Is Market Samurai still relevant and a good tool?

[Marc van Leeuwen]

I have not used Market Samurai before but I heard more about this tool, it can help you search volume and competition strength etc...is it still a viable tool to use for basing good keyword research on? or I should go with another tools?

 

[SEOPub]

It was never a good tool. It is a slow resource hog. And I do mean slow.

The data it pulls is all useless stuff like domain age.

 

[Rob Whisonant]

Rob Whisonant

What would you recommend to use then?

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

I don't think there is any tool out there that does a good job of judging the competition for keywords. They are all awful at it. The only one that is kind of okay, is Moz's keyword tool. The reason I say that is because Moz's tool at least attempts to incorporate the quality and strength of links pointing to a page (which is the #1 ranking factor in Google, so kind of important). However, their tool uses data from OpenSite Explorer, which is not a very big, or anywhere near complete, link database.

I think the only way to judge competition accurately is manually inspecting the top 3 ranking sites for a keyword. The rest of the sites do not matter. If you cannot get in the top 3, you are pretty much irrelevant.

As far as coming up with keywords, there are tons of options out there such as:

• Google's Keyword Planner.
• Ubersuggest.org.
• Using seed keywords in the Google search bar and seeing what pops up in the autocomplete.
• Google Trends (nothing sucks worse than to target a highly searched keyword for 3 months only to then figure out that its search volume has been on a rapid decline).
• Running an AdWords campaign with some broad and phrase match keywords.
• SEMrush is great for getting an idea of what competitors and similar websites are ranking for.
• FAQ Fox (great for finding questions people are searching in a niche).