Now, even though this website is focussed on online business, I still think we can learn a lot from “real” bricks-and-mortar businesses. (Yes, there, I said it: we online mavens can learn from the “old style” businesses too – not just the other way around).

Recently I read an interesting article about how the only pizza companies that seem to be making good business in bad times are NICHE pizzerias.

Heck, I wasn’t even aware there are such thigns.

[...]the fastest-growing chains in the heavily saturated pizza segment are ones with highly focused positioning.

[...]“The key to growth in the slow economy will be differentiation. Top players will have to understand the competition, successfully identify emerging trends, and find and execute a strong position in the market.”

Now, what they are saying there is just as true for online businesses, as it is for pizzerias obviously. According to the article “healthful and environmentally friendly” pizzas, and pizzas specially for the Hispanic market seem to be going strong.

You can read the full article here.

Randy from the Marketing Twins has published a very good article on the importance of targeting a specific group of people that you market to. He called it “What I Learned From Africa About Niche Marketing“.

I’ll take the freedom to quote part of it here:

Clarifying your niche market will not only ensure you get the best referrals, it will also keep you focused on where and how to spend your precious resources:  time and money.  When you have time to give or a dollar to spend on advertising, you can sift every decision through the lens of this question:  “does this effort help me reach my target market?”  Often times, we find ourselves justifying our expenditures simply because somewhere, somehow our target market might see this generic marketing effort targeted at no one.

This is so true – you will be able to achieve far more when you really focus your efforts. The difference is equal to cutting a piece of wood with a laser beam compared to trying to keep it out in the sun long enough so that it rots.

One thing about Market Samurai that I don’t like and that I would like to see improved is about the “find content” module. I love the find content module, it’s really great, but I think there is one button that is really missing. And that button is simply a export all. Yes, I know that there is analyze all button, but what I’m after often as not to analyze all of the content sources, but I want to get them all into one place, and right now I have to go to each of them in the tips of each of them manually by clicking on them and that can be quite tiresome. So I hope that in a future version of Market Samurai, there will be one single button that allows me to select also that I can have them all into one HTML file so that I have a nice compilation of all the content that I want to have. Because oftentimes I don’t really use the find content module the way they said, but I actually want to use it outside of Market Samurai. In order to do it right now, I have to find the URL and copy it.

I know the guys from Market Samurai could very easily do that, just the way they do it with the promotion module. I think they just don’t see the value in it yet, but I’ve contacted them and I hope that they will implement that idea. Because Market Samurai is great in many ways, but when it comes to browsing the Internet, I really have some issues with that, because it’s a lot slower, and it doesn’t allow me to use all the functions that I use with a normal browser. That would make this almost perfect piece of software even almost perfecter. Bring it a little bit closer to the state of perfection.

This is a common error message in Market Samurai, when it can’t retrieve SEOC (SEO Competition) and AWA data. Fortunately, there is an easily solution in most cases.

The program itself tells you to just try to push on the “Analyse Keywords” button, but that usually doesn’t help, because it just brings back the same error message.

This can cause a lot of frustration, because being able to view the SEO Competition so quickly is such an amazing feature, and definitely my mosed regularly used.

But here is what works in most cases. (This works up to Market Samurai 0.84.3, which is the version I use. It will probably also work with future versions, but it definitely works for 0.84.3).

Step 1: Just do your keyword research, and klick on “Analyze keywords” till you have all the data except for the SEOC SEO Competition. Then, click on File in the menu bar (upper left corner), and then settings. Then, click on the proxy tab. There, disable the “use inbuilt proxyservers”, and do not use ANY kind of proxyserver at all.

Then, save the settings, and click on “Analyse Keywords” again.

This time, you will also get the SEOC data.

Just remember to afterwards go back into your settings and enable the inbuilt proxies again.

Market Samurai is a very powerful keyword research tool that can gather HUGE amounts of data in very short amounts of time. Lots of the data it gets from Google.

Now, Google can see how much data you request at any given point from it – and if it things that you are requesting too much data at once, it will just “shut you down” so to speak, you will not be able to access data from Google because you have overdone it.

It’s kind of like asking someone so many questions and keep on nagging them till they say: “Enough!” And don’t talk to us anymore.

So, I know it’s tempting when you have a new niche research tool to to crazy and try out all kinds of keywords and markets, but take it easy at first, and really work focussed on specific projects. Otherwise Google will ban you temporarily. They will also “unban” you after a while, but it still is trouble.

That is why you can use proxy servers to protect you from being banned when using Market Samurai, but I’ll get into that at another point.

