Do SEO Tools Make You Lazy

I have been asked about SEO Tools many times in the past and whether they make you lazy in your marketing and SEO efforts…

As with anything you do, if you totally rely on these types of tools such as WordTracker, Keyword Elite, SEO Elite, Market Samurai and many others that are currently available online you will become very lazy as an affiliate marketer that relies on SEO.

However if you are going to be using these tools to get good at search engine optimization and have great search engine rankings then you need to know exactly what it is these SEO tools are doing so that you can understand how everything works when it comes to getting high search engine rankings.

When conducting any research with these tools you really need to be hands on so that you can go to that niche and see for yourself what is being listed as the number #1 website and why by understanding this will really give you a huge head start when it comes to competing against other sites in your niche.

Understanding Your Competition

Don’t get me wrong because with every new campaign I launch, I do use some type of tool to start the process, right now that is Market Samurai. This just gives me an overview and a guide into look for that profitable niche market, but I also do a lot of hands on work in the niche so that I can get my head around every aspect of the research and the competitiveness of the market.

One of the Tools that I use constantly and one that is totally free and can be found in Firefox web browser with a plugin called SEO For Firefox that give me enough information to get started into knowing how competitive a niche is.

Once you start to use these tools together with some hands on tactics that I will outline for you further on in this post you will see how you can get really involved into your niche and as you continue to do your research this way you will also become much faster at doing it.

So How Should You Target A New Niche Market

The very first step is to open up you Firefox web browser and go to the Google home page you will see right beside the search box some links Advanced search, preferences and language tools the one you want to click on is “PREFERENCES” this is where you are going to set your browser to view 100 results at a time. Doing this will give you a much bigger picture of what you are up against in the niche you are considering marketing in.

So what am I looking for in the first 100 results? I am trying to see how many of these sites have their homepage listed (TLD) opposed to an internal page of their site. If the top 30 sites are all TLD’s (top-level domains) then I probably wouldn’t pursue this market as it would take much longer to get a good listing as an affiliate.

However if many of the top sites were only internal pages and I have a registered a domain name with the keyword I was targeting in it I would not hesitate to enter this market and actually dominate it very quickly.

When solely relying on SEO Tools to do this work which they do you will not see a lot of this information which can lead to you wasting your valuable time in trying to break into a niche market.

How Can I Really Dig Down Into Niche Market Using Google Search…

There are some very simple but effective commands you can use in Google to find out allot more information about your competitors just by typing these commands into the search box.

1. site:www.domain.com
   This command will tell you how many pages of the site are actually indexed into Google, some say that this isn’t much use to you but if I am going after a niche I really don’t want to be competing against a site that has 500 relevant pages that they can use to knock me out of the rankings.
2. allintitle: Keyword Phrase
   Using this operator will tell you how many sites and pages are using this keyword or keyword phrase in the page title, so you get a very good idea as to how many websites are targeting this and what actual competition you can expect in the niche. You can also use this operator with quotes to dig even deeper into a niche market
3. Surrounding Your Keyword Or Keyword Phrase In Quotes example”affiliate marketing”
   Entering your keyword into the Google search box with quotes will give you a much bigger picture when looking into your selected niche. This operator will reveal to you all the websites that have this keyword or Phrase somewhere on their site. It can help to determine how hard a niche will be to dominate.
4. Inurl: Keyword or Phrase
   This is one operator I use a lot so that I can see how many websites actually have the keyword I want to target in their domain names. As you probably already know it is a very good idea to have your keyword or phrase in your domain name if possible.
5. Google Wonder Wheel (No Longer Available)
   This is a free tool provided by Google that allows you to see all the relevant terms that Google considers important in your niche.

Here is the next step where you can see the link to the Google Wonder Wheel (Google Wonder Wheel Is No Longer Available)

What you see listed above are some of the functions that some of these tools can perform for you, and yes I do use them to do this. But to get a much better understanding on the niche I am entering into it also pays to manually view everything yourself. Give them a try, and if you come across things you are not sure about post it here and I will help you find a solution.

So What Is My Conclusion?

If you are going to rely on SEO Tools totally and not do any hands on research then yes you are going to be a lazy marketer who overtime will be no wiser than you were when you started out online.

However if you are prepared to roll up your selves fire up your SEO tools and do the manual research as well you will end up having a degree in marketing that you can’t get anywhere else after all when its your time and money at stake you don’t have room for to many errors so you will learn fast.