Market Samurai Review: Can It Help You Slice Through the SERP Competition?
There’s more to samurai than meets the eye.
They’re not just hired swords ordered to do the bidding of their masters.
What truly separates them from other warriors is their discipline.
Through their strict observance of the Bushido code, which dictates the virtues and characteristics of a samurai, they’re held in high regard as some of history’s noblest warriors.
The same can be said for powerful SEOs.
There’s a fine line that divides the good SEO from spammers—and that line is discipline. Do you have the discipline that it takes to be an SEO samurai?
How to Become an SEO Samurai
Having a disciplined, organized approach to keyword research is what you’ll need to beat your competition in the SERPs.
You’ll need to have serious standards for which keywords you choose to use. You can’t accept any old keyword to optimize your content. You want to target valuable, high-traffic keywords that people search for often to increase your chances of getting found.
The manual process of searching for these types of keywords can be laborious, so you’ll need to develop a slick, smart approach to this. Remember, the SEO samurai does everything with style—no bumbling around on Google Keyword Planner for countless days, unsure of which keywords are right.
Free tools are often not enough, in this case. Samurai need sharp, well-made swords—and you need a sharp, well-made SEO tool that points out the low-hanging fruit, low-competition and longtail keywords, thus making it easier for you to slip into the rankings.
You’ll want a keyword tool that will let you research your competition, learn their strengths and weaknesses, and pierce through their armor.
To achieve this quality of keyword research, the tool you’re looking for might be Market Samurai.
What Is Market Samurai?
Market Samurai is a desktop-based keyword tool that lets you find the best keywords for your content. It lets you compare and contrast keywords by every important characteristic you might need.
Aside from being a keyword tool, Market Samurai helps you build niche sites based on your chosen keyword. The tool helps you find domains to purchase so you can maximize your monetization strategy. It also enables you to search for articles you can republish on your niche site and promote it on appropriate channels to increase your traffic.
Market Samurai is a product of Noble Samurai, an organization based in Australia that develops B2B apps.
Market Samurai Review: Can It Help You Slice Through the SERP Competition?
How to Get Started with Market Samurai
To start, you simply fill out a form with your name and email address to secure a limited copy of Market Samurai.
You’ll receive an email with a link where you can download the file. Before installing, you’ll need the latest version of Adobe Air. Once installed, you’ll need to enter the email address and registration key provided in the email.
Once you’re all set up, you’ll be brought to the tool’s Project Settings. Enter the project name, and the New Keyword tab will open to show you the different features that Market Samurai offers.
The Best Features of Market Samurai
Keyword Research
To search for keywords for your first project, click on the Keyword Research button and search a term of interest to generate keywords based on that one seed keyword.
You can add more keywords to be analyzed by the tool, as well as positive and negative keywords that the tool needs to be mindful of. Once you’ve settled on your keyword list, click the Generate Keywords button.
The tool will then show the keywords it has gathered for you. To understand which of the keywords you should target, click on the Keyword Analysis button.
The next page will show you the different metrics that will help determine which keyword you should target for. The data for the metrics aren’t available yet at this point.
You’ll need to click on the Analyze Keyword button first to collect and gather the metrics. The results will take time, depending on the number of metrics whose data you want to gather.
You can analyze the keywords based on organic and basic competition, There are also keyword metrics drawn from Majestic SEO if you want to parse data using a reliable third-party tool.
Personally, I would focus on SEOTCR—SEO Title Competition to SEO Competition Ratio—since the goal is to focus on keywords with low competition. When you pounce on gaps left behind by the competition, you can rank higher in search results and generate more organic traffic.
Find and Choose Domains
If you want to use the keywords to create niche sites, click on Get Domains.
Using your Seed Keywords, you can filter the results based on domain variations, TLD and other domain filters to refine your search. Click on Find Domains to show the available domains.
The results will show you relevant domains available for purchase.
This basically adds words to the seed keywords and uses different domain extensions to create new domains, and then it sees which of the generated domains are available for purchase.
