Semrush or Market Samurai? Which one is best?

I don't like either one, but at least SEMrush gives you some keyword ideas off your competitors.

To be honest I am a great fan of Semrush. Although Market samurai is also good but I amusing semrush for a long time. May be this is the reason that I like it so much.

I don't like either one as well, I rather reverse IP lookup competitors and pick my keywords that way. For example I see some EMD ranking at page 1 then my process is like this:

Step 1: I do the reverse IP lookup to find the other domains on their hosting
Step 2: I filter out the other sites that look like an EMD
Step 3: I break up the domains into key phrases
Step 4: Run them through Google Adwords and filter on the usual 1k+ $1 cpc+
Step 5: Save the ones that fit the criteria
Step 6: Run the kw's through scrapebox and let it return only the top 10 results for each kw
Step 7: Check the domain pagerank (not the url)
Step 8: Remove all the domains that are PR1+
Step 9: Save all the domains that look like EMD into a list again
Step 10: Repeat step 3 till step 5
Step 11: Google the keywords manually and check if there are PR0 sites ranking at page 1

For most of those keywords you WILL see a PR0 site ranking at page one so you get a huge list of very easy to rank keywords that you can use for a long long time. Last time I did this it costed me a little more over a week but I have keywords with 100.000+ searches that are pretty easy to rank.

The method is not 100% foolproof cause sometimes you see PR0 sites ranking for tough keywords that definitely had some 301 redirect cause it's like plain impossible. One of those keywords is "medical assistant". Well you really don't rank for that with some crappy PR0 site in a natural way.

Anyway I have over 800 kw's in my list cause of that 1 week fulltime boring work and the kw's are a lot better then when you would have to do it in a normal way.

I cant understand why MS got that much popularity. Whether users dont know how to do keyword research or they are doing something that I am missing. I personally would go for semrush even free version is very good.

I agree with mike. For KR semrush is not perfect. I like it as it can provide some good information like trend, CPC, competitors, competitors are ranking for which keywords and also we can find some undiscovered keywords using some simple tricks.

I like MS but don't use it alone. MS is good for bulk keywords research.

Semrush start at $69.95/month, but I really like the feature where you can find all your competitor keywords. It show both position and traffic they are getting from any particular keywords. I haven't see any tools that can show that kind of data.

They're really two different tools.

SEMRush is basically to reverse engineer your competitor's keywords. It doesn't give you much SERP competition data.

Market Samurai is more to find keywords to build sites around.

I actually use a simple but effective tool: Niche Finder by Brad Callen.
It's not pretty but it gives you the raw numbers you need to make decisions.