Market Samurai was first released to members of the Immediate Edge and then a 40 day free trial was provided to members of the 30 day challenge. Market Samurai is built using the Adobe Air developer platform and has a nice and simple interface.

Your first step is to configure the software by opening the settings section. Here you have the option to use a built in proxy service to reduce the chances of being banned temporarily by Google. You also have the option to target search engine traffic from certain countries or leave set to all countries. Next you need to enter your SEO Digger user name and password if you want to take advantage of this service. You can sign up for a free account here www.seodigger.com.

The next step is to create a project. To create a project you simply enter the main keyword of your market, give the project a name and select where on your hard drive you would like to store the data. You can create several sub projects for each sub niche in your market by clicking the new keyword button. Once your project is created you have the following options at your disposal.

• Keyword Research: There are two sources which the tool uses to generate it's data, the Google Synonym Tool and SEO Digger (to use SEO Digger you need to have an SEO Digger account and entered your user name and password in the Market Samurai Settings as explained above). The Google Synonym option simply pulls keywords from the Google Synonym tool and the SEO Digger option will give you a list of keywords which sites are ranking for which also rank for your main keyword.

  You also have two filtering options, the first is SEO Traffic filter and the second is Adwords Traffic filter, both will remove any keywords which are not receiving at least one search a day according to their records. One thing to note is that enabling filtering increases your risk of being temporarily banned.

  You now click generate keywords fill in a captcha and Market Samurai will pull data from the service(s) which you selected above. If you wish you can add keywords to the negative keyword if they don't relate to your market or simply aren't interested in and they will then be automatically removed from your list. There are several ways you can add keywords to the negative keyword list which is quite useful as well as create a new sub project using any of the keyword in your list with the click of a button. You also have the option to manually add keywords to your keyword list which is great if you already have keyword lists which you would like to analyze.

  Unfortunately they recommend processing no more than 100 keywords at a time to avoid being temporarily banned for overworking the Market Samurai servers.

  Once you are done you then click Analyze Keywords and you are presented with a whole bunch of options. There are four main categories which are organic, Adwords, competition and commerciality.

• Organic: There are three options here, total traffic, SEO traffic and trends. Total traffic will provide you with how many searches each keyword gets in the major search engines. SEO traffic gives you a rough estimate of how much traffic to expect if you are in the number 1 spot for each keyword (be aware that there are a lot of factors which can not be measured which will affect this value) and trends which will show you the seasonal affect on traffic for your keywords.
• Adwords: There are also three options within this section which include Adwords traffic, CTR and CPC. The Adwords traffic option will provide you with the amount of traffic to expect if you are the top listed ad. Adwords CTR provides you with the click through rate of the top listing ad and Adwords CPC provides you with the value that the top bidder is paying per click. This information is extremely valuable not just to find out how you will need to bid to gain the top position but it also tells you how valuable a certain keyword is. The higher the bid value the more money there is likely to be made on a particular keyword. This is also useful information for Adsense publishers as it allows you to find high paying keywords to create content on.
• Competition: There are two options here, Adwords competition and SEO competition. The Adwords competition data gives you a rough idea of how many Adwords ads there are for each keyword and SEO competition gives you the number of organic search engine results using exact match.
• Commerciality: This is an interesting set of options including OCI (online commercial intent) which determines whether or not the keyword is likely to result in a sale of some kind or whether it is simply being used to gather information. Obviously you want to target the keywords which are going to result in a sale. Next you have Adwords value which rates how valuable a keyword is by factoring in the amount of traffic you would expect and the CPC (cost per click). Lastly you have SEO value which simply compares the amount of organic search engine traffic to the amount being bid in Adwords for that particular keyword.
• Once you have selected the options you wish to retrieve data for you then click analyze keywords

The tool runs surprisingly quickly considering the amount of data which it has to gather. A list of about 150 keywords took about 2 minutes to process with all options switched on however I did get a strange pop up a couple of times although I just clicked cancel and it continued collecting data. It managed to collect just about all of the data I requested except for the SEOC data where it provides you with the amount of organic competing pages using exact match, I probably received about one third of the data. I am assuming this data is pulled from Google and Google must have blocked me for to many requests. You can however click analyze data again and it will try and retrieve whatever data it missed on the first attempt.

The data is easy to view and sort and you can filter all of the options above to streamline your keyword list. For example you can choose to filter the list by keywords with at least 100 searches a day or keywords with no more than 20,000 competing pages in Google using exact match and so on.

There are also a whole bunch of other functions of the Market Samurai tool which are still in development and not functional at this stage. They include SEO Competition, Find Content, Promotion, Publish Content, Monetization and Adwords. I would imagine those features will only be available to those who purchase the tool.

Overview of the Market Samurai Tool

At this stage I haven't had a chance to really put the tool through it's paces however so far it appears to be a well built tool which works fast, is easy to navigate and provides you with some really useful data to help find and target the most profitable keywords for your market.

The tool is still a little buggy as it is still in development but most of those should be ironed out over the following days. How reliable the data Market Samurai provides can only be proven in time and most of the data seems to be pulled from the Google Keyword tool which hasn't proved to be particularly accurate. More research needs to be done to analyze competition as we know that going off an exact match search in Google alone is not enough data to know if we can obtain a top search engine position. The other interesting option was the OCI option which determines how likely that keyword is to result in a sale which will be interesting to see how accurate that value is.