Each domain is presented with its keyword density—the higher the score, the better optimized the domain is for search engines.
SEO Competition
The SEO Competition feature lets you analyze web pages that rank for your project’s keywords. It analyzes each site based on metrics from Majestic.
The Trust Flow metric is currently one of the most reliable bits of SEO data to determine a site’s authority, but there’s plenty more to look at here. The depth of information makes this feature one of Market Samurai’s best.
Once you click on Generate Results, you’ll have to wait for a moment for the tool to gather the data for your review.
The results will show the first 10 organic search results from Google. You’ll learn so much more about your competition this way, as opposed to just searching and peeking at each web page.
If you’re the kind of SEO who digs into the metrics of each individual page that’s ranking for a keyword, then this will save you a ridiculous amount of time.
You’ll know that the keyword has low competition if result boxes for each metric are in green. That’s when you have the perfect opportunity to strike. Red means that the SEO metrics for the sites is solid and the SERPs are very competitive.
In the screencap above, you’ll notice that almost all of the result boxes are in red. It means that the keyword is very competitive and it would be difficult for you to crack the first page of Google. Therefore, you’ll want to analyze a different keyword until you find the least competitive one to work with.
Monetization
The remaining features of Market Samurai are a boon for affiliate marketers and niche marketers, or anyone who has a source of income from the affiliate products they sell on their website or blog.
The Monetization feature lets you find products to promote from affiliate sites like Amazon, Clickbank and others, so you can earn money from your site.
Upon choosing an affiliate product to promote, you can create content in Market Samurai and even build a banner ad that you can publish straight to your blog’s sidebar.
You can also generate dynamic ads within this feature using Google Adsense, Amazon Omakase and others.
Find Content
The Find Content feature lets you scour the web for content related to your seed keyword that you can republish on your blog or site.
It draws sources from web 2.0 sites, forums, Q&A sites and others to help you find the most relevant content.
You can analyze each content for the number of times your seed keyword has been mentioned in the post to ensure that the content is relevant enough to be republished.
Publish Content
If you want to publish content straight from Market Samurai, then the Publish Content feature lets you do exactly that. It’s great to be able to keep more of your work in one place.
This simple feature could really help simplify your publishing process, especially after you’ve just come fresh off of researching your target keywords, filtering the results and choosing the best options.
Promotion
Once you’ve got your content published online, you’ll want to start checking how it performs and keeping track of your results. Market Samurai allows you to do both of these things with its Keyword Rank Tracking and Promotion tools.
The rank tracking is what you’d expect, but the Promotion feature goes a step further—it’ll help you build and track backlinks to your published content.
Though, if you’re more serious about link-building and backlink monitoring, you might want to invest in an additional, more specialized, rigorous backlink tool like Monitor Backlinks.
Even the Monitor Backlinks Free Backlink Checker will help you dig up more information on your backlinks and any competitor’s backlinks, if you don’t want to spend any extra cash but need solid backlink info.
The Promotion feature of Market Samurai is really just a nice bonus to have on top of all the research, content creation and publishing tools, and great for casual backlink checking.
Market Samurai Plans and Pricing
Market Samurai is one of the more affordable keyword tools on the market.
Unlike other tools that require you to sign up for a monthly subscription, the tool only asks you to make a one-time payment of $97. This lower price is only available for a limited time, though.
One week later, the tool raises its price to $147, so the trick is to take advantage of the free trial and then jump on the lower price when it’s offered to you.
Pros of Market Samurai
As mentioned earlier, it’s one of the cheapest keyword research tools available. You won’t be bogged down by monthly payments since Market Samurai has a one-time payment deal, and the one-time payment is pretty affordable compared to other subscription-based keyword tools.
Given the surprising amount of features available for this price, Market Samurai is perfect for niche marketers looking for an all-inclusive tool to run research on their keywords and competition, as well as affiliate products to promote on their blog.
