IMO Market Samurai Doesn't Give Enough Detail

[GuerrillaIM]

Hey people,

Been using Market Samurai and decided to go back to my old manual method with free tools as it doesn't give enough detail.

Before I go any futher. MS is the most comprehensive SEO research tool available. If your into PPC the Keyword elite is better, but for SEO analysis, MS is market leader right now.

Anyway, back to why I am disgruntled.

1. MS doesnt give info on second page! Looking at page 2 of google shows soooo much. Your could have what looks like a competitive front page but all subsequent pages are wide open. This a lot of time means you can creep onto first page. And sometimes keywords look fairly easy but have several pages of extremely competitive results. Looking just at first page is not enough.

2. MS doesnt show the text used in the title, URL or the description. Whether the ranking URL has relevancy to the root domain of the URL has big impact on ranking factors. As sometime a page may have low inbound links, but its same topic as root domain and root domain has shed loads.

3. Every time I click back to my keyword list after researching competitiveness, I have to wait for results to re-load. Why doesn't this casche?

4. No feature to check keyword density of anchor text in incoming links to a domain (like in seo elite).

I do like market samurai, and I think its a nice software. But until 1-3 in my list has been sorted, it is quicker for me using web tools (some paid, some free).

Anyway, if they add these features I will be happy as a pig in proverbial.

Anyone disagree?

[DireStraits]

Originally Posted by GuerrillaIM

Hey people,

Been using Market Samurai and decided to go back to my old manual method with free tools as it doesn't give enough detail.

Before I go any futher. MS is the most comprehensive SEO research tool available. If your into PPC the Keyword elite is better, but for SEO analysis, MS is market leader right now.

Anyway, back to why I am disgruntled.

1. MS doesnt give info on second page! Looking at page 2 of google shows soooo much. Your could have what looks like a competitive front page but all subsequent pages are wide open. This a lot of time means you can creep onto first page. And sometimes keywords look fairly easy but have several pages of extremely competitive results. Looking just at first page is not enough.

2. MS doesnt show the text used in the title, URL or the description. Whether the ranking URL has relevancy to the root domain of the URL has big impact on ranking factors. As sometime a page may have low inbound links, but its same topic as root domain and root domain has shed loads.

3. Every time I click back to my keyword list after researching competitiveness, I have to wait for results to re-load. Why doesn't this casche?

4. No feature to check keyword density of anchor text in incoming links to a domain (like in seo elite).

I do like market samurai, and I think its a nice software. But until 1-3 in my list has been sorted, it is quicker for me using web tools (some paid, some free).

Anyway, if they add these features I will be happy as a pig in proverbial.

Anyone disagree?

Yeah these are all good very good points. #1 and #3 really do bug me every time I use Samurai. I often have to enable my SEO Firefox plugin (and i don't even use FireFox anymore) and go through the 2nd and 3rd SERPs to come to a reasonable conclusion with regards to the strength of competition, and that kinda bugs me. Why can't they let you set the number of pages to check for competition, or something. Seems like something that should've been implemented almost immediately after launch, to be honest

[Steve Crooks]

I absolutely love market samurai and it pains me to find myself agreeing with you because it makes me feel a bit ungrateful to the noble samurai, but I do agree with what you are saying. If there was a way of mashing seo elite together with MS, you would have one hell of a tool!

[Marakatapolis]

I agree about the keywords, but as far as page 2 and 3 of Google I don't care whats on it, #1 spot on page 1 is what I want, so only the top 5 spots on the first page are really of any concern to me.

[terryd]

Yeah I don't really care on Page 2 of Google as I'm not looking at landing there but I do agree with your 3rd point, I hate having to switch between keyword tabs and waiting for it to reload.

The other points you made would be improvements but to me MS is still the best software out there.

[BrentHodgson]

Points noted - and thanks for the feedback.

We've always got an open ear if you want to give us feedback.

Any time you want to contact us via support, we're there - and we listen. In fact, almost every feature release we put out is based on the feedback we receive from users.

I just want to quickly touch on two issues...

You mentioned a speed issue clicking between tabs.

Sadly, this is something we can't fix yet.

The issue here is simply the speed of Adobe AIR. The results are cached, but rebuilding the page and applying your settings is taking time because of the way Adobe AIR is structured right now.

The good news is Adobe AIR 2.0 is in beta right now - and it runs Market Samurai a lot faster.

So for some of the stuff in the list - we're on it!

But, even though I'm the kind of guy who likes to try and please everyone - there are some points here that we're going to let you down on...

For example, I doubt we'll ever show the 2nd page of results.

Firstly, it's because I believe aiming to get your site onto Page 2 of Google is an unsound strategy because the returns are far too low...

Check your Google Webmaster Tools stats for this one - they recently released a feature that shows you click through rates, traffic and rankings for your keywords. Results that are shown on Page 2 of Google are displayed rarely, and clicked even less frequently.

