Software Type: Desktop Software (Windows)
Cost: $77

Niche Finder was one of the early pioneers of using software to help speed up the process of mining publicly available data to attempt to identify niche areas. It has gone through a fairly major revamp upon release of version 2 in obvious response to the needs of their customers.

This tool is primarily designed to search out niche markets. It is not designed for SEO as such, but its very nature can certainly help you identify areas of your market that you may not have thought about targeting.

Let’s take a closer look.

My Experience

I fired up Niche Finder 2 and found a very simple interface. There was simply a keyword box and a grid with buttons above and below it.

The first thing I like to do when I get a new piece of software is to ensure that the options are set up in the way that I like. I went through the settings of Niche Finder and left most of them as default. I moved the number of keywords to find to its maximum (500) so I could see how relevant these were. I was somewhat disappointed to find that there was no control over how the software was going to interact with the search engine, nor could I set a proxy server so my IP wasn’t blocked.

I typed in “fly fishing” and clicked on the auto button. It went out and found hundreds of keywords. It initially just went to Yahoo! Search Marketing and grabbed those keywords. It then appeared to look up a bunch of websites and  analyze the meta tags of these sites to generate even more keywords. This was fantastic. A downside was that many of these keywords were not very well related. It became a bit of a chore to delete these unrelated words to keep my list on focus. From what I understand, you can set up a blacklist file to stop Niche Finder visiting sites that generate keywords that are not well related.

The great thing I found was that you could append keywords to the end of your list. This allows the software to create very large lists of keywords to do analysis on.

Once it had found all of these keywords, it went and started to find the demand for them. This is very unusual - many tools only extract the search volume while collecting the keywords. Niche Finder does it after the fact. This means that you can import as many keywords as you like and it will go out and grab the search volume from Yahoo! Search Marketing for each one of them.

Once I had narrowed my keyword list down by deleting the irrelevant listings, I ran each of the tests individually. So it went out and found the volume, the demand (from Google), provided me with a KEI analysis, as well as the number of ads shown for each keyword from Overture and Google.

Unfortunately, it would only show the first 8 for Google (just the first page) which was a shame as it made that aspect of the tool worthless. However, the Overture Ad lookup worked well, showing all the ads.

I was able to export this data as a CSV file only. This is OK as long as you have a method of analysing CSV files. One good thing is that you can import the CSV file back into Niche Finder if you wish to continue working on it later.

There were also some bonus tools you can find upon right-clicking any keyword.

Summary

So what did I end up with after using Niche Finder 2?

• Thousands of relevant keywords with Supply, Demand, KEI and Ad Data.

Strong Aspects

The strong points of this product:

• Simple and fast
• Ability to export and import data easily.
• Can look up keywords individually
• Can append data to build large keyword lists.
• Lateral searches and grabs keywords from other sites
• Strong sorting ability.
• Can do large analysis on many keywords at once.

Weak Aspects

The weak points of this product:

• Doesn’t allow multiple sessions.
• Lateral searching limited to other websites.
• Not great with keyword management.
• Doesn’t go past 8 ads on Google.
• Extra tools could be more integrated, but they work.
• Not SE friendly.
• No proxy ability.

Who is it ideal for?

This software is primarily for Niche Miners who want an inexpensive tool to hunt for opportunities.

Ratings

For Niche Miners:
For Search Engine Optimizers:
For Pay Per Click Advertisers:
For AdSense Publishers:
Usability:
Value:

Site: Check Out Niche Finder Now!