Market Samurai Review
Dylan of Way of the Olympian was looking for information on Market Samurai earlier. I have been using Market Samurai for a while, and sent him an email with the basic pros and cons. I figured seeing as I hadn’t thought of a better topic of the day, I’d review the software here right now.
Market Samurai is a pretty feature-rich keyword research program, (and much more.) I’ll tell you all about it and how and why it works in this article.
What is Market Samurai?
Market Samurai is a feature-rich keyword research, website competition and all-kinds-of-other-wizardry tool that’ll give you a ton of data about keywords to target for your website and other things you’ll want when starting your site.
To do keyword research effectively without spending any money, you’ll need to use Keyword Planner which is not-so-fun, you’ll also need various browser extensions and knowledge of how to use Boolean operators in your web searches. Market Samurai saves you from doing all that by grabbing all the relevant information from a ton of sources and delivering to you on a single screen with a couple of keywords. It also allows you to select various parameters and filter your results. On the competition screen, it even colours the results so you know what’s easy and what’s difficult to compete with. Handy and time saving. Those are the benefits in a nutshell. It saves time, makes things easier and gives you comprehensive data so that you can make a more-than informed decision about your market.
The not so great thing I’ve found with Market Samurai is that the benefit above – that it takes info from a lot of sources – is also sometimes a detriment. Market Samurai’s development team is a bit slow, and their software is a complicated piece of kit that has to grab a lot of data from a lot of sources. This tends to mean that when one of those sources changes, Market Samurai will have periods where it returns inaccurate – or no – data. These issues always get resolved, but a small development team can only do so much.
That said, they always fix their issues, and you can find workarounds for a lot of these issues within the software. If you use a “Keep It Simple” mentality with your keyword research, i.e. Get in, find keywords, get out, then you won’t have any problems.
An Honest Market Samurai Review: Should You Get Market Samurai?
(Or any other SEO tool, for that matter)
You don’t need a paid keyword research tool to find keywords. You don’t even really need to concentrate on keywords to succeed online. If you provide good, relevant content to a niche that wants content, then you’ll probably succeed.
So why worry about keywords at all?
Because keyword research means you’ve got a better chance of a) writing content that’s relevant to your market, and b) you’ll make it easier for your market of readers to find you.
With that in mind, should you get a paid keyword research tool? Yes and no.
Google keyword planner tool works fine. You can find keywords to target, get all the relevant data, so on and so forth. There’s more than you need. It’s the same with Market Samurai – you get tons of data. More than you need.
However, the reason you’d get Market Samurai over trying to use the Keyword Planner is that the Keyword Planner was basically designed by a robot… for robots. I may or may not be making that up, but it’s what it feels like. (All of Google’s interfaces are like this. I’m trying to learn about Adwords campaigns right now… it’s a nightmare.)
Market Samurai is well laid out, it’s easy to use in that everything is where you’d want it to be, and everything you’d need in terms of data is a couple of clicks away.
A related benefit is that checking the competition strength for a keyword is also just a click away. If you were going with a free option like Keyword Planner, you’d need an added extra like the Moz Toolbar or some other browser extension. Again – you can do this, but if you’re building websites frequently, then having one bit of kit to do it with is better than having five different options.
How To Tell Whether You Should Buy ANY SEO/Internet Marketing Software
The above is a key point. You can do stuff with free software. If you only intend to create one website ever and you’re not really trying to get many visitors, then don’t spend money on software you don’t need.
If you’re thinking of creating a hundred websites and getting massive traffic and targeting hundreds of long-tail keywords, then get software that will help you do that. Only get what you think you’ll need.
If you’re constantly building your sites and trying out new business stuff, then you’ll soon hit a wall. You’ll find that basic tasks take too much time. You’ll find that free software doesn’t give you everything you need. Or, you’ll find that you’re simply demanding too much of your limited software. That is when you should upgrade – and you’ll know whether you need something based on whether it fulfils the needs you have at the time.
I’ve seen people recommend alternatives to Market Samurai like SEMRush, but bearing the above philosophy in mind, you don’t really want to be spending $70+ per month on keyword research tools unless you know you need them.
Final Thoughts: Using Market Samurai Without Paying
This is a review that isn’t really a review. It’s more an article on how to think about buying things for your business. If you need them, then get them. If you don’t, then expand your business until you do need them, and then you’ll know what to buy and when you need to buy it.
That said, if you’re on the fence about buying Market Samurai, then you should try before you buy. One of the best things about Market Samurai is that they’ve got a free trial with all the features available. The length that this lasts changes over time. At the moment, it’s a twelve day trial. There’s no credit card signup for this or sneaky charge if you don’t cancel. Simply put in your email and name, and you’ll get access to the whole program for twelve days and then the premium features stop working after that (unless you order.) your keyword research will still work after the trial though, so if you only want that feature, it’s good news.
Sign up and try Market Samurai now, risk free.
P.S.You’ll also get access to training materials and even a set of best-use emails telling you how to do keyword research. For the price of an email signup and with a $149 piece of software practically free, these are well worth it. Sign up for those emails and the free software here.