Art Of Money

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Okay here goes. I’ve had Keyword Elite for over a month now and it’s time to share my thoughts.

First thing is, whether it’s Keyword Elite or some other similar program or service, if you do keyword research as part of your business, you should have a professional tool. Previous to purchasing Keyword Elite [KE - to save me typing it 25 more times] I used NicheBot or the free versions of Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery. But I have seen that having a pro tool is well worth the investment.

KE has five different projects or ways to gather data. I’ll give a brief rundown of them all, but basically as someone who creates niche sites, I really only use the first two. If you were into buying Adwords though, I’m sure the others would be very useful.

Keyword Elite Project #1 = Create A Keyword List

Project one is the starting point for my keyword research using Keyword Elite. Here I enter the keyword phrase that I’m exploring and enter the number of results that I would like. The starting point is 100 and the slider goes up to 10,000 in case you really want to go deep into your niche.

Project one will also integrate with a Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery [KD Enterprise Edition Only] accounts, but I don’t really find that you’ll gain much by adding these paid services to what you’re already getting from Keyword Elite.

Project one returns awesome vast and somewhat rough keyword lists. The thing that I love the most about them is that it does what no other keyword tool that I’ve found can do: it searches for what you mean, not just literally just what you type into the box. For example if you enter ‘cars’, you don’t just get every permutation of the word cars, you also get autos, vehicles, Ford, GM, and transportation etc. For me this is a huge brain and time saver. I now don’t have to try and guess all the related terms to my primary phrase.

The downside of this type of semantic guessing is that sometimes it is wrong. So you’ll end up with things like car loans, which is good but then from there you’ll get home loans as the program branches out to try and cover all the basis. No fear though because project one comes with a great keyword list cleaning tool that you can use to filter out words. So just tell it to remove all phrases that have the word ‘home’ in it and presto, no more home loan phrases. You can also filter out unwanted symbols and phrases over a certain length…so it’s easy to remove nonsense stuff like ‘cars auto loan loan car rental new york’ from your lists.

Keyword Elite Project #2 = Analyze Pay Per Click Listings

Project number 2 is the other KE project that I use a lot. Basically you take the Keyword list from project one and slam it into project 2 and KE will go through each phrase and return to you all the information you have checked for each term on the list. This one is very useful as you can tell which phrases are popular and how much a click for that phrase is worth and a rough guide of how much competition there is for the phrase. If you click the image to the right you’ll get an idea of what the result of project 2 is.
Keyword Elite Project #3

Project 3 is for choosing one of the many pre-built keyword lists that come with Keyword Elite. There are a lot of them, but personally I haven’t used it, so I’m not including it in this review.
Keyword Elite Project #4

Project number 4 is another one that I haven’t used. It is basically a rudimentary way of checking out the effectiveness of your competition for a given keyword. It gives you their Page Rank, and how well the pages are optimized for the phrase. Again, not something I really use, but good for a very quick analysis of your competitors.
Keyword Elite Project #5

Project #5 is about spying on your competition�s Adwords campaigns. I’m sure if you are doing Adwords this would be a very cool tool, but currently I’m only building niche sites so I haven’t had a chance to use it and unfortunately I don’t have time to figure it out so you’re on your own on this one too.
Summary

Cons:

There is an excellent keyword cleaning utility built in but it is difficult to import a non KE list into because it is only available after you have run a KE Project #2. So I find myself running the shortest possible #2 and then deleting the results and importing my other keyword list in and cleaning it…a little more clunky process than I’d like, but the cleaning tool is excellent.
Navigation between projects is difficult. If you want to work with the same keyword in multiple projects you can’t do it easily.

I do fear that I’ll be banned from Google. I wish they had used the Google APIs that allow automated inquiry of Google up to 1000 times a day. Please be aware that my fear isn’t that my sites would be banned [Google has no way to link my websites to my computer's IP address] just that my use of the tool would be banned. But I’ve been hammering on it for 3 or 4 hours a night for about a month now and no sign of trouble. The Keyword Elite developers did give the paranoid a work around and they allow you to use a proxy [which hides your IP address] so you are protected, but it does slow the program down when you use it in this mode. They also use a delaying tactic which more closely simulates human search behavior, which is probably the safest way to avoid being flagged by Google.

Pros:

You can install it on two computers, which means you can share with a friend or do like I do and install it on two computers [with different IP addresses preferably] and run have it running twice as much research for you. Long lists of 1000 or more keywords can take 20 - 30 minutes or more to run project #1 and project #2 for.

Very responsive replies to bug reports and constant updates and improvements. Brad Callen seems sincere about taking care of his customers for the long term and not just going after the quick buck.

I really wanted to not like it, at one point I had it on my to-do list to return it for a refund [which I had no doubt that I would be given, without hassle] but I decided to give it one more try, and even more importantly I decided to [please macho brothers forgive me here] read the instruction guides! Lo and behold it the program started to make a lot more sense and I started to like it.

The bottom line is that Keyword Elite produces killer keyword lists. If you think you can make money from having 1000 or 5000 targeted keyword phrases that relate to your niche, then the $167 is easily worth it. I use it constantly and I doubt if I’ll go back to Wordtracker, Nichebot or Keyword Discovery in the near future. If you’re serious about making money online a tool like this is essential. Keyword Elite, keyword research tool.