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Review: Niche Inspector

Written by Administrator
Friday, 12 October 2007
Niche Inspector is Meelana Phan's keyword research tool that quickly builds keyword lists from the ground up using all three big Engines. Meelana Phan developed Niche Inspector for her own use. She continues to develop and support the tool. NI generates keywords by three methods: You can ask it to go get suggestions without any input from you, you can give it a seed keyword and it will get hundreds of related words, or you can paste in your own list and it will use those verbatim. I find myself using the last two most often although it is interesting to build up huge lists of totally unrelated keywords with the first option. After a few hundred suggestions from NI, you have a ranked list of unrelated keywords that can kick off ideas in your own head. The important thing happens after you get a list of keywords. NI automatically asks the three big search engines for results on each keyword. This shows you how they rank on each system. Although Google has half the searches on the internet, Yahoo is often much bigger in a product area where people are searching for merchandise. So you definitely want to consider Yahoo along side Google when you are dealing with things people buy. Even MSN is important in certain areas. And if you want the maximum organic traffic, you should consider all three. The results can be displayed in three ways. Simple returns showing how many competitors exist for that keyword. KEI, a computed strength of keyword effectiveness. and R/S, the ratio of the number of competitors to the number of searches in the last two months. I find myself jumping back and forth from one mode of display to the other to get a feel for the big picture. NI provides filtering of the results. You can reject keywords that don't meet your standards. For instance, reject all keywords that contain the word "free", or have less than x searches per month, or have too few Google ads showing up for that keyword. If few people are paying for Adword ads, then it will be very hard to make any money from an Adsense site based on that keyword. There are many more variables you can adjust in the filter. Meelana is quick to fix bugs. For instance, MSN and Yahoo make simultaneous changes to their sites that prevented NI from acquiring data. NI was fixed within two days from the time I turned in the problem by email. I love NI for the quality of keywords. I have Wordtracker and KRA that generate huge lists from another source, but NI goes directly to Google, Yahoo and MSN for data, or to Alexa. And the keywords it returns are cleaned up. You don't get weird keywords that no one really searched for. Wordtracker will give you hundreds of things you KNOW were not real keywords but because some marketer searched for the weird keyword 47 times, then Wordtracker reports it. NI uses Google or Alexa for the number of searches and the keywords are real. If it can't find that keyword it will not include it in the list even if you suggested it. It provides proxy redirection so Google will not get upset with you for hammering their system for research. I don't abuse it and you should not either. NI provides a delay you can set to prevent repetitive searches that occur too close together. And you set the delay. You can set a maximum price for Google adwords and NI will retrieve cost data for the keyword for broad, phrase and exact data. If you set a max of 0.15 then it will tell you if it can find that word for less than 15 cents. Or set it to a dollar and find out if the keyword is going for less than that. It's flexible on how it acquires the cost data. Sometimes the data is not available for a particular keyword but the list usually has plenty of cost data for other keywords and you can get a feel for the cost of using these keywords in an Adword campaign. To get a free and very valuable report on the method underlying Niche Inspector, go to Meelana's site and evaluate the tool for yourself. Even if you don't buy it, the report is worth reading in itself. In summary, I recommend Niche Inspector as a fast tool to quickly find keywords, filter them and rank them across all three big Search Engines.