Cons
The Keyword Research feature is a bit of a mess. It starts off simple and intuitive. However, loading the data for the metrics can take time and it’s difficult for users to determine which metric they should focus on from the get-go. I understand that the wealth of metrics allows you to effectively filter out which keywords to target. However, some of the metrics featured won’t be as useful compared to others. It would have been better to cut down the metrics to the bare essentials, making it easier to use and allowing for better loading times.
Some of the features such as Find Content and Domains don’t provide enough value to be included in the tool. Today’s SEO landscape requires you to create unique and valuable content on your respective sites. Therefore, there’s little point to republishing content from third-party sites when you should be focusing on creating high-quality content that you can call your own.
Also, the domain name suggestions aren’t terribly unique or helpful—there are free tools like NameMesh.com and Lean Domain Search that provide more useful suggestions, in my opinion.
Final Thoughts on Market Samurai
Market Samurai is more than just a keyword tool. It offers a ton of varied features that will help niche and affiliate marketers build a profitable website based on the tool’s suggestions.
However, the number of features available in a tool isn’t indicative of how useful the tool is.
The SEO Competition and Monetization features are interesting and useful enough to give this tool a shot. But at the end of the day, if you’re looking for better data, UX and features, you may want to look elsewhere.
If you’re looking for a sharp research tool with good insights on the cheap, this is the right tool. Ultimately, if you’re not working on a really tight budget, there are better alternatives for your keyword and marketing needs than Market Samurai.
Wait a Sec, We Have Something for You!
Remember the Monitor Backlinks tool we mentioned earlier?
CoSpot readers can now receive a free trial of the Monitor Backlinks SEO tool.
It offers an excellent keyword rank tracker and backlink management tool, plus complete reports of your site’s SEO performance.
Oh, and if you decide you love this reporting tool, you’ll be happy to see that the plan pricing is pretty awesome too.
Take advantage of the free trials for both Market Samurai and Monitor Backlinks, compare and contrast, and see which one is a better fit for your needs.
My guess is: If SEO metrics are very important to you, Monitor Backlinks will be the ideal tool for you. If you’re looking for more of a generalist tool that captures a wide variety of data but doesn’t dig quite so deep, Raven Tools might be right.
Market Samurai Review: Can It Help You Slice Through the SERP Competition?
There’s more to samurai than meets the eye.
They’re not just hired swords ordered to do the bidding of their masters.
What truly separates them from other warriors is their discipline.
Through their strict observance of the Bushido code, which dictates the virtues and characteristics of a samurai, they’re held in high regard as some of history’s noblest warriors.
The same can be said for powerful SEOs.
There’s a fine line that divides the good SEO from spammers—and that line is discipline. Do you have the discipline that it takes to be an SEO samurai?
How to Become an SEO Samurai
Having a disciplined, organized approach to keyword research is what you’ll need to beat your competition in the SERPs.
You’ll need to have serious standards for which keywords you choose to use. You can’t accept any old keyword to optimize your content. You want to target valuable, high-traffic keywords that people search for often to increase your chances of getting found.
The manual process of searching for these types of keywords can be laborious, so you’ll need to develop a slick, smart approach to this. Remember, the SEO samurai does everything with style—no bumbling around on Google Keyword Planner for countless days, unsure of which keywords are right.
Free tools are often not enough, in this case. Samurai need sharp, well-made swords—and you need a sharp, well-made SEO tool that points out the low-hanging fruit, low-competition and longtail keywords, thus making it easier for you to slip into the rankings.
You’ll want a keyword tool that will let you research your competition, learn their strengths and weaknesses, and pierce through their armor.
To achieve this quality of keyword research, the tool you’re looking for might be Market Samurai.
What Is Market Samurai?
Market Samurai is a desktop-based keyword tool that lets you find the best keywords for your content. It lets you compare and contrast keywords by every important characteristic you might need.
Aside from being a keyword tool, Market Samurai helps you build niche sites based on your chosen keyword. The tool helps you find domains to purchase so you can maximize your monetization strategy. It also enables you to search for articles you can republish on your niche site and promote it on appropriate channels to increase your traffic.
Market Samurai is a product of Noble Samurai, an organization based in Australia that develops B2B apps.
