Software Type: Desktop Software (Windows)
Cost: $69.99

Rapid Keyword is a newcomer to the keyword research game. To be honest, until I began searching out some of the more fringe dwelling Keyword Research software, I had never heard of Rapid Keyword.

I jumped on to their site and found they presented a very professional image and promised some quite interesting features. The sales page got me excited and I was eager to put the tool through its paces.

Let me show you what I found. 

My Experience

My first impressions with this software were very positive. The design of the interface was very professional and it seemed like they used a vertical tabbing approach to help the user adopt an appropriate workflow. I was presented with tabs that led to sections called “Find”, “Analyze”, “Manage” and “Scratch Pad”. The software starts in the “Find” tab.

As usual, I looked at the settings of the software to ensure that I had everything set up correctly, as well as looking at what kinds of tweaks were available to me. There were a few localization settings, a meta-tag search depth setting as well as a proxy setting. I plugged in my anonymous proxy and pressed OK.

I was back in the “Find” tab, and I typed my keyword phrase “fly fishing” in the text box. I was presented with several different methods for generating keywords. They included:

• Overture Suggestion Tool using Overture's Keywords Selector.
• Meta Tag Spider. This method searches for the keyword in search engines and returns the keywords from meta tags of top positioned web pages.
• Related Keywords Spider, which spiders meta-crawlers for related keywords.
• Yahoo Related Keywords: spiders Yahoo! for related keywords.
• Google Proximity Search, which spiders websites that have top positions for your base keyword, and expands your base keywords based on that data.
• Google Groups Proximity, which works the same as above, but spiders the Google Groups archive of millions of messages.
• Google Suggest, which uses the new Google Suggest method that is currently in beta at Google Labs.

As you can see, this software has many different and quite useful methods of finding keywords. I first selected the “Overture Suggestion Tool” from the drop down and it started to populate with the number of searches data as well. I systematically went through each of the different digging methods to generate a large list of keywords. The excellent part of this software was that it would just keep expanding the list, while at the same time ensuring there were no duplicates. Therefore, I could get a few alternative keywords (for example, “flyfishing”) to add to the list and it would collectively gather all the keywords in one space. I liked this aspect. In comparison, many tools remove your past searches when you enter a new one. I ended up with 715 well targeted keywords.

Once I had my keywords I was able to click on the analyze button at the bottom of the page. This took me directly to the analyze tab. 

This section allowed me to take those keywords that I had generated in the “Find” section and look at them in relation to how many ads there were for that keyword in Google, Overture and Miva, as well as how many competing web pages there were. Unfortunately, that was the only information it provided.

At this point, as a Keyword Researcher, I would want to know in addition to this at least the search volume as well, if not the actual cost information of these ads. This way I could use a rough KEI measure to try to assess which keywords I should place more emphasis on targeting.

Once I had processed this information I moved on to the “Manage” tab. This tab contained many tools that help manage your keyword lists. You could probably go from the “Find” tab to this one before going to analyze, as it had a typo generator tool that would have been handy to expand your list even further.

The tools contained within this section would be quite useful for people who are working with large keyword lists. It provides the ability to remove duplicates, filter, split and merge lists. It also provides a well done keyword wrapper for outputting in a compatible format for Google AdWords.

There was also a scratchpad functionality (on the next tab) which I didn’t find very useful, but perhaps others would.

The only method of saving the data was in a text format. There was not the ability to save as a CSV, Excel or HTML file.

Summary

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

• 715 relevant keywords with Supply, some Demand, and Ad Data.

Strong Aspects

The strong points of this product:

• Huge list of keywords built with no subscription necessary.
• Excellent lateral searching although missing a thesaurus.
• Great way of managing keyword lists.
• Excellent interface.
• Proxy works well.

Weak Aspects

The weak points of this product:

• Not very good search engine controls beyond a proxy.
• Doesn’t give KEI or Demand data for most keywords.
• Doesn’t have some of the advanced other features other software has.

Who is it ideal for?

This software is for PPC advertisers. It could most powerfully be used in conjunction with another piece of software such as Keyword Locator, to fill in the information that is missing in the analysis.

Rating

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

Site: Check Out Rapid Keyword Now!