Cash back offer on your purchase – see the bottom of this review.
The video below is more about how to use Market Samurai to assess your competition in Google, rather than being a review of the tool. Its a great tool – hopefully I’ve managed to get that over to you in the video.
This is a solid bit of kit! No, this is a very good bit of kit! If you do any amount of keyword research whatsoever, Market Samurai (MS) is arguably the best keyword research tool to help you out!
What with the demise of Yahoo Site Explorer (YSE), I was forced into using the Market Samurai product that I had purchased quite some time before. Up till then, I relied solely on the assessment of Google top ten whilst checking out the Yahoo Site Explorer backlinking stats.
Well, YSE is no longer, so I had to turn to another method.
And since I already had MS, this was the obvious choice.
I was a bit concerned at first because I had in fact used MS previously on the trial version, and I found it a bit clunky and not overly user friendly.
As you may know though, I am not at all technically inclined which means that even for fairly easy-to-use tools, I do struggle a bit to come to terms with their use.
And I am not going to tell you that I use every facility that MS has to offer, but the facilities I do use are excellent.
Firstly, the keyword research module is very easy to use. You hardly even need to read up on how to utilize it – its that easy! See the screen shot just below of the keyword research module – click the image to make it larger.
Click the Image to Make it Larger
You’ll see its a search for the phrase “how to get rid of stretch marks” which has 33,000 global searches in Google per month (exact searches as opposed to phrase or broad searches, since exact is a much more accurate measure). Well shucks, there my site is in second spot 
The only columns you really need to pay close attention to are these…
- BLP (backlinks to the page that shows up in the top ten for the keyword phrase you are currently researching)
- BLD (number of backlinks to the domain as a whole)
And of course, checking the actual URL is important since it may be an exact match domain name, or it may be a domain you recognize which is regarded by Google as “authoritarian” for want of a better word to describe a “trusted” site.
There are other columns which give you a reasonable idea about on-page SEO factors. Those are…
- Title
- URL
- Desc
- Head
Don’t worry about what those mean right now – the meanings are written just above in MS, so its very easy to figure it out.
The main thing to note though is that you want your own domain to have a Y in each of these columns, whilst its preferred that your competition has N in those columns. Don’t get too hung up on this though.
The other column which may be of particular interest to you for one reason or another is the DA column – domain age.
Again, don’t get hung up on how mature the competition’s domains are. Have a look at the screen shot above and check out my stretch marks domain in second spot. You’ll see it has no age showing. That’s because the domain is only around a year old. All the other domains are much older. In other words, who cares? If you know your Google SEO, domain age does not matter too much.
Oh, and next to the DA column is the Google PageRank column. Again, nothing much to worry about here. Don’t go checking your competition’s PageRank to see if they are all PR4 to PR7. It matters not. You can rank a PR0 in among high PR competition.
The other key value that MS offers is this. You can check out your competition’s backlinks and see where they get their high PR backlinks from. Cool!
You can then emulate what they’ve done simply by working through the list. Check the screen shot below.
Click the Image to Make it Larger
Have a look at the little column to the left of the DA column right after the column with the URL’s.
Click on the downward pointing arrow – see the screen shot just above for what shows up…
At the moment, MS provides what is called ACRank Analysis. This comes up instead of PR Analysis because Google is currently blocking the PR analysis.
No need to worry though – chances are decent that Google will unblock this in time. But even if they don’t, the ACAnalysis is still a good way to assess where you wish to gain your backlinks from. I simply start from the top, and work down the list.
As you can probably see from the screen shot just above, you can also check Alexa rankings and Google Trends etc.
Although there are other facilities with MS, those are the main ones that I use. May not seem much, but it surely is a vital analysis that you simply cannot do without when it comes to keyword research!
I’m going to offer you a very nice chunk of money-back should you purchase via my affiliate link.
To get the nice chunk of cash back (the MS software currently costs a one-time $149.00), you need to purchase via my affiliate link which is just below here. And then, you need to work with the software for 1 month, after which, please send me a copy of your payment details and I will happily re-imburse you $35.00 on the $149 purchase price!
If however the price has reverted to $97 once more, I will re-imburse you to the tune of $20 USD.
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