Market Samurai Review: Can It Help You Slice Through the SERP Competition?
How to Get Started with Market Samurai
To start, you simply fill out a form with your name and email address to secure a limited copy of Market Samurai.
You’ll receive an email with a link where you can download the file. Before installing, you’ll need the latest version of Adobe Air. Once installed, you’ll need to enter the email address and registration key provided in the email.
Once you’re all set up, you’ll be brought to the tool’s Project Settings. Enter the project name, and the New Keyword tab will open to show you the different features that Market Samurai offers.
The Best Features of Market Samurai
Keyword Research
To search for keywords for your first project, click on the Keyword Research button and search a term of interest to generate keywords based on that one seed keyword.
You can add more keywords to be analyzed by the tool, as well as positive and negative keywords that the tool needs to be mindful of. Once you’ve settled on your keyword list, click the Generate Keywords button.
The tool will then show the keywords it has gathered for you. To understand which of the keywords you should target, click on the Keyword Analysis button.
The next page will show you the different metrics that will help determine which keyword you should target for. The data for the metrics aren’t available yet at this point.
You’ll need to click on the Analyze Keyword button first to collect and gather the metrics. The results will take time, depending on the number of metrics whose data you want to gather.
You can analyze the keywords based on organic and basic competition, There are also keyword metrics drawn from Majestic SEO if you want to parse data using a reliable third-party tool.
Personally, I would focus on SEOTCR—SEO Title Competition to SEO Competition Ratio—since the goal is to focus on keywords with low competition. When you pounce on gaps left behind by the competition, you can rank higher in search results and generate more organic traffic.
Find and Choose Domains
If you want to use the keywords to create niche sites, click on Get Domains.
Using your Seed Keywords, you can filter the results based on domain variations, TLD and other domain filters to refine your search. Click on Find Domains to show the available domains.
The results will show you relevant domains available for purchase.
This basically adds words to the seed keywords and uses different domain extensions to create new domains, and then it sees which of the generated domains are available for purchase.
Each domain is presented with its keyword density—the higher the score, the better optimized the domain is for search engines.
SEO Competition
The SEO Competition feature lets you analyze web pages that rank for your project’s keywords. It analyzes each site based on metrics from Majestic.
The Trust Flow metric is currently one of the most reliable bits of SEO data to determine a site’s authority, but there’s plenty more to look at here. The depth of information makes this feature one of Market Samurai’s best.
Once you click on Generate Results, you’ll have to wait for a moment for the tool to gather the data for your review.
The results will show the first 10 organic search results from Google. You’ll learn so much more about your competition this way, as opposed to just searching and peeking at each web page.
If you’re the kind of SEO who digs into the metrics of each individual page that’s ranking for a keyword, then this will save you a ridiculous amount of time.
You’ll know that the keyword has low competition if result boxes for each metric are in green. That’s when you have the perfect opportunity to strike. Red means that the SEO metrics for the sites is solid and the SERPs are very competitive.
In the screencap above, you’ll notice that almost all of the result boxes are in red. It means that the keyword is very competitive and it would be difficult for you to crack the first page of Google. Therefore, you’ll want to analyze a different keyword until you find the least competitive one to work with.
Monetization
The remaining features of Market Samurai are a boon for affiliate marketers and niche marketers, or anyone who has a source of income from the affiliate products they sell on their website or blog.
The Monetization feature lets you find products to promote from affiliate sites like Amazon, Clickbank and others, so you can earn money from your site.
Upon choosing an affiliate product to promote, you can create content in Market Samurai and even build a banner ad that you can publish straight to your blog’s sidebar.
You can also generate dynamic ads within this feature using Google Adsense, Amazon Omakase and others.
Find Content
The Find Content feature lets you scour the web for content related to your seed keyword that you can republish on your blog or site.
It draws sources from web 2.0 sites, forums, Q&A sites and others to help you find the most relevant content.
You can analyze each content for the number of times your seed keyword has been mentioned in the post to ensure that the content is relevant enough to be republished.