But one thing you can do right from the start to minimize the risk of getting banned is not work with more than 100 keywords. (so in the Keyword Research module, you filter it down until you have no more than 100 keywords that you then take to the SEO competition or so.

Before you decide whether or not you want to buy Market Samurai, check out my Market Samurai Review.

One of the first things I always do to check out the potential of a niche is to look for Google Advertisers.

If there are people bidding on niche-related keyword phrases, then that’s a good sign that there is some money in that market. If there are no sponsored ads, then that’s a good (or bad) sign, that there is no money in that market. And usually, the more advertisers there are in that market, the more profit potential it has.

Most people do it the slow way: they just type in the search phrase in Google and see if on the SERPs (search engine results pages) there are any ads showing up.

But not you anymore. Instead of going to www.google.com, you go to www.google.com/sponsoredlinks.

This is a search engine specially for AdWords ads. Just try it out. If you have previously been researching ads via the normal google search, you will find this special adwords search very useful, because it can save you a lot of time if you do a lot of research.

Now, if you don’t have a niche research tool, you have to do this by hand. But I really recommend that you check out my Market Samurai review, because I think it is a great piece of software for most online marketers.

The SEO Competition Module in Market Samurai is basically a tool that helps you to find out what you need to do in order to rank for any given keyword. It shows you which websites rank on Google’s front page for any given term, but it also gives you some additional information like PageRank, number of Backlinks, and so on. (see below for an overview of all the things it shows you)

It’s very useful, because after you have narrowed down keywords that might be worth going for with the Keyword Research window (for example because they have a low SEOC value and a high search volume and a good AWCPC value), here is where you really analyze those keywords and find out which ones are the easiest to go for.

The way you do that is that you use the SEO Competition module to look at the top 10 Google search results for any given keyword with Market Samurai.

When you look at the list of keywords, then pick the one you want to analyze first. Click on the little key symbol to the left of the keyword.

Or, if you already are in the SEO Competition window, then just click on the button that says “Generate results”.

The great thing is – if you really just want to analyze quickly which keywords are easiest to go after, then you can do so simply by looking at the colors green, orange and red. It’s SEO by numbers Green means: easy to compete against. Orange means: Will take a bit of work, but is doable. Red means: that is really hard to go against. Just like a traffic light.

But you still might want to look at the details that SEO Competition module gives you about each website that ranks on page 1 of Google.

Here’s what the SEO Competition module will show you about each website that is ranking for the keyword you want on page 1 of Google:

• DA – Domain Age – The age of a domain, according to the first registered date in WHOIS records.
• PR – PageRank – An indicator of the overall quantity and quality of links to a web-page, as determined by Google’s PageRank algorithm.
• BLP – Page Backlinks – The total number of links pointing to a web-page from outside of that web-site itself.
• BLD – Domain Backlinks – The total number of links pointing to an entire domain (whole web-site) from outside of that web-site itself.
• BLEG – Government / Education Page Backlinks – The total number of links pointing to a web-page from Government (.gov) and Educational (.edu) sources that are external to the web-site itself.
• DMZ – DMOZ Listing – Whether the site is listed in the Open Directory Project’s Directory.
• YAH – Yahoo! Listing – Whether the site is listed in the Yahoo! Directory

• Title – Keyword in Title Tags – Whether the web-page <title> tag contains the keyword.
• URL – Keyword in URL – Whether the web-page URL contains the keyword.
• Desc – Keyword in META Description – Whether the keyword appears in the <meta> “description” tag.
• Head – Keyword in Header Tags – Whether the keyword appears in <h1>, <h2>, <h3> etc. tags within the page content itself.
• CA – Google Cache Age – The number of days since Google last reindexed the page listed.

You noticed that I listed some of these purple, and some of these in black. The purple ones are off page factors, the black ones are on page factors. You can totally and very easily control the on page factors (except for the google cache age), of your own sites with very little effort, takes about 2 minutes. If the sites that show up on page 1 of the Google search results show lots of green in the on-page factors, then that means that you will probably be able to rank for that keyword. At least it will be easier than if there are lots of sites that are optimized specifically for that keyword phrase. (However, the off-page factors still matter a lot, but they take much more time, so we want to focus on the on-page factors because we can get results here fast).

Compare Your Own Site (Or Specific Competitor Sites)

You can also compare your own site, or a specific competitor site against the top 10 sites in Google, and thus get an easy idea what you can do to further optimize your own site and get higher rankings. This is very specific and useful information! It tells you exactly what the easiest thing is that you can do SEOwise to improve your rankings. This is pure gold!

