Nichefinder review

Before starting the Nichefinder review, let me mention this book. Strike It Niche is packed with 70 Niche ideas - low competition, high demand projects. These projects are blueprints for success and well worth the low asking price.

Nichefinder is a software program that helps you to find keywords and evaluate those keywords in terms of the numbers of searches made at the search engines and the amount of competing websites for those keywords.

For anyone serious about search engine optimization, it is vital that you know :

1. Which keyword phrases people type in at the search engines
2. How many other sites are optimized for those keywords.

Point number 2 should be obvious. If there are 2 million other sites competing for top placement in Google for a particular keyword phrase, you are unlikely to be able to get into the top 10. For keywords with less than 10,000 competing sites, that job is a lot easier.

So, where does Nichefinder come in?

Nichefinder allows you to type in a keyword or phrase, and let the Nichefinder Robot collect keywords for you. It then analyzes those keywords for you. The report it gives allows you to quickly identify which keywords are profitable.

Is Nichefinder any good?

If you had asked me this last week, I would have said save your money. The results that were produced by Nichefinder were just not useable by me. Nichefinder robot seemed to go off on a tangent and return many many words that were just not related to my original keyword. However, this month (May 2003) the authors have released a new version (1.8) with "improved relevancy". I have run a few searches through Nichefinder and indeed, the software is now so much better that I would recommend it if you dont have a subscription to Wordtracker. To me, there is no substitute to using Wordtracker for keyword research. The only issue with Wordtracker is that you do not own it - you need to subscribe (which can work out very costly). For those who want to own their keyword research software, Nichefinder is now a good alternative.

Final thoughts on Nichefinder

I have a couple of reservations about Nichefinder - both of which can be overcome.

1. In an effort to improve relevancy, the software appears to use all of the words in your search term as an exact phrase to "seed" the search. It goes looking for pages with that exact phrase on to begin the keyword generation routine. If it does not find any - tough luck. If it does, then NicheFinder can use these to begin finding keywords.

E.G. search for "baby nursery theme", and Nichefinder does not find any suggestions. Search for "baby nursery" and Nichefinder then kicks in and returns keywords including "baby nursery theme". The results found though do not necessarily have all of the words from the phrase in them (unlike Overtures keyword tool & many other keyword software that relies on Overture for its results).The power of Nichefinder kicks in (particularly when requesting a large number of keywords) and on bigger searches there are a wide variety of related key phrases that just beat the overture tool handsdown.

I said that both reservations could be overcome. To overcome this one, use smaller keyword phrases instead of trying to fit several main keywords into the search box.

OK, onto the second reservation:

2. My second reservation is that when finished, the results are not very user friendly. OK, Nichefinder produces pretty graphs with all the information that it has found like numbers of searches & competitors, potential etc. However, on big searches this is overwhelming. It would be nice to be able to delete those keywords we dont find useful as well as others based on criteria e.g. delete all phrases with more than 100,000 competition and print out our keyword list as just that - a list, with all relevant numbers. Well, there are 2 solutions here. If you are an excel wizard, you can import the results into Excel and manipulate them there. Not everybody's cup of tea, and certainly not straightforward. Now, thankfully there is a better solution. I have written a small application to do this for you.

Nichefinder - Conclusion

Overall, I believe Nichefinder is a good tool, especially for those starting out in SEO. However, for professional use, I would only fully recommend WordTracker. Having said that though, when Nichefinder is used with the Nichefinder Results Analyzer, Nichefinder becomes a formidable tool. and one I use regularly. It's advantages over Wordtracker is that you actually own the software and don't have monthly or annual subscriptions to pay, and also that it is much easier to use.

Nichefinder has consistently identified profitable niche areas for me to target in my affiliate business. Type in a phrase, click go, and Nichefinder comes back with up to 500 relevant phrases and enough information about each phrase to tell you which ones will be profitable. For ease of use, quality of information returned, and value for money, Nichefinder gets my vote.