Seo tools, market samurai, long tail pro, screaming frog, etc.

[gnojham]

preface: i dont know what im doing. would be obvious if you read my posts, but i figure i could announce it anyway. be gentle on me.

 

so, i was reading wedreamseo's thread: http://spartanmarketingacademy.com/forums/topic/676-this-is-how-i-do-kw-research-once-i-identified-a-niche/

 

at some point in the not so distant past, i was messing around with a free trial version of market samurai. from what i remember, it seems the early work he talks about here could have been accomplished quicker with a tool like market samurai?

whats the difference between what he did manually and what ms would do for you?

i see mixed reviews on ms, but it seems the people that know what theyre doing dismiss it as garbage. i did see one guy that seemed to know what he was doing say he used it when he was new and then stopped using it when he knew what he was doing. 

so if anybody wants to chime in, is ms garbage? awesome? or is it like training wheels on a bike, you use it until you know what youre doing and then stop using it? i think it could be had for about $50 or so, and if it is a decent learning tool, i have wasted way more than $50 in my life.

 

as a bonus, feel free to chime in on long tail pro and other such tools. screaming frog, whatever.

 

thanks in advance

 

full disclosure, when i first got to wf, i made a similar type of thread, but i dont want to go back there, and i want the straight dope from the rock stars here.

[Mike Friedman]

I put my thoughts on Market Samurai here.

 

http://spartanmarketingacademy.com/forums/topic/540-marketing-tools-to-avoid/

[gnojham]

I put my thoughts on Market Samurai here.

 

http://spartanmarketingacademy.com/forums/topic/540-marketing-tools-to-avoid/

looks like you were on the fence about it

the only part of that i noticed myself was how slow it was. crazy slow. 

thanks sir

[gnojham]

i didnt know there was a product review forum, shall we delete this thread?

[Mike Friedman]

I'll just move it there. No big deal.

[wedreamseo]

Longtail Pro is great if you like to enter captchas every 5 seconds.

[wedreamseo]

preface: i dont know what im doing. would be obvious if you read my posts, but i figure i could announce it anyway. be gentle on me.

 

so, i was reading wedreamseo's thread: http://spartanmarketingacademy.com/forums/topic/676-this-is-how-i-do-kw-research-once-i-identified-a-niche/

 

at some point in the not so distant past, i was messing around with a free trial version of market samurai. from what i remember, it seems the early work he talks about here could have been accomplished quicker with a tool like market samurai?

whats the difference between what he did manually and what ms would do for you?

 

Well I just upgraded my Longtail Pro version and downloaded keywords for one of my main keywords: best lawnmower, lawnmower reviews, added the filters that I put in the keyword planner as well and guess what? I got the exact same keywords as Adwords provided me.

 

Now Longtail Pro has one extra function and that is to check intitle: , woohoee that made my day.

 

To see if I could get any value from Longtail Pro I decided to copy the keyword list that they pulled as source keywords, just to get some more, and that resulted in entering a captcha every few seconds.

 

I think Longtail Pro has zero value as it provides the exact same as keyword planner does. In Googles keyword planner you at least have an option to also include less relevant keywords (which sometimes provides interesting side keywords), I didn't find an option to do that in LongtailPro,

 

Haven't used Market Samurai in years so no opinion on that. 

 

Longtail Pro "Platinum Edition" requires you to click a button named Calculate KC (keyword competition) and then it starts loading and provides a % that you have to take with a large grain of salt, instead you can enter the kw in Google with the moz bar enabled which is faster and more accurate. Unless Longtail Pro comes with an option to calculate KC for a bulk amount of keywords, to do some prefiltering, I wouldn't waste my time on it.

 

One more thing, Longtail pro doesn't seem to allow for blacklist keywords anymore, eg keywords that you don't want in your list, Googles keyword planner does provide that, which is easy when you search for flat iron and you don't want to get the flat iron steak results or when you search for slow cooker and you don't want the kw's with recipes or how/what type of queries.

 

All togehter I find it a worthless tool, a tool that provides the same a the keyword planner but than less, and in a different format then the keyword planner does, so less data presented in a different way. I don't see the benefit in that.

[gnojham]

Thanks guys for the input. Any thoughts on screaming frog?

I'm actually not looking for a miracle tool,just something that would be helpful to a noob like me that would compliment Google keyword planner

thanks again

[Mike Friedman]

Screaming Frog is awesome.

[gnojham]

Screaming Frog is awesome.

hmm, thanks. care to expand a bit?

[Mike Friedman]

If what Screaming Frog does is useful to you, it is awesome. I probably should have said that.

 

It is great for pulling a lot of data about onpage SEO factors for a website, identifying problems, and basically doing a site audit.

 

Now if you are not doing those sorts of things frequently (or ever), you probably would not find it useful. It is not a magic SEO button or anything like that. 

[gnojham]

If what Screaming Frog does is useful to you, it is awesome. I probably should have said that.

 

It is great for pulling a lot of data about onpage SEO factors for a website, identifying problems, and basically doing a site audit.

 

Now if you are not doing those sorts of things frequently (or ever), you probably would not find it useful. It is not a magic SEO button or anything like that. 

so far all i can understand in it is h1/h2 tags, and titles. 

[Mike Friedman]

Then it is probably not something that you need all that much at this stage. If you are building simple, small sites, you really do not need it at all. If you are expanding to larger sites, want to analyze larger sites out there, or are doing client based SEO, then it is a much more useful tool.

[gnojham]

Then it is probably not something that you need all that much at this stage. If you are building simple, small sites, you really do not need it at all. If you are expanding to larger sites, want to analyze larger sites out there, or are doing client based SEO, then it is a much more useful tool.

well, the end goal is to be making sites and trying to compete,whether it be for myself or a client.