(Yes, you could do that manually, but with Market Samurai, it takes a minute. Manually, it takes 30 minutes. If your time is worth even just $10 an hour – I think that’s about what you earn flipping burgers at BK? – then Market Samurai is already going to pay off for itself only for that point. But you can check my Market Samurai Review to really find out whether this niche software tool is for you or not)

Digging Even Deeper: Analyzing The Backlink QUALITY

Now, with backlinks it’s not only about numbers, but it’s also about quality. It’s better to have one quality backlink with relevant anchor text from a high PR website, than it is to have 100 backlinks with irrelevant anchor text from low PR sites.

For each website in the SEO Competition module, you can click on the small down arrow next to it on the right site, and then click on PR analysis, and/or Anchor text analysis. It will then show you how many of the backlinks to that page have a PR of 0, of 1, of 2 and so on. This info is again pure gold.

Again, this is also something that you could do manually – but it would take you hours, specially if a site has hundreds of backlinks. With Market Samurai, it’s a single mouseclick.

If you see that most of the backlinks to a webpage are actually low-pr backlinks, then you can beat them, because it’s quiet easy to get low-PR backlinks. (Just do some blog commenting, social bookmarketing, web2.0 sites and so on).

And if the links have relevant anchor text, then the links also have a higher value, and that makes it again a little bit more difficult to rank for them. But if the anchor text is irrelevant, or something like “click here”, then it’s again easier to beat them.

Before you decide whether you want to buy Market Samurai or not, please check out my Market Samurai Review.

Don’t just go for every keyword that has a low SEOC value in Market Samurai.

The SEOC score is really just a way of narrowing down a group of SEO terms that are worth analyzing further. Some keywords might have a low SEOC score (under 10,000), yet can still be highly competitive and difficult to rank for, become some people have really locked in their position in the Google Rankings. That’s why it’s important that once you located keywords with a low SEOC score you analyze them with the SEO Competition module in Market Samurai.

Because what really counts is the first page of Google – the sites that get displayed on page 1 of google. If you can’t go up against them, then there’s no need to waste your time trying to rank for that keyword, simply because even though the keyword has a low SEOC value, it still is difficult to rank for in Google.

So the process is:

1. Locate keywords that might be worth going for
2. Go over to the SEO Competition module so you can determine which ones are the easiest to rank for.

Read more about SEOC value.

Read more about SEO Competition.

If you are not sure whether MS is right for you, check out my Market Samurai Review.

Of course, the answer is (as always): it depends upon how much resources you have.

If you have a high-authority site, you can target higher SEOC numbers, but if you want to do small niche sites and get the “low-hanging-fruit”, the easy keywords, then you should look for values below 100,000.

Everything above 100,000 is an indicator that you will need to put in a serious amount of resources into ranking high for that search term in Google.

Less than 30,000 is good, and less than 10,000 is great.

Keywords that have a SEOC value of less than 10,000 are keywords that you should be able to grab easily. So if you are a beginning online marketer, and you don’t know a lot about SEO, or you simply don’t want to invest a lot in ranking for a specific term, then look for SEOC values below 10,000.

Read other posts about SEOC.

If you want to find out if MS is right for you, check out my Market Samurai Review.

Let’s look at the phrase-to-broad (PBR) option in Market Samurai, in the keyword research module.
This shows the percentage of phrase-match searches out of broad-match searches for any given keyword.
What does that mean and why do you need it?

It basically is a way of filtering out low quality, rubbish keywords.

For example, let’s say your niche market is online marketing, and you are looking for the term niche marketing.

You generate a list of keywords and then weed out the bad ones, so that you have a good, targeted list of quality keywords.

But some keywords with even a high search volume might be “rubbish” keywords that are in there for whatever reason.

For example: “marketing ebook niche how products to”.

Do you think that is a good keyword to optimize for?

Even if it would have a high search volume displayed in google, nobody talks like that.

You can set market samurai to kind of automatically filter out these weird phrases. You do so by determing the ratio between the phrase searches and the broad searches. A phrase search is a search where the searcher actually types in the words in the right order, the order of that given keyword phrase.

A broad match is a search where the searcher types in the keywords, but in a weird kind of order.

The Easy Answer:

Just set the PBR to 15. That’s what the creator of the software prefers and recommends in most cases. But if you are not sure and are afraid that you might miss out on some super-keyword, then just don’t use the PBR function at all.

If you aren’t sure whether MS is right for you, read my market samurai review.