Dave and Jay - Crazy Web Entrepreneurs

Since our review of SEO Elite, I’ve received a number of requests for a review on Brad Callen’s other major product entitled Keyword Elite (please remember that any links out to the Keyword Elite site are affiliate links).

If you haven’t heard of it before, Keyword Elite is a very interesting keyword research tool. Like SEO Elite, it’s not exactly revolutionary, however even as a critic it’s hard to deny the time-saving benefits of this software. At the same time though, the software does have a number of weaknesses - mainly that it relies on overture to pull its data - but if you are willing to cough up the cash and buy a Word Tracker or Keyword Discovery, account then it’s flexible enough to pull data from there as well.

I can’t honestly say I’m surprised that Keyword Elite pulls its traffic data from overture, but I do view it as a weakness since overture is planning on eventually pulling the plug on free and easy access to their data. While Brad may come up with an alternative source, it’s definitely something to keep in mind when going in.

Anyway, on to the review!

Keyword Elite Project 1: Create a Keyword List

This project is the one you will likely spend the most time in, and thankfully it’s quite easy to use. You simply input your main phrase, and the software goes to work generating a list of literally every conceivable key phrase related to what you’re looking for. This is ideal because unlike many free tools out there, you’re not limited to the top 100 or so results -  you can start off looking for anything from 100 to 10,000 results, though oddly enough the software doesn’t seem to count very well, since it usually goes over the number requested. For example, a recent search I did for 100 results came back with 241, so not really a big deal unless you’re picky.

Generating lists this in-depth allows you to really target long tail search terms, however it also takes awhile since once again Keyword Elite pulls its data from public sources. If you’re searching for a few thousand terms (3,000+), it’s not uncommon to go and have lunch and come back, only to find it still plugging away. For smaller searches it just takes a few minutes to complete.

What I do love about this project is the variety of terms that come up. As an example for this review I did a search for 200 terms related to “Lawn Mowers”, and I was really impressed with what came up - for instance, brand names of lawn mowers, questions people would ask like “what is the best lawn mower”, as well as types of lawn mowers (electric, gas, self propelled, etc.). If you want, you can check out the complete list here.

Also, the program makes it really easy to either transfer these keywords over to the other projects for further research, or to edit them for importing directly to your adwords account. Overall, I would give project 1 a 10 out of 10, just because I can’t imagine a way to make it better and I don’t know of any free tool that generates this many terms and allows you to do what Keyword Elite does.

PS: As a side bonus for those of you looking to build spam pages, once you select a number of keyphrases in project 1, simply right click and an option will appear to generate adsense pages. If you want, you can select 100’s of different terms and Keyword Elite will find free articles to populate the pages with and place your adsense blocks automatically. We don’t use it, but for those that may want to, it functions as advertised.

Keyword Elite Project 2: Analyze PPC Listings

Essentially, this project is the same as the traffic estimator used in Google Adwords - in fact, it pulls the data directly from the traffic estimator, so that isn’t exactly surprising. However, what it also does is eliminate the need for you to import the keyword lists you created in project 1 into adwords manually, just to find out how much the terms cost and if the traffic is worth giving it a try.

Project 2 also has a number of extra features that make it more than just a local version of Google’s traffic estimator, such as being able to perform allintitle, allinanchor and allintext searches using your keyword list. I’m not really sure how applicable that is to most people, and it’s much better done on SEO Elite, but it’s there if you need it. All you have to do is click the appropriate box on step 4 of the project screen and the program will generate the results for you under the number of results tab.

For the most part, this project is rather redundant because you could easily log into adwords and do this yourself, however the project has a single saving grace: the filter function. If you’re working on thousands of keyphrases, it’s pretty easy to get lost in the data, but here you can tell Keyword Elite to only bring back results to you that fit your needs. Literally everything is covered in the filters, from how many searches (according to overture or wordtracker) to what your cost per click will be, and when it’s all said and done you can filter up to 14 different sets of data to weed out the terms you don’t want.

Overall, this project does what it says it does, however it would be nice if the program could optimize your bid price as well, so that you could tell the program to find out how much it would cost to be the #3 ad for your terms. Currently it just tells you the highest bid price, and it’s quite common that once you lower your price, the #2 or #3 spot is much cheaper - but since project 2 does only the bare minimum, I have to give it a 5 out of 10. Kudos for the effort, but it could have been so much more!

