How to Use Market Samurai

How to Use Market Samurai's Key Features

If you truly want to make money online, whether by writing articles or setting up your own website, you have to do your research before starting. This article will show you how to use Market Samurai to not only find great keywords to write about, but also to check out your online competition for that keyword. It isn't enough to have a great keyword that everyone is searching for. You have to be able to make your way to the first page of Google if you want to see real income for it.

Why is Researching Your Competition so Important?

If your article or website isn't showing up on the first page of Google, people aren't finding it. If people aren't finding it, they aren't visiting it. And if people aren't visiting your website or article, you aren't making any money. It's that simple.

If you just want to make a preliminary search of your competition, simply type in your chosen keyword in the google search box and look at the sites that come up. The problem with this approach is that you really can't see the behind the scenes details as to why these sites are ranking so well. Is it because they are page rank 5 or higher? Do they have a million backlinks to their site? Do they have several .edu or .gov backlinks pointing to their site? (Google loves backlinks from .edu and .gov.) Or are they simply lucky that there isn't a stronger website out there (hint, hint). By the way, in the rest of the article I will be using the word website, but feel free to substitute article. It all works the same.

Market Samurai (A Keyword Research Primer)

Once you download the trial version of Market Samurai, or purchase it outright, you are set to start researching keywords and competition. A special note here: Even if you are sold on Market Samurai and have already decided to purchase it, download the free trial first. This simple act will get you a major price reduction.

When you are ready to start, open Market Samurai and click on New Project. Enter a general Keyword or Niche you want to research and hit the Create Button. This will take you to the main Market Samurai menu screen. Your first step is to see what kinds of keywords you can get from your general one, so click on KeyWord Research. From there press 'generate keywords'. You will need to have a google adwords account set up as this is where the information is pulled from. This process takes a few minutes. Be patient, it's worth it.

Once you have your list of keywords, click at the bottom right of the screen on Keyword Analysis. This will bring you to another screen where you can enter your preferences. Move your mouse slowly over the options at the top of the screen to see what each option means. Enter your choices and hit Analyze Keywords. Again this takes a few minutes.

When it has finished processing all the information you will be left with a page of suitable keywords for your niche that meet your general guidelines (the options you chose above). You will be able to see not only how many searches are made for the keyword, but also and how much SEO competition there is, along with a lot of other pretty nifty information.

Market Samurai for SEO Competition Research

The next step is to choose a few to research competition on. Pick your favorites by clicking on the little box to the left of the keyword. Start with just a few. Once you've made your selections, go to the bottom of the page and click on 'Actions on Selected'. Choose the option to open a tab for each selected keyword. Your selected keywords will now show across the top of the screen. Click on one and it will take you back to the Main Menu screen.

To check out your online competition for your chosen keyword, select 'SEO Competition'. Just leave all the boxes at the top checked and select Generate Results. In my opinion this is what makes Market Samurai a simple must have. Once all the data is processed you will see a simple to understand, color-coded screen. In a nutshell, red is bad and green is good.

This page will break down the top 10 results by a number of things, including the page's rank, how many backlinks it has, how many .edu or .gov links it has, and more. If you see a lot of green and sites that are ranked 1 or 0, you stand a good chance at being able to rank for this keyword.

How About a Case Study in Action?

While I was writing this article, I had Market Samurai up and was going through the steps as I typed. I chose an almost impossible niche to rank in, dogs, just to see if I could find a viable keyword. Once I set my parameters as to number of SEOT (this is the number of visits a number one ranked site could expect in a day) to 9 and my maximum SEO competition (SEOC) to 15,000
-- I was left with only two options: Milbemax Dog Wormer and Harrington's Dog Food.

The Milbemax Dog Wormer keyword came back with an SEOT of 18 and a SEOC of only 394, which is fantastically low in the way of competition. I clicked the little box and added the keyword as a tab and went to check out the competition. What came up was 1 website page ranked 5, one site ranked 1, and 8 ranked 0. Promising. Furthermore, there was a lot of green on the page, showing a lot of places where I could easily outrank them. I should be able to get to number two without too much effort in the way of backlinks, etc.

Hmm, now I have to write an article on this dog wormer...if I could rank 2 (no way could I beat a page rank 5 for 1) I should be able to get several visits a day, and this would be an excellent click thru article as people looking for this would most likely be ready to buy it. And all from typing 'Dogs' into Market Samurai.

So now that you know how to use Market Samurai, research those keywords and start writing!