Niche Horde Review – Niche Keyword Research
“Niche Horde” is a niche keyword research tool specifically designed for those who focus on building mini niche websites and content around high paying keywords terms.
If you’re main online business focus is to develop just one or two websites, then it’s probably not the tool for you. However if your focus is on building many mini websites (or micro blogs) then it could be right up your alley and is certainly worth a look.
In essence what it does is find keyword terms that…
- Have high cost per click advertising rates on Google Adwords – meaning a higher return per click when you run adsense on your micro blogs.
- Have low competition in the search engines – meaning the keyword terms are generally easier to rank well for with a little effort.
- Have a reasonable volume of search terms each month on the major search engines – meaning that you can prioritize your focus to the “low hanging fruit” when you generate your content.
The “Niche Horde” service itself is in two distinct parts.
The first part is a small application that you download and run on your computer. This application processes small chunks of data (keyword research on third party websites such as Google’s Keyword Suggestion tool) whenever you are logged in.
It does nothing else – the idea being that the load of processing all of the necessary keyword data is spread amongst all users of the software. That information is then passed back to the main database hosted on the “Niche Horde” server where everything is “sorted out” and categorized.
That is the second part of the service – an online membership area where you can then get access to the communal data that’s been processed.
As I write this there are currently 26 active clients running (customers running the desktop application right now) in the membership area. The membership area also contains data for over 8,024,313 individual keyword terms – but of course it could be substantially more by the time you read this.
The first thing you’re presented with when you login to the “Niche Horde” membership area are the “Latest Niche Findings”. These are described as…
“The most recent niches found that look pretty good in terms of search volume and SOC (strength of competition)…. Criteria: No more than 500 competing web sites (SOC), and a monthly search count of at least 500.”
Here’s just a small screenshot of what you’re presented with (there are generally a few hundred different keyword terms listed when you first login)…
Niche Horde Review - Sample Data
..It’ shows the keyword terms, the number of searches, the bid for the keyword term, when it was last analyzed and a feature to check to see if a domain can be registered related to that keyword term (or phrase).
The “Searches” column shows the estimated monthly search volume according to Google’s Keyword Tool – how many people are searching specifically on that term.
The “Bid” column shows the Google Adwords suggested advertiser bid (meaning that other advertisers are paying this amount or slightly less per click).
The “SOC” column stands for “Strength of Competition”. This is best explained verbatim from the membership area…
“How difficult it is to rank for any given keywords in Google is based primarily on how many links your competition has to their web page that contains the sought-after keywords in the link text. That’s a simplified version, but it’s pretty much the sum of the truth.
A quick way to know if a set of keywords is really competitive is to check how many pages have links coming into them with your target keywords. The more competing pages there are for the terms, the higher the likelihood that it will be difficult to rank for those terms.
That’s where the SOC value comes in. SOC stands for “strength of competition”, and is the number of results returned by Google that have the keywords in links aimed at their site (the value you get when you search Google for ‘allinanchor:[keywords]‘).
So, for instance, if Google indicates there are 1,000,000 pages competing for the keywords, that’s going to be real tough to rank for because it will take a lot of links to do it. On the other hand, if Google says only 100 or 200 pages have links with the keywords, that will be a lot easier to rank for, because the fewer links it takes to rank for a set of terms, the fewer links the currently rankings pages will have.
This makes sense, because once a page is sitting at the top of the search results, it’s very unlikely the webmaster will continue to get more and more and more links to try and improve the page’s ranking. He already has the ranking, and his competition is low, so why put more work into it?”
So knowing this data we can then prioritize any new niche keyword terms we would look to build an entire website around (or add new content to an existing website) based on our own opinion of what’s likely to be easier to rank for and most profitable.
For example you might like to focus on any keyword terms that have between 1,000-2,000 monthly searches, have a minimum bid per click of $0.50, and have an SOC value of less than 200.
Or, if you think you can build more incoming links to your new website or content page, you might raise the bar and increase the SOC value. That is entirely up to you.
The advantage of “Niche Horde” is that it basically takes the headache out of having to come up with new niche keyword ideas to expand your micro blogging or content empire around. It even gives you access to a domain checking tool to see if those keyword terms are available to register as new domains – increasing the chances of better search engine rankings.
The disadvantage of “Niche Horde” is that everyone who is a member has access to this same data (although they may of course analyze and approach things differently). That means everyone is competing with everyone else to varying degrees – although with an ever expanding keyword database I wouldn’t let that put you off too much.
A few other nice features of “Niche Horde” include…
The Keyword Suggestion Tool;
This is an online submit form inside the membership area. It allows you to suggest several core keyword terms (i.e. “sports car”) that the network will then search on.
The data is then passed out to all of the user clients when they are active. It is then sorted, processed and passed back to the database. So you can work to influence the results of the keywords to certain markets if you have specific interests… it will find and analyze all “sports car” related keyword terms it finds and provide you with the data.
The “Niche Groups” Keyword Tool;
This feature provides the same data as the previous screen shot however niche groups are groups of keywords that are related to each other.
The database builds and catalogs these groups in order for you to be able to build ‘mini sites’ out of content based around the keywords.
You simply click on the primary group keyword to get a list of all keywords related to that group. You can then see the individual data for all keywords in the group.
As I write this there are just under 7,000 individual niche groups in the database however the vast majority of those groups are very “light”. That is they only contain 2 or 3 keyword terms.
Ultimately that sums up what “Niche Horde” is all about.
Again, if your online business focus is on just one or two websites, the tool is pretty useless to you as it provides very specific data across millions of keyword terms – stuff that’s not going to be applicable to you. And if you have a narrow focus, you can do the same thing in your own niche manually (you should be able to work out how after reading this review) in just a few hours.
I would however definitely recommend it to the micro bloggers out there that focus on building mini sites and content around high paying keyword terms.
At $97 for 12 months it’s a pretty solid investment – just a few ideas that you build out should cover that no problem…
I am guessing you would really have to have a specific business in order for this product to be of great value to you, especially since everyone can see all the data. Is there a tool that keeps the analysis more private?