The Keyword Bible Full Review

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

The Keyword Bible Review

Software Type: Desktop Software (Windows)
Cost: $495

The Keyword Bible is a new (August 2005) Keyword Research tool that has had some strong marketing behind it, with some big time Internet marketers endorsing it. There were some big claims being thrown around by some folks, so I was keen to get my hands on it to see how it stood up against all the other software I’ve looked at.

I was also interested to find out that Jim Morris from Nichebot.com fame is involved in the project. Jim has had a lot of experience in Keyword Research, and has quite a following of people who rely on his expertise, especially in the Niche Mining aspects of Keyword Research.

Let me show you what I found.

My Experience

Once I was sent my link I quickly downloaded and installed The Keyword Bible on to my machine. I was interested as it decompressed thousands of keyword lists that seemed very interesting. I’m constantly trying to think of keyword areas that may be worth pursuing that are currently untapped. As the software installed, thousands of these were flashing before my eyes. My heart rate began to increase a little at the thought.

Once the software had finished installing I fired it up and was presented with a very simple interface. It seemed to me that this was again another interface to pre-compiled lists of keywords in the same sort of way that Instant Keyword Research (IKR) was. This interface, however, seemed to have more functionality than IKR.

I was presented with three tabs, which represented three different ways of working with the pre-compiled lists. The first one was “Search in files”. This search function obviously searched through all of the keyword files and brought back every keyword phrase that contained the search query. In my case I was looking for “fly fishing”. The software returned lots of results. Unfortunately, the software didn’t actually give me a results count. So I cut and pasted the keywords into my text editor to get a line count. I was pleasantly surprised to find The Keyword Bible had returned 5117 keyword phrases!

So I had 5117 keyword phrases now at my disposal. I was able to save this data to a file so I had a single list for future reference. I was also able to automatically enclose the keywords to make them friendlier for submitting to Google AdWords using the different methods of matching that AdWords offers. This is especially useful. Because of the large numbers of keywords being generated, pay per click advertisers may be using this tool as a way to get lots of keywords for their campaigns.

At this stage I began to be a little disappointed in The Keyword Bible. It offered me no real way of analyzing this list at all. I would have liked to have at least volume data so I could sort my list in terms of popularity.

Unfortunately, there was no method for any sort of analysis. The only way I would be able to analyze the data would be if I imported my list into another piece of software to go out and grab all the data I require to make a more educated decision on what is worth spending time pursuing.

In a similar way to Instant Keyword Research, this kind of approach is fine for folks who build throw-away sites that are built as traffic nets, rather than long-term businesses. But for most people this is a major drawback for the Keyword Bible.

This software shares the same problem as IKR when we look at how fresh the keyword data is. The data contained in The Keyword Bible is simply a snapshot in time and is not updated dynamically to evolve with the ever changing landscape of the Internet.

For this data to remain current, The Keyword Bible folks would have to always send you updated lists, or else you would need to update the lists yourself. It also means that you will be using the same lists as many other Internet marketers and consequently won’t necessarily have an advantage of an overlooked market. They have, however, just released an add-on piece of software that you use on your own server that works mining fresh keywords so you can continue to build new keyword lists to add into The Keyword Bible. This is useful, and because the tool doesn’t provide any volume stats anyway will probably work OK with this somewhat flawed method of Keyword Research.

At least The Keyword Bible does quite a nice job of Keyword List organization. It allows you to create new lists and add them to the mix. Unfortunately, you can have only the actual keyword (rather than other volume and competition data) in the file unless you do some tweaking.
I moved on to the next tab of The Keyword Bible to see what other functionality it included. This tab was labelled “Search in titles”. This provided search functionality of the list subset’s actual title, and returned the file names of those keyword phrases. For example when I searched for “fly fishing” it returned file names like fly fishing trip.txt.

The software allowed me to either copy the files to a new folder, save the file list for later reference or to merge the file contents. This was useful to a certain extent. However, I would have preferred it to work in the same way that the Instant Keyword Research software worked. They showed you how many items are in the list, as well as allowed you to browse the files from within the software. Sadly, with The Keyword Bible I was left in the dark.

I then clicked on to the final tab in The Keyword Bible software. This allowed me to browse the entire list of keyword files that were available. I am not sure if it was supposed to be designed like this, but I actually found this aspect of The Keyword to be of the most value.

This is a real gold mine of possible niche markets to target. It is like an idea bank! Even though there is the issue of other people sharing this idea bank, I believe there are too many opportunities for the number of people likely to pay the asked price for this software to exhaust totally. It looks as though they have done a good job filtering the keywords to possible niche areas with just about all the keywords I have seen looking like they could be viable money spinners.

Unfortunately there is no other data available to further investigate their potential, but it could be quite useful for many as a solid idea starting point.

Summary

So what did I end up with after using Keyword Bible?

5117 keyword phrases that related to my seed keyword phrase.

Strong Aspects

The strong points of this product:

Nice keyword management interface.
Lots of ideas generated.

Weak Aspects

The weak points of this product:

Expensive.
Lacks extra information to assess if the keyword is worth following up.
List will be outdated fairly quickly because it is a static list (not live data).

Who is it ideal for?

At the end of the day, I think that The Keyword Bible would hold quite a bit of value for some people, especially those who are building automated portal type sites that act as traffic funnels. However, for most (including PPC advertisers who will like the large lists it generates at times), it will be of little use except as an idea generator, and a starting point for more extensive Keyword Research offered by other tools.

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