Secondly, it's because you don't need to worry about what's on Page 2 of Google if your site has better on and off-page optimization than the sites on Page 1. (There's a reason why the sites on Page 1 are outranking the sites on Page 2 - it's because they're the most relevant, optimized sites for that keyword. So if you use these top sites as your benchmark for SEO, the sites on Page 2 mean nothing.)

I understand how other people might have a different philosophy though.

Again, I appreciate the feedback here - as always.

I think one of the things that makes Noble Samurai unique is that it actually listens in support, and uses customer feedback to fine-tune the features in its products and work out which tools will help people the most.

So if there's something that frustrates you, get in touch with us directly where we're certain to get your feedback.
(I'm glad I stumbled across this thread - otherwise I might have never heard your thoughts here!)

Brent

[jasonmorgan]

Firstly, it's because I believe aiming to get your site onto Page 2 of Google is an unsound strategy because the returns are far too low

While I agree with your point. GuerillaIM also has a good point when it comes to competition and the 2nd page.

While the first page may be very competitive, if the competition drops off quickly and it wouldn't take much effort to reach the teens then it might still be a keyword that is worth chasing after. Especially with keywords that are high traffic.

A lot of it has to do with what kind of keywords an IMer likes to go after.

Some people avoid keywords that have any real competition while I mainly go after keywords with high volume traffic, and thus, higher level of competition. If I can hit page 2 without much of an effort then I can always asses my situation and decide from there if I can use brute force to get onto page 1.

[GuerrillaIM]

Originally Posted by BrentHodgson

I doubt we'll ever show the 2nd page of results.

Firstly, it's because I believe aiming to get your site onto Page 2 of Google is an unsound strategy because the returns are far too low...

Thanks for getting back to me. I am not trying to land my site onto the second page, but the second page info is vital for me in the way I do my research.

Number of links and whether the keyword is in title is not all the SEO ranking factors that effect where you place (I made a post in private section regarding this recently http://www.warriorforum.com/war-room...7E20OLsvXTIUb8).

Some sites rank well on a small number of links due to the high quality. As I analyse the second page of results I can spot keywords that on the face of it appear easy but are actually very hard.

For instance, first page of results, there are many sites with low backlinks, but second page all the sites have lots of backlinks and keyword in title.

Also, I have seen it where google throws sites to page one for a few days or few weeks that have very few backlinks and then throws then down the list. By looking at competition on second page you can get a better picture of whether or not this has happened.

The truth is there are more to ranking factors than number of backlinks, and by looking at the runners up you can make sure a keyword really is as easy as it seems.

If a keyword is easy then on second page you should see results with keyword in title having very low links and results with lots of backlinks and not having keyword in title and also some slightly unrelated listings.

I research a lot of keywords and every day see sites with a couple of hundred links outranking those with thousands.

For me, I tackle this by looking at the second page results and then running some backlink reports on interesting listings to see the keyword density in the anchor text of incoming links.

I also like to try and see if the ranking page is the same theme as the root domain or is part of a larger section. As if root domain has thousands of links and ranking page has none or very few, it can either be very easy or very hard to beat depending on the circumstances.

Sometimes a website has thousands of keyword targetted links to its index page, but google decides that an internal page is better suited to be displayed for the keyword. This can be very hard to beat.

Sometimes a website has thousands of un-targetted links to index and just a few to ranking page (like in case of hub pages, squidoo, eza etc..). In this case the page is usually very easy to beat. SENuke's keyword research pretty much revolves enitrely around finding keywords that web 2.0 properties rank for although their approach is far too simplistic IMO.

This is why I would like to see title text and also the URL with a clickable link. Seeing if the theme of the root domain and ranking page match can give a hint that incoming links to root doman have related keywords to the ranking page, which is very important as sites with a root domain of several thousands of incoming links are hard to analyse as you can only see first 1000 links. Some guess work and common sense are needed.

This adds time to my research process but I have my method refined now so I have a pretty much 100% success rate choosing keywords that I can get ranked.

I suppose the majority of people would just take the approach that if a few keywords appear easy but really aren't then its no big deal as they are doing just a little seo and catching the easy keywords.

However people like myself who are targetting keywords with a higher level of competition and decidating a lot of resources to the SEO process may also be frustrated with having to use other tools to support MS.

I think MS is the best all-in-one tool out there for SEO keyword research. It just needs a few tweaks to be all the way there so I dont have to use other tools as well. For me not having second page of results kills it as if im checking backlinks with seo toolbar for second page, I might aswell use it to check them for first page as well.

[Pauline60]

Although it is a bit more laborious you can analyse the results from page 2 by going to 'view results in google', removing any customisation of the results, and then adding the sites shown on page 2 into the 'add custom URLs' option.

Yes I agree with your point 3 about swapping between SEO competition and keyword research taking ages - that drives me nuts.

But overall I love MS, don't know what I would do without it.

Pauline