Micro Niche Finder is the tool I use to find keywords when I’m looking for themes for articles or pretty much anything else.

It hooks in to the Google keyword tool, so you know that real people are searching for the phrases it finds.

And it stores them in its own database so you can go back to previous searches whenever you want to.

But it also does a lot more:

What does Micro Niche Finder do?

The main feature that I use is the “strength of competition” option.

If you’ve done keyword research before, you’ll know that the advice is to check the number of competing pages by putting quote marks around the phrase you’re thinking about.

Micro Niche Finder will  find this for you by clicking the “get exact phrase count” option.

But strength of competition (SOC for short) goes further than this.

With just one click, it checks three different things: how many times the phrase is used in the anchor text pointing to your competition, how many times it is used in the title of your competing pages and how many times it’s in the url. These are then combined to give an SOC figure.

This figure then has a simple, at a glance, traffic light symbol next to it.

Green means next to no competition – you should be able to dominate this keyword phrase with ease.

Amber means caution. There’s a fair amount of competition but if you’re feeling brave then the rewards are likely to be worth it.

Red means stop. This is an ultra competitive phrase and will take a giant amount of effort to compete in.

For instance, at the time of writing, the phrase “niche marketing strategy” gets about 590 searches a month. Which isn’t a lot. There were 50,700 competiting pages with that exact phrase count. So you’d probably think it wasn’t worthwhile. But the SOC figure was a very low 33 with a green tick next to it. So if you were looking to target the phrase, chances are you’d find it easy to come up high in the results.

By way of contrast, the phrase “finding your niche” had 480 searches a month, 71,400 competing pages with that exact phrase and a gigantic 10,800 (and a red cross) for SOC. Well worth avoiding.

I’ve been using Micro Niche Finder for some time now and it’s helped me find some nicely targeted keywords with relatively low competition. And I’ve found them quickly.

One test I did was against the keywords found by a friend. He’d spent hours researching them. In less than 10 minutes, I found the best keyword phrases in his niche, verified by reading them out to him over Skype and getting him to check them off against his list.

Micro Niche Finder found all the ones my friend had found plus a few extra he’d discounted.

If you’re serious about niche marketing and keyword research, you’ll find that Micro Niche Finder is an excellent keyword research tool. It’s well supported (there’s a support blog, a support FAQ and a support center) and regularly updated.

If you’re stuck for topics, there are also two other features that will unstick you fast.

The brainstorm option, which gives you 25 topics that are currently being searched for. When I checked whilst I was writing this review, these ranged from balsamic vinegar through mountain bikes, poker chips and convection ovens. You can run this report whenever your mind goes blank.

The second option is hot trends. These are items that are up and coming in Google searches. Often current events but also quite often things that have piqued people’s interest. Again, these are useful for those times when brainstorming with yourself hasn’t produced anything you like.

Overall, Micro Niche Finder is an excellent tool to add to your arsenal and it is the keyword tool I use most regularly.

If you read almost any book on internet marketing, you’ll be told to research your keywords.

OK, but where to start and which keyword tools should you believe?

If the book you’re reading is old (or at least old in internet marketing terms), you’ll likely see a reference to Overture. This used to be Yahoo’s keyword tool but it is no longer around.

So you can use a free tool like Google’s keyword tool. Or you can use a paid-for service like Wordtracker.

Each has their pros and cons.

Google’s tool is good and regularly improving. It has bar graphs for monthly search volumes, so you can check the seasonality of your keywords. Recently it has added search quantities. Which is great. If you’re on a limited budget, look no further than Google’s keyword tool.

The long standing company for keyword research is Wordtracker.

It’s the tool I turn to whenever I want to research keywords.

Why? Because it gives me a gigantic list (usually 300 words long) of words that it thinks are related to the search term I first thought of.

So, for instance, when I was looking for a title for this article I asked it to look up searches for the keyword “Wordtracker“.

Amongst the phrases that came up that I should investigate were “keyword research”, “keyword discovery” (probably Wordtracker‘s main paid-for competitor), “Wordtracker article” and loads more.

Each keyword can be drilled down to reveal an estimated daily search figure.

Then the powerful bit starts. You can add your keywords to a “basket” and analyze them further. Wordtracker has a competition search feature. You can analyze your chosen keywords on a variety of different search engines (I choose Google and at a guess so do most other people) and you get a list of how many competing pages there are and also Wordtracker’s own proprietary “at a glance” KEI figure. This is there best guess of how easy it would be to get your keyword optimized page well ranked for that particular phrase.

The KEI is a complex formula but boils down to the higher the KEI, the easier it is to rank. So you don’t need to care how it’s calculated.

Wordtracker offer a free trial which is well worth taking. Once you start using it, you’ll probably be hooked. It’s the only paid-for keyword tool I go back to use again and again.

Get a free trial of Wordtracker here.