Keyword Elite
Keyword Elite is software that you can purchase, download and install on your PC, and use for finding keywords and phrases that other people enter into the search engines to find products and services. Anyone who is actively involved with building and maintaining web sites needs to have access to keyword research software, as keywords and phrases are essential when building web site pages that can rank high enough in the search engine results for your site to be found.
As we all know, ranking in the search engines is all about competition. If you optimize your pages for keywords that have a lot of competition then it is unlikely that you will rank high enough to ever be found. Therefore, it isn't enough just to find keywords and phrases that are entered: you must also find keywords and phrases that have low competition. In theory, if you optimize your pages with low competition keywords, you can more easily rank higher in the search engine results listing. The lower amount of traffic is offset by a higher conversion rate because the low competition keywords are more targeted.
Organized into projects, Keyword Elite works more like a wizard. For instance, in Project #1 you enter a starting keyword or phrase. Keyword Elite will return a huge list of related keywords and phrases that will help build your initial list. Then select the keywords and phrases that best fit the subject matter of your web site and send them through Project #2 to analyze search engine traffic, the number of searches performed, keyword effectiveness index, Adwords CPC, the number of Google, Yahoo, Miva and Enhance Campaigns and top bid reports. Not only can you access the competitive sites bidding on the keywords and phrases but you can actually review their ad campaigns. Project #2 will help you narrow down your long list.
Here are a few of the features advertised:
- Build a huge keyword list of over 50,000 keywords for Adsense sites or Adwords campaigns in record time.
- Locate profitable and high priced keywords.
- Discover "niche markets" that can be extremely profitable.
- Determine that concentrating on a particular niche market idea might not be the wisest area and discover others that will be more lucrative.
- Find low-cost, traffic generating keywords for quick sales.
- Find the cheapest, high traffic generating keywords that no one knows about.
I've had problems with Keyword Elite when searching for keywords. If I ask for 100 or more results, the application always hangs at about 80%. Also, as far as the amount of time required, I've found Keyword Elite to be extremely slow. In fact, as far as keyword research goes, I believe it to be the slowest tool available. One final complaint that I have is that the keywords and phrases that I discover cannot be managed directly inside the tool; that is, I have to export them and then import them into another tool to more easily sort, delete, add, or comment.
The information I get from Keyword Elite has been useful, but, unfortunately, performance and maintenance are essential ingredients to doing keyword research. Until these issues are properly addressed, I can't see using Keyword Elite as a preferred keyword research tool.
The rating I've assigned is based on how well Keyword Elite performs based on the advertised features and the cost of the product. Although I've found Keyword Elite to be a good keyword research tool, I have not found it to be very useful with discovering "niche" markets that are profitable, which I would consider to be more of a market research tool rather than simple keyword discovery.
Last Reviewed: Feb 28, 2009
Overall Rating: 3 of 5