Instant Keyword Research Full Review

By Jay Stockwell | Published 10/5/2005 | All The Reviews |

Instant Keyword Research Review

Software Type: Desktop Software (Windows)
Cost: $297

Instant Keyword Research is a new solution that seems to target mainly Niche Miners. Their sales letter suggests that they have already done lots of keyword research for you and this software allows you to quickly tap into these reservoirs of niche gold.

This tool takes the approach that many people are doing nowadays of sending a physical product rather than providing it as a download. Sometimes I wonder if it’s really necessary to go down this track for practical reasons. Perhaps the lists are so extensive it is not feasible to download it?

Let’s take a look!

My Experience

When I finally got the Instant Keyword Research product into my hot little hands I was quite excited. It is funny how I still get excited to open up a shrink wrapped DVD. Once I had removed the wrapper in record time I opened up the case and found two DVDs. One was the main Instant Keyword Research software, and the other was a bonus disk.

I put in the DVD and it auto started the Instant Keyword Research tool. I was presented with a very simple, yet professional search interface. There was very little for me to access except a text box and two check boxes. I entered my comparison keyword search, “fly fishing”, and clicked on the direct (vertical) and related (lateral) search box.

I clicked search and it quickly bought back 26 results. You can see for this search the results returned the keyword phrase, the relationship (direct or lateral) as well as the number of keywords contained in the keyword group. So what it actually bought back for me was 26 keyword group results. By group results I mean while there were only 26 results, there were actually many keywords contained within each group. So for example the “fly fishing tackle” result had 16 phrases within that group. This software is more or less an interface to a huge set of precompiled keyword lists.

I see some advantages and disadvantages of doing Keyword Research in this way. Let’s take a look at the advantages first. This software package puts the keywords into individual lists. Most keyword tools will just fetch a large unsorted list, and you have to drill down separately for each sub-niche. In this case “fly fishing” is the niche, and “fly fishing tackle” is the sub-niche.
This is a nice way of doing it for Niche Miners in particular. However, it is perhaps best suited to a particular type of Niche Miner – someone who is building many sites very quickly, using a shotgun approach where they fire off as many rounds as possible and hope to hit as much as possible. Often they don’t have time to spend on lots of quality Keyword Research because their sites are often getting kicked out of search engines almost as quickly as they can build them. This kind of software can save them a lot of time. And after all, time is money.

However, Niche Miners who are more interested in building high quality sites that are going to stick around for the long haul may not see the same kind of benefits from this approach.

The other major problem for pretty much all types of Keyword Researchers when using this kind of approach is that these lists are a snapshot of time. Consequently these lists may become outdated very quickly. This is especially the case when dealing with things that are seasonally driven such as outdoor sports.

I continued on my research and went ahead and selected all and then pressed unzip. Unfortunately the software could not create a folder to unzip into. I had to go back and create a new folder to unzip my new group of data into.

The end result was an output of a large collection of CSV files, some of them were labelled as “direct” and others “related”. This essentially told me if the keyword group was a vertical search or a lateral search output.

I opened up a “direct” file and it gave me the total search volume as well as the monthly search volume. These are two important measures because they show you which of the keywords or phrases are searched for the most.
I then opened up a file labelled “related”. In this group, it simply gave me a list of related keywords. Ideally I would have been able to just click on one of these and it would have generated a search of those keywords.

Unfortunately, due to the restrictions in the interface, I would have to cut this from the CSV file and paste it back into the software. There was also the negative aspect of a lack of search volume information for any of these “related” (or lateral) keywords.

So as you can with this kind of software, if you are going to get value out of it, you have to trust the vendor that these really are niche markets worth pursuing. We have to ask the question, are these keyword lists worth the money? That is where most of the value for this software is, because the actual software itself is quite basic and limited.

Are they actually profitable keywords? I would be reluctant to say yes because there is very little added information to support their case. They are simply relying on volume data, it would seem, and that is just one piece of the puzzle.

It would have been nice if the software could do more and provide this kind of extra information (such as current search volume, bid statistics, or competition analysis) on the fly. That would give you a nice foundation to build on. This is version 1 of the software, so perhaps they will improve this aspect. We can’t have everything we want in the first version I guess. It’s just a shame you would need to buy extra software to do this kind of analysis on the data they give you.

Once I was finished with this aspect of Instant Keyword Research I grabbed the bonus disk and put that into my machine to see what else they had included for us. A menu auto-loaded and presented me with several options including some more Keyword Metrics data, a bonus Keyword List, a Misspelling generator and a Keyword Miner.

The Keyword Metrics aspect of the software was quite interesting. It was made up of around 93,000 keywords that include keyword cost data from AdWords as well as their search volume. This is really useful data, and would have been excellent if it was integrated with the other Keyword Research information. Unfortunately, they just included it as a CSV file so you’re restricted to working with it in software like Excel or Access. Some people are happy to work in this creating formulas and macros, but many will find this difficult to make use of.

On this disk there was also a bonus keyword list pack. I’m not sure why they didn’t include this in the main list of data that was included on the other disk. Perhaps they bought this list from another company. Either way, it seems a bit silly to have two different lists and interfaces when they should have combined to two to have a single larger list that was available from the same interface.

The bonus disk also included a misspelling generator which I found worked very well and is one of the better ones I’ve used.

The bonus disk also included a Keyword Mining tool, which I guess is meant to help you build new fresh lists to add into the mix. This worked in a similar way to Niche Finder 2 by using a combination of Overture data, as well as mining meta-tags etc. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out a way to add these newly created lists into the main application. Again, it also doesn’t give search volumes or any other extra data to help you decide if the keywords and topics are worth pursuing.

Summary

So what did I end up with after using Instant Keyword Research?

Access to 14 keyword vertical sub-niche lists that contained total and monthly search volume and 12 lateral sub-niche lists. I was also able to generate many misspellings and mine for new keywords.

Strong Aspects

The strong points of this product:

Results sorted by sub-niches.
Pre-selected niche markets?
Good misspelling generator.
Large raw keyword list for AdSense.

Weak Aspects

The weak points of this product:

Keyword lists will get outdated quickly due to the fact they are contained on the DVD instead of being rolling data.
Limited keyword list management interface.
Expensive for most people.

Who is it ideal for?

This product is mainly a keyword list. People interested in building throw-away sites (for example, portal type sites) can quickly use this kind of data. However, people building businesses will require more information to justify their time investment. Unfortunately, Instant Keyword Research doesn’t provide this.

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