Keyword Elite Project 3: Select a Keyword List

The title of this project is very misleading, because in actual usage it’s very similar to project 1 except that it uses Keyword Elite’s own dictionary files, as opposed to scraping online suggestion tools. This means it runs much, much faster - but on the negative side, the results look a lot like overture some days. By that, I mean the words it tacks on don’t look very natural. A good example of this using the keyphrase “Lawn Mower” returns a few results like this: “snapper zero turn lawn mower beautiful”…! If you want to see the whole list it generated, click here.

Once again, this project is kind of redundant considering project 1, but with the exception of the poorly chosen name it performs as advertised - and probably makes a good backup feature should the free suggestion tools ever find a way to keep Keyword Elite out.

For this project, I would rate it a 3 out of 10. I give it 3 points solely for being much faster then project 1, but beyond that I have to question why it was included.

Keyword Elite Project 4: Analyze Keyword Competition

This project is more for those of you who aren’t in PPC as it looks solely at on-page factors such as comparing title tags, H1 tags etc..

Awhile back, Brad Callen offered a free program to his SEO Elite customers provided they called a special phone number and left audio testimonials about his product. I can’t remember the name of the free program, but it did the same thing project 4 does -  however being a free product, it was only supported for a few months and eventually stopped working… that’s how he got hundreds of audio testimonials on his site.

The only big difference I can tell is that after a year of having Keyword Elite, it still works. However I don’t think in today’s search engine world that this is really an effective way to see how competitive a term is; it would have been better to include a dumbed down version of SEO Elite that would tell you how many links were pointed to each site, even if for marketing reasons it would only give you a number and maybe percentage of those that used your term for anchor text.

All that being said, I know some people still swear by this sort of information, and if this is what you’re looking for then it’s a 10 out of 10 - however for me, it’s a 1 out of 10 only because it works.

Keyword Elite Project 5: Spy on Adwords Competition

Project 5 is definitely a case of saving the best for last; if you’re looking to buy this software solely for keyword research, then this won’t matter much to you. However if you are involved in PPC advertising, affiliate sales, and all that jazz, then you will literally love this - not so much because it’s easy or perfect, but because it does something that is extremely difficult to do by hand.

As you probably guessed by the project’s title, this project allows you to keep tabs on your competition - imagine this:

You want to sell red widgets as an affiliate, you’ve used project 1 to find a list of keyphrases, but you’re not rich and can’t afford to lose 100’s or 1000’s of dollars experimenting on keyphrases. However, you’re a patient person, so you find as many keyphrases your competition is advertising on as possible and then load up keyword elite.  Tell it which keyphrases to check and which website to verify is advertising for that term, and then tell the program to check these once or twice or more per day.

The idea behind this project is people will only spend money where they make money, so if advertising on a keyphrase continues to cost them more than they are earning over time, they will drop that term. The downside is a lot of amateurs run their own PPC accounts, so some people may unwittingly continue to pay - however, it’s one more way you can insulate yourself from needless losses.

While this project isn’t really keyword research, it does provide a function that you can’t get anywhere else (that I know of), and if you’re in the affiliate game or simply looking to sell your own products, it can be a very handy tool to do research - which can save you a lot of money down the road.

Unfortunately, the project doesn’t find which keyphrases your competition is advertising on for you, so you still have to do the grunt work on this yourself. An easy way around at least some of the work load is another service called Spyfu. This service attempts to scrape what terms your competition is advertising on, however it’s not detailed enough for day to day comparisons, and keeping track of the data would be something you’d have to do by hand - so I would reccommend using Spyfu to track down a good deal of terms that your competition is paying for, and then enter them into Keyword Elite to save you from hours of manual labor.

Overall, I give this project an 8 out of 10. It works as advertised and provides a useful service no one else does, and if you’re motivated enough to make use of this, project 5 alone I feel is worth the purchase price of the software. If you’re not into PPC advertising, then you really shouldn’t consider this when it comes time to purchase.

Concluding Thoughts:

Price: $176 USD with a 60 day refund policy
Upgrades: One thing no one can say about Brad Callen is that he doesn’t update his software - here you can find a list of upgrades/fixes done in the past year.

Overall:

This program is stable and functions as advertised, which sadly isn’t all that common, however don’t be confused into thinking this is the silver bullet to internet riches. It’s merely a tool which makes your life a little easier. If you’re a looking to start a site or two, then you’d be better off buying a week-long word tracker membership, but if you’re doing this as a profession and need to find keyphrases either for PPC or long tail search terms to rank for, then Keyword Elite should be worth the price of admission.