Beginners Guide To Market Samurai

This article shows you how to make the most of the Market Samurai Free Trial. If you have not already got a copy, click here.

There is no point owning tools if youdon't know how to use them. Market Samurai is an awesome tool to help you maximize revenue online,but first you need to understand how to get the information you need out of it.

In order to successfully earn an income online you need to do two things:

1) Write about subjects people are searching for
2) Rank high enough in the search engine results for readers to find your work.

This is where the difficulty arises. There are no more low hanging fruit. All of the subjects and keywords with huge amounts of traffic are highly competitive and the chances of a new site competing with the big boys is essentially zero. You need to go hunting for search terms that are getting a decent amount of traffic BUT have weak competition. At this point a certain needle and haystack springs to mind.

Finding out the number of daily or monthly searches for a keyword on its own is a waste of time as you have not taken into account the probability of getting onto the first page of the search results. If you choose a nut that is too hard to crack you are wasting your valuable time. This is where Market Samurai comes in. It lets you quickly check the search volumes for you chosen keywords then also assess the strength of the competition. Only fighting the battles you can win is a smart strategy.

Beginners should use Market Samurai initially for these two steps:
1) Keyword Research
2) Competition Evaluation

Keyword Research
Start a new project then select the open padlock tab to begin your keyword research.
Add the keywords you want to try and rank for. Once you click "Add keywords" they will appear on the right. From here, click analyze keywords on the bottom right.
On the next screen, ensure the tick boxes are clicked for:
Total Searches
Title Comp (SEOTC)
Title/Comp (SEOTCR)

Then click Analyze Keywords

Time to review your results........

Firstly, is the amount of daily traffic enough to make it worth your while? Remember that even the No. 1 ranked site on google doesn't get 100% of the traffic. 20 searches a day isn't worth it. Hundreds often are and thousands or more is great if you can find one without stiff competition.

The above screen shot shows that there are nearly 165,000 searches a day for the keyword "Plane". Great if you are number one but obviouslya very general term and difficult to rank for.

How difficult? Look across to the column "SEOC". This lets you know how many webpages in google's index mention the keyword. All 122 million of them. The next column, SEOTC shows you how many of these mention the keyword in the title, still 4.6 million here.

This would be as far as I go with this keyword as it is way to difficult to rank for.

Time to either choose another topic or look for long tailed keywords to focus on.

EXAMPLE: The keyword "World War 2 Planes" still gets over 900 searches a day but has only just over 700 pages with the term in the title. This term looks much more viable.

So, we have found a keyword that has adecent amount of traffic and the first look indicates that the total number of competing sites is not high. This is not the most important factor however as you only need there to be 10 strong sites and you can't rank on the first page. This means it is time to take an in depth look at the top 10 sites.

Competition Evaluation

The first step is to set up our new keyword in Market Samurai. Click on the Key tab on the top left to add in our new phrase "World War 2 Planes". It will now get its own tab at the top of the page next to our original keyword.

Next open up the SEO Competition tab on the left with the magnifying glass icon.

There are 13 different variable you can get Market Samurai to look at. This is way too many for the beginner to get their head around so lets simplify it a little. Uncheck every option except for:

PageRank

Page Backlinks

Keyword in Title

Keyword in URL

This screen shows us the first page of the google results. The results for the variables we selected are color coded to give you an idea of the competition. A sea of red is bad news, in fact, even a single red in each row would indicate too much competition (remembering there are 9 other variables we are not looking at).

The top two spots have the keyword in both the Title and URL but they are the only ones. The bottom 4 all lack the keyword in both and have less than 20 backlinks to the page.

I would be confident of beating these positions within a month or two. It appears that this long tailed keyword has both a good amount of traffic and modest competition. If this was a topic that interested you, the chances of your work making the first page are good.

So, what now?

The Safe Approach

Test the viability further with an established revenue sharing site with good authority like Hubpages. Ensure the keyword phrase is in both the URL and Title (as well as the summary that appears on the search results page). Build some backlinks and monitor its progress. If the results are promising, you can later decide to build your own site on the topic and use you Hubpage for backlinking to it.

The Aggressive Approach

Those with more experience or who are looking to take the plunge for the first time can buy a domain name and run their own site. The Market Samurai domain search function (the "www" tab on the left) reveals that the domain "worldwar2planes.net" is available and offers 100% keyword density. This is an excellent result and worth grabbing if you like the look of this topic.

This domain, plus some decent content and 20 or so backlinks would have a very good chance of being in the top 5 in a short period of time.

This example highlights the value of Market Samurai. By understanding both the level of traffic and the make up of the competition, you are able to target the appropriate level of keywords and save time (and potentially money for domain names etc). Once you become familiar with the interface, you can find all of this information in less than 5 minutes and you won't think of creating new online content without doing the research first.

If you haven't tried it already, get the free trial here.