Publish Content
If you want to publish content straight from Market Samurai, then the Publish Content feature lets you do exactly that. It’s great to be able to keep more of your work in one place.
This simple feature could really help simplify your publishing process, especially after you’ve just come fresh off of researching your target keywords, filtering the results and choosing the best options.
Promotion
Once you’ve got your content published online, you’ll want to start checking how it performs and keeping track of your results. Market Samurai allows you to do both of these things with its Keyword Rank Tracking and Promotion tools.
The rank tracking is what you’d expect, but the Promotion feature goes a step further—it’ll help you build and track backlinks to your published content.
Though, if you’re more serious about link-building and backlink monitoring, you might want to invest in an additional, more specialized, rigorous backlink tool like Monitor Backlinks.
Even the Monitor Backlinks Free Backlink Checker will help you dig up more information on your backlinks and any competitor’s backlinks, if you don’t want to spend any extra cash but need solid backlink info.
The Promotion feature of Market Samurai is really just a nice bonus to have on top of all the research, content creation and publishing tools, and great for casual backlink checking.
Market Samurai Plans and Pricing
Market Samurai is one of the more affordable keyword tools on the market.
Unlike other tools that require you to sign up for a monthly subscription, the tool only asks you to make a one-time payment of $97. This lower price is only available for a limited time, though.
One week later, the tool raises its price to $147, so the trick is to take advantage of the free trial and then jump on the lower price when it’s offered to you.
Pros of Market Samurai
As mentioned earlier, it’s one of the cheapest keyword research tools available. You won’t be bogged down by monthly payments since Market Samurai has a one-time payment deal, and the one-time payment is pretty affordable compared to other subscription-based keyword tools.
Given the surprising amount of features available for this price, Market Samurai is perfect for niche marketers looking for an all-inclusive tool to run research on their keywords and competition, as well as affiliate products to promote on their blog.
Cons
The Keyword Research feature is a bit of a mess. It starts off simple and intuitive. However, loading the data for the metrics can take time and it’s difficult for users to determine which metric they should focus on from the get-go. I understand that the wealth of metrics allows you to effectively filter out which keywords to target. However, some of the metrics featured won’t be as useful compared to others. It would have been better to cut down the metrics to the bare essentials, making it easier to use and allowing for better loading times.
Some of the features such as Find Content and Domains don’t provide enough value to be included in the tool. Today’s SEO landscape requires you to create unique and valuable content on your respective sites. Therefore, there’s little point to republishing content from third-party sites when you should be focusing on creating high-quality content that you can call your own.
Also, the domain name suggestions aren’t terribly unique or helpful—there are free tools like NameMesh.com and Lean Domain Search that provide more useful suggestions, in my opinion.
Final Thoughts on Market Samurai
Market Samurai is more than just a keyword tool. It offers a ton of varied features that will help niche and affiliate marketers build a profitable website based on the tool’s suggestions.
However, the number of features available in a tool isn’t indicative of how useful the tool is.
The SEO Competition and Monetization features are interesting and useful enough to give this tool a shot. But at the end of the day, if you’re looking for better data, UX and features, you may want to look elsewhere.
If you’re looking for a sharp research tool with good insights on the cheap, this is the right tool. Ultimately, if you’re not working on a really tight budget, there are better alternatives for your keyword and marketing needs than Market Samurai.
Wait a Sec, We Have Something for You!
Remember the Monitor Backlinks tool we mentioned earlier?
CoSpot readers can now receive a free trial of the Monitor Backlinks SEO tool.
It offers an excellent keyword rank tracker and backlink management tool, plus complete reports of your site’s SEO performance.
Oh, and if you decide you love this reporting tool, you’ll be happy to see that the plan pricing is pretty awesome too.
Take advantage of the free trials for both Market Samurai and Monitor Backlinks, compare and contrast, and see which one is a better fit for your needs.
My guess is: If SEO metrics are very important to you, Monitor Backlinks will be the ideal tool for you. If you’re looking for more of a generalist tool that captures a wide variety of data but doesn’t dig quite so deep, Raven Tools might be right.
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