Keyword Locator Full Review

By Jay Stockwell | Published 10/6/2005 | All The Reviews |

Keyword Locator Review

Software Type: Desktop Software (Windows)
Cost: $87

When I heard about an early release of Keyword Locator in a well known Internet marketing discussion forum, I jumped in and bought it. It sounded as though someone was taking this style of Overture (Yahoo! Search Marketing) based keyword research to the next level.

I was pleasantly surprised when I began using this software, as it wasn’t all just hot air as can often be the case.

Let’s take a look at how Keyword Locator fares with our keyword research on the phrase “fly fishing”.

My Experience

I opened up Keyword Locator and I had to verify my registration data. It’s good to see a solid mechanism for stopping software cheats who exploit people’s money-back guarantees. Don’t you hate those guys!
The first thing that struck me when I used Keyword Locator was the interface. It was all very professional, with excellent icons, clear labels and nice usability.

Once again, I looked at the options to make sure that everything was set up as it should be. I was able to accurately modify with a high degree of control exactly how the software interacts with the search engines. This is important if you don’t want to get your IP blocked. I also set up the proxy setting so that it used an anonymous proxy for added security. I modified the default settings to increase the threads, but also increased the time that it contacted the search engines so I didn’t annoy them.

I input my key phrase “fly fishing” and noticed there were a couple of options. I could have more control than in most software over what keywords were searched for, including what keywords were to be left out. This is an excellent feature that is not seen in many other tools.

To start off my search I was presented with five options to direct where I wanted to get my data from. These included Overture (Yahoo! Search Marketing), Google, Yahoo, No Suggested Terms (for data on one term only) and digging. To me, Keyword digging sounded very interesting and the type of thing I like to see in a keyword research tool.

I pressed the big green start button and I was shown another box that asked how many terms I wanted to mine for. It also provided a link to responsible usage of the tool. This was excellent as it reminded me that if I get too wild with my digging, I may jeopardize others’ research. I input 250 and pressed OK.

The software went out and started mining my keywords. It looked like it grabbed the first 100 from Overture’s suggestion tool and then began digging to a second level, the top key phrases, until it reached 250 reasonably quickly.

Once the process was complete, I checked out the data that was available to me and was very surprised at how much was extracted. This was more than any other tool I have tried.

The extra data it found included:

The URLs of advertisers.
Page titles used (for Overture, Google, Enhance and Findwhat).
Keywords used (for Overture, Google, Enhance and Findwhat).
Bid prices (for Overture, Enhance and Findwhat).
A very useful extra tab that presented the data in a new way that reflected the top bids. This function is very useful for people trying to capitalize on AdSense as they can focus their attention on keywords that are likely to generate the most money.

The way this data was presented was very user friendly, making the most of tabs that loaded the data depending upon which keyword was highlighted.
I was also pleased I could save this search and go back to it at a later date as Keyword Locator presents the data in such an efficient manner.

I checked out the import tool and found that it loads keywords into the software perfectly. The really great thing about it is the fact that it will reload the search volume data, which is a great feature that other programs lack.

The export data was excellent. It allows you to specify what data you would like exported. The options included the search results, top bids, keywords only, and one or all tabs. It also allowed type of file export whether that be csv, excel or html.

There were a couple of little things I found along the way that I am sure will be tidied up in the upcoming releases. One was the fact that you cannot pause a search while it is processing. This is important when you are processing large lists. The lateral search could also have been stronger with perhaps meta-tag searching, keyword mixing, or misspelling options. There was also no Wordtracker import function if you wanted to analyze the data pulled from Wordtracker instead of using the sometimes skewed Overture data.

There were a couple of other little tools included in the software that would help people who use AdWords campaigns a lot, to help format the data correctly.

Overall, this is definitely one of the best keyword research tools on the market today.

Summary

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

Hundreds of relevant keywords with lots of extra data including Supply, Demand, R/S Ratio, URLs of advertisers, titles and keywords used, bid prices, as well as top bids.

Strong Aspects

The strong points of this product:

Excellent interface.
Lots of information mined about each keyword.
One of the best digging tools around.
Looks up searches from files drawn out of text files.
Great options and attention to detail.

Weak Aspects

The weak points of this product:

Cannot pause the process once it is started. If you press stop and start again it doesn’t work.
Cannot easily import Wordtracker data.
Lateral searching not fantastic.
No KEI.
Uses primarily Overture (Yahoo! Search Marketing) data.

Who is it ideal for?

This software is ideal for Niche Miners, PPC advertisers, and AdSense publishers and will work well in partnership with other keyword generating tools due to its ability to be able to mine data well from existing lists.

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