on your site.
• List of affiliate products to promote.

All the niches identified have a very strong buyer intent, which means that you don’t have to go for a hardsell as the person is already looking to buy the product they are interested in.  Typically, buyers like to find some information that reaffirms their decision and that’s where your niche site comes in and makes the conversion.

I initially tried out the service and ordered 5 niche reports as a way of testing out the quality of their information.

I was very impressed with all the reports, and one niche in particular had great figures with over global monthly search count of over 5000 and competing pages of just 13100.  In addition, none of the sites in the top 10 for that keyword were fully optimised for the particular keyword, so it is quite easy to rank highly.

Don’t let the look of their website put you off.  I know their design skills really suck, but if you request their demo report, you’ll see that their skills definitely are in the keyword/niche research area and not website design.