Market Samurai Review

Summary

Market Samurai reviews can help you see what others like and dislike about a product.  Here is our comprehensive review  of their keyword analysis tool.  If you have any questions, feel free to submit them to us.  To make this review as honest and accurate as possible, we spent countless hours and days working with and testing out keyword analyzers, rank trackers, and other similar programs.  Throughout this time, we kept track of the positives, negatives, and capabilities of each.  As a result, we ended up choosing Market Samurai as it fit our overall needs better than all others we used.

Our favorite features

• Easy to learn and implement to fit your specific needs
• User-friendly interface with helpful tips/notes throughout
• Huge amount of functions, options, and capabilities
• Awesome training material/guides/videos and overall support
• Cut our research time down tremendously, time=$!
• It has helped change our lives and dramatically improve our online success

Areas for improvement

• Program runs slow at times and has frozen on us
• Data has seemed a bit inconsistent at times
• Could use live chat and/or phone # support

Ease of Use

Market Samurai was a bit confusing for us at first but it was mainly due to the fact that we weren’t familiar with their advanced filters and what they did.  However, they do a great job of inserting notes and tips for many items that ones would have questions for.  The Market Samurai tool and interface are user friendly, with a large left side menu (image below).  They also help explain what each tool can do to help you with your research.  For example, one of our favorite tools is the rank tracker.  It allows you to easily monitor different websites for specific keyword rankings.

Modules

Market Samurai comes with 9 modules which basically means 9 unique tools that can help you out.  Here is a screen shot of these modules:

So, what do each of them do?

1. Rank Tracker

This is one of our favorite tools.  The Market Samurai rank tracker lets you easily track your search engine rankings for specific keywords/phrases in Google, Yahoo! and Bing.  It also makes it easy to view graphs that track your progress, including your page ranks and total backlinks.  All you need to do is add your keywords and your domain’s index page URL.

2. Keyword Research

One of the most important tools, the keyword research module gives you estimates of a keywords traffic potential, total searches per day/week/month sorted by broad/phrase/exact.  It also shows how many URLs have the keyword in their title and so much more.  For example, you can quickly get insight on the competition for a keyword and the potential commercial value of them.

3. SEO Competition

Another favorite tool and one of the most important has been the SEO competition module.  This allows you to easily check and report key information and metrics regarding your competitors.  For example, you can view the top ten sites in Google for a keyword and see their domain age, page rank, # of indexed pages, # of backlinks to their home page and domain, if they are listed in DMOZ, Yahoo Directory, and more.

4. Domains

Domain Samurai is a nice and efficient way to research available domain names.  It will quickly show you what domains or similar URL’s are available to buy immediately.  This is a bit easier then trying to do the research yourself through Google and various sites.

5. Monetization

This module is a great tool for affiliate marketers or others that are trying to find ways to monetize and promote their website or blog. It has a product search tool for finding products to promote from some of the major affiliate directories such as Commission Junction.  It also comes with a helpful visual editor with templates to make it easier for you to publish content, create widgets, blog posts, and banners for promoting your products.  You can even manage your Adsense account through the monetization tool.

6. Find Content

If you want to find content or articles related to your keyword, the find content tool makes it easy.  It allows you to search various sites such as Ezine Articles to find related content for your specific keyword.   We don’t use this too often but it has helped us research and find helpful information.

7. Publish Content

This Market Samurai tool makes it possible to manage and post content to your site without leaving the program.  This could be helpful for some but we like to log in separately and do our work in the admin section of our sites.

8. Promotion

For many internet marketers, backlinks are one of the most important items for ranking well with search engines.  The promotion module makes this process much more manageable by letting you easily identify websites and forums related to your keyword.  Why is this so important?  This quick search now enables you to get RELEVANT backlinks without spending a ton of time finding places to participate in.  You can search web 2.0 sites such as Squidoo, blogs, forums, and more.  This tool gets a lot of use from us.

9. AdWords

According to Market Samurai states that this tool will help you target profitable sources of traffic, in turn helping your Adwords campaigns perform better.  We don’t use Adwords often so this module doesn’t get any use from us. However, it may be beneficial to those that use PPC campaigns often.

Speed of Use

Our biggest complaint about running Market Samurai is its speed.  We have realized that our laptops, being a few years old, can be held somewhat responsible for this.  According to the system requirements, we have less than the recommended processor speed which is likely the culprit.  Regardless, there have been times that the keyword research module and the rank tracker have slowed down considerably or even frozen on us.  When this happens, our project is usually saved when we re-open the program.  Lastly, the rank tracker can take a while but it is analyzing so much data that its understandable.  It is also dependent on your filters.

Market Samurai Dojo- Training & Support

Market Samurai tutorials, training, and support make the overall experience more pleasurable and is referred to as the dojo (Japanese for a place for training).  They do a great job of providing video tutorials, documentation, and support.  They make these highly visible and accessible through use of their emails, website, and links inside the program itself.  There is no live chat or phone numbers to reach out to them but they have responded to our questions relatively quickly. In addition, Market Samurai upgrades occur regularly to address any bugs or issues that arise.

When we were getting started, we watched every video and read almost all of their supporting documents and website pages.  After completing it, we felt like we just went through a full training.  It was nice that they also provide video transcripts for every lesson.  They do a good job of using scenarios and walking you through detailed steps in an understandable way.  Below are just some of the lessons they provide:

A Sample of Market Samurai Lessons

• Introduction to Keyword Research
• Golden Rule #1: How to Find Relevant Keywords
• Golden Rule #2: How to Find High Traffic Keywords
• Golden Rule #3: How to Assess Market Competition
• Golden Rule #4: How to Assess Commerciality
• Golden Rules Case Study
• Finding Long Tail Keywords
• Understanding Match Type Data
• How to Avoid Targeting the Wrong Keywords
• How to Generate up to 800 Keywords
• How to Signup for a Google Adwords Account
• How to Use Preset Filters
• Introduction To SEO Competition
• How to Assess the Strength of Competition
• How To Gain a Competitive Advantage
• How To Unmask Your Google Competition
• Your guide to Domain Samurai
• Introduction to Monetization
• How To Register With Affiliate Directories
• How To Find Products & Assess Market Viability
• How To Write A Compelling Ad In Minutes
• How To Publish An Ad To Your Website
• How to Sign Up for the Google Adsense Program
• How To Replace Your Affiliate Offer With Dynamic Ads
• How To Use Bit.ly To Track Your Affiliate Click Through Rate
• How To Use The Pretty Link Plugin To Track Your Affiliate Click Through Rate
• How To Create Trackable Affiliate Links Using WordPress Direct

Effectiveness

When used correctly and diligently, Market Samurai is one of the most effective tools that we have invested in.  Programs like Google’s Keyword Tool provide good data for free but you are very limited on how you can analyze that data.  We’ve been using Market Samurai for a long time and are still learning new ways to use it.  One thing is for certain though, once we started using the program our online income immediately began to improve.  We still make mistakes and overlook some things at times, but this tool opened our eyes and enabled us to succeed.  Could other tools and programs out there have done the same?  Perhaps.  However, we thoroughly tested others and were sold on the overall potential Market Samurai has.  We paid $97 by signing up before the trial ended and recovered that investment back in two months.  This doesn’t factor in the days and months that it has saved us by cutting our research time down tremendously.  Since then, it has not only made us money but it has helped teach us invaluable lessons.