I’ve tried A TON of keyword research tools: Micro Niche Finder, Market Samurai, Word Tracker, Keyword Elite, you name it…I’ve tried ‘em all.
What sets SECockpit apart from its competitors is that it’s ridiculously fast. Since it’s a web service rather than a local software app, you can run as many queries as you want simultaneously…in fact it can handle 200 fully processed and analyzed keywords per minute. I’d like to see your current tool do that!
Not only that, but SECockpit uses multiple keyword sources: Google Adwords, Google Suggest, and Google ‘related search terms’.
Let’s take a look at the SECockpit interface, for this example I used the seed keyword “deals”:
As you can see, it comes packed with tons of useful details for each keyword. The “Niche” column is the SECockpit evaluation of how “good” the niche is for that keyword. You can see which domains are available to buy for each keyword, with hyphens and without. You can see which of the top 10 results are sniper sites or Youtube vids.
And if you double-click on a keyword in the results, you are taken to the top 10 Google results which give you some juicy data such as mozRank, Page Authority, Juice links (count of links that are valuable in determining SE ranking), and a direct link to go to Open Site Explorer.
Pretty slick, eh?
Get SECockpit here.
Just some general rules I like to follow when running an SEO campaign. Hopefully you find some of these helpful!
- Keep the Content Fresh
- At the least, a new post or page every week is great to keep the search engine bots continually crawling your site. Plus the more pages your domain has the better. The total Google PR for your entire domain can not exceed the # of pages. So if you have a 1 page site you’ll never have higher than PR 1.
- Yes I realize there’s irony in this point because I don’t update this blog nearly that often. But I suppose that’s because this isn’t an income stream for me, I’m just doing it for fun, so I don’t really care too much about its SEO.
- If you’re using a blogging platform, remember to use tags, as each tag creates yet another page.
- Find Forums to Post in that have Do-Follow Signature Links
- Be the first to respond to new threads so your sig will appear near the top of the page
- Try to write useful, respectful comments, and not obvious spam…you know who you are…silly spammers
- Submit your RSS Feeds to Directories
- Search engines love RSS feeds, probably because they are great followers of Tip #1 (Keep the Content Fresh), and constantly updating
- Two of the major ones are Feedage.com and Feedagg.com
- Use ‘title’ and ‘alt’ HTML Tags for Images
- This way you’ll get bonus traffic from search engine image searches, such as Google and Bing (my new favorite).
- Social Bookmarking Rules
- It’s powerful because each bookmark not only creates multiple backlinks (due to the tags), but also because of the “social” aspect your bookmark could appear on a “top bookmarks” page (with high PR) if other users vote or submit it as well.
- With SocialAdr your webpages can be bookmarked (to 15 or so of the major social bookmarking services) up to 420 time per month. And that’s just with the ‘Free’ account!
- Keyword Research is ‘Key’
- This is one of the (if not THE) most important parts of an effective SEO campaign. Too many people rush through it and don’t take the time to realize either (a) there’s weak traffic for the keywords they’re targeting or (b) the competition is insane and it’s virtually impossible for them to get on Page 1 of Google.
- I use a handy app called Micro Niche Finder – it saves a lot of time compared to using the free tools
- The free method is simply using the Google External Keyword Tool to find how much traffic each keyword gets and Google (search for the keyword “in quotes”) to find how much competition you have. I prefer > 1000 searches / month with less than 20,000 competition. But there’s a lot of wiggle room in those numbers.
Note: This post is related to my ongoing experiment to determine which Google prefers more – Fresh Content or Quality Backlinks
Well after a quick browse through ClickBank I stumbled across this -> Double Your Vertical Leap.
The World’s Top Selling Vertical Jump Enhancement System Is Back, Better Than Ever. 6 Months Of Extensive Testing – And A Mouth-watering Offer – Has Produced A Website That Converts At 5-7%… Every Single Time! Look For More Updates Shortly…
It’s got some decent numbers:
- $89 / sale
- 51% commission
- 93% referred
- 12.05 gravity
- And a 5-7% conversion rate on the pitch page
After searching for “vertical jump” in good ‘ol Micro Niche Finder, I came across a particular phrase that had solid results.
“jump higher exercises”
- Search Count = 1,300 (how many times per month people are searching on Google for this phrase – this is a tad low but not terrible)
- Exact Phrase Count = 13,200 (how many total results there are for this phrase in quotes – under 20,000 is good)
- Commercial Intent = 29% (how likely a person searching for this phrase is to BUY something – this is bad but I’m not doing this to make money)
- Strength of Competition = 14 (this is excellent, it means the competing sites don’t have very good backlinks)
So I’m all set! The next steps are to create two subdomains, setup WordPress, and then work on the initial content.
I’ve been using this app for about a month now. Actually, it was the very first piece of commercial software I started using for internet marketing. After reading a bunch of good reviews on WarriorForum, I took a leap and bought it.
These are steps that I used to do manually, for each potential keyword phrase, one-by-one:
- Google External Keyword Tool (# of monthly searches)
- Microsoft Online Commercial Intention Tool (commercial intention)
- Google.com (# of competition)
- Yahoo Site Explorer (strength of competition)
I would then use these metrics to calculate the potential profitability of a new “niche” (keyword phrase).
Well now I do all that in Micro Niche Finder. Those 4 steps are done automatically through MNF in mere seconds. It even suggests related keywords and calculates their metrics at the same time.
Here’s a screenshot of the “meat & potatoes” of the app:
Note: I chose “fat loss” as my search phrase purely for this review. I don’t actually think this is a good market to approach, as you can see by the numbers…the competition is insane!
And a quick description of what each column means:
- Phrase – these are related keywords that are automatically generated by MNF. By default it shows results for the EXACT phrase (ie. a search in Google with “quotes”) but you can also choose BROAD (without quotes) or PHRASE (words out of order)
- Search Count - the total number of searches each month for this phrase on Google (ie. the DEMAND). I usually only look at phrases with > 2000.
- Exact Phrase Count – these are the number of results for the phrase in Google (you can verify yourself by going to Google.com and typing in the phrase with “quotes”). This is the COMPETITION. I usually aim for phrases with < 20,000, but the COMPETITION / DEMAND ratio is also important. If it’s, say 4, and the COMPETITION is 100,000, those are darn good numbers.
- Ad Cost – how much Google charges advertisers per click they receive on their AdWords ads based on this phrase. This is usually relative to a combination of the Commercial Intent and Strength of Competition.
- Commercial Intent - how likely it is that a person searching this phrase on Google will end up buying something. Anything less than 50% usually isn’t worth your time.
- Strength of Competition (SOC) – how strong the competition’s websites are. This calculation considers things like PageRank, number of one-way backlinks, etc. The lower the better! That red X image turns into yellow (medium) or green (good) depending on how low the SOC values get.
Micro Niche Finder. Very. Useful. Tool. 
Here’s more information on it if you’re interested…