SEO tools reviewed: Keyword Elite by Brad Callen
Keyword Elite is a piece of software written by Brad Callen which looks at keyword supply and demand to help identify low-competition niches. I’ve been aware of Brad for quite a few years now, although my memory is slightly hazy as I always used to confuse him with Brad Fallon - I could never work out why emails from the 2 Brads never seemed to file themselves properly in Outlook as I thought they were one person, but that’s another story.
I bought Keyword Elite earlier this year when I was starting to look at Adsense arbitrage following the release of the ebook by Michael Plante. Before that I was using a combination of Overture results and hand checking competition for small keyword lists and the rather clunky keyword tools in Site Build It, which relied at the time on input from Overture as well as Wordtracker. BTW, don’t bother looking for Michael Plante’s book now because Google has effectively killed arbitrage and if you do try it anyway you’re likely to have your Adsense account terminated with no chance of being allowed back in. I still have my Adsense account because when I saw the way it was going I stopped arbitrage.
Keyword Elite is split into 5 different projects, although I use the first 2 almost exclusively. Project 1 builds a keyword list from sources such as Wordtracker, Google and Yahoo and you can choose which sources you wish to query and how many keywords you would like. Once you have your keyword list you can manipulate it and remove phrases with too many words, too few words or containing certain words - “free” for example - before moving on to Project 2.
Keyword Elite’s Project 2 queries Google (or your choice from 3 other search engines which I’ve never used) to compare the number of webpages competing for each keyword phrase. The resulting report lists the estimated number of times each keyword is typed into Google against the number of competing webpages and also includes data such as the number ofGoogle Adwords campaigns competing and how much they are paying for clicks for each position.
There are some more advanced features, although I haven’t really used them much. Project 4 looks at the top 10 results for a keyword, while Project 5 spies on Adwords competition. And as for Project 3, I can’t work out what it’s for as it seems to do the same as Project 1.
Anyway, despite these criticisms, it is a piece of software I use regularly when looking at new niches, although I do cross check the number of searches data with GTrends.
Keyword Elite in summary
- It is easy to use with various options to select depending on your requirements giving great flexibility
- The software is regularly updated - around once every fortnight
- As well as checking the competition for each keyword both with and without quotes, Keyword Elite allows you to check using intitle and inanchor instead, which many SEOers prefer
- Although it can report competition on phrases contained between quotes, it doesn’t provide the number of searches on the keyword in the report, you have to cross check with the phrase without quotes.
- It doesn’t crosscheck Wordtracker results using the GTrends technique developed in Immediate Edge and popularised in the 30 Day Challenge.
More info: Brad Callen’s Keyword Elite