This is the second post in a series of guest posts by Tim Janssen. Tim runs an online business selling Japanese chef’s knives on Shopify.
In my last post I talked about the “hard way” (e.g. no cost) to find good keywords to target for your online business. Today I’ll talk about an application that I discovered while doing my own keyword research. I now wish that I had found this tool a lot sooner, as it could have saved me a LOT of time.
The tool is called Market Samurai. The bad news here is that this is definitely not a free tool. There’s a one-time fee of $149, but in my opinion it’s worth every penny. If I calculated the hours I spent sifting through extensive lists of keywords at $10/hour (which is an extremely low-ball figure) this tool would pay for itself pretty quickly. That said, let me explain why I think this tool is so valuable before you rush out and sign up for it.
Attractive Keywords
This is where the Market Samurai tool really shines. You simply enter a few general keywords and Market Samurai will give you all kinds of related keywords. It’s not difficult from here to start seeing how much monthly traffic you can expect per month and what kind of competition you’ll face. You can then apply filters to help you focus in on the keywords where you’ll face lower competition with decent monthly traffic. For example, I did some quick searches around “car insurance” and was able to find that “car quote insurance” would give me around 8,000 search per month with 179K competitors. “Insurance for car” would yield 5.5K visits with 96K competitors and “young insurance” would yield 3K visitors with 34K competition. This could have taken hours doing things the “hard way” as I described in my previous post.
This information is extremely valuable, but you still need to decide whether or not certain keywords are worth the effort. You do this by investigating the strength of the competition you would face. Doing this the ‘hard way” means digging through the competitors backlinks, anchor text and so on. This is extremely painful to do manually. Thankfully Market Samurai can do a lot of this heavy lifting for you.
Evaluating The Competition
With one click of a button you will can get the domain age of a competitor’s site, how many backlinks it has, its page rank, and so on. Going back to my car insurance example, the initial stats I found concerning monthly searches and competition made this keywords look pretty attractive. After digging into the competition with Market Samurai, however, I quickly discovered that it would be extremely difficult to get ranked well for these keywords due to the relative strength of the competition. In this case, the competition has a lot of other sites that link to it (sometimes called backlinks). The number of these links are one of the main ways that Google determines how well a site ranks in search results. If your potential competitors have a lot of backlinks it will likely be very difficult to compete with them on those keywords.
So the competition looks pretty stiff for the standard “car insurance” keywords, but Market Samurai showed me that “young insurance” is a pretty good keyword with pretty weak competition. The top result on Google only has 56 backlinks for the anchor text “young insurance”. With a few high quality links it would be easy to get ranked well on Google. I’ll talk more about this process in a later article.
So by now I’ve spent about 10 minutes doing my car insurance keyword research with Market Samurai and have found a very juicy keyword that I can pursue. I’ll use this keyword as a jumping off point to find more keywords and related terms. To me, this makes Market Samurai worth the $149 price tag. That said, $150 is a lot if you’re bootstrapping a new business. If I had known about Market Samurai when I first started the keyword research process I probably would have sprung for it, especially if I knew then what I know now. We’ve really only started to scratch the surface of what Market Samurai can do. You can find a lot more information about this tool over at smartpassiveincome.com which is a great blog and resource for starting a business. There’s a great video on this blog that will show you far more about Market Samurai than I could tell you in this article, so go check it out!
I hope these articles have helped you understand more about keyword research. Both the “easy way” and the “hard way” can generate lots of keywords to work with. Start working on finding these keywords now and we’ll continue in my next post learning how to put those keywords to work.
Tim runs a Shopify store selling Japanese chef’s knives. Doing solid keyword research has revealed his best keywords are Santoku Messer and Damat Messer (a type of steel). He now builds his store around these keywords and gets highly targeted traffic without spending any cash on pay-per-click advertising.
