One of the things I hear asked around the internet in marketing forums and other places, is the question of which keyword tool is better. Well, actually most people want to know which paid keyword tool is the best, but that kind of depends on what you are doing and what you are using the keywords for.

I use two keyword tools. Micro Niche Finder from James Jones and Keyword Sniper Pro from Jack Duncan.

They each have different functions and are designed for particular kinds of keyword research.

Micro Niche Finder by James Jones

Micro Niche Finder is a tool that accesses the external Google Adwords Keyword Tool (GAKT).  I am talking about the external tool here. MNF uses Google’s API to log into the external GAKT and will bring you back 100 results to your desktop. Actually it brings back information for broad, phrase and exact match, but concentrates on using exact match.

Then MNF can also hunt down exact competition numbers for you. This is where the program will enter the keyword phrase in quotes for you in a Google search box and return those results to you.

It will also give you an estimation of the difficult of ranking for that particular keyword phrase, by showing you a red, yellow or green icon (green being the best). This feature is kind of like Market Samurai, but there is just one icon to look at instead of that big spreadsheet sort of display that MS will create for you.

Lots of people like this idea that the software will decide for you which keywords to target. Some people like me don’t like it so much. I don’t particularly like it because it seems as if the software is in the business of telling you “No” and the truth of it is that you can probably rank for almost anything with enough work.

Maybe not things like credit cards for bad credit or payday loans, but for a lot of other things, the true competition is often very small.

But for what it does as far as bringing you back results from the GAKT, Micro Niche Finder works great. And if what you are looking for is a quick, very well supported piece of keyword software that will help you build lists of keywords from the Adwords tool, Micro Niche Finder is absolutely one of the best.

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Keyword Sniper Pro from Jack Duncan

Keyword Sniper Pro is a product from Jack Duncan at Marketbold.com. Jack puts a lot of time into making his products and making sure they work. Like James Jones, Jack’s support is top notch.

Google does change around their search API and does not tell the developers more often than not, and when this does happen, jack’s software is updated quickly. Often in as little as 2 hours.

KSP is a quality product from a great guy.

Keyword Sniper Pro 2.0 does differ from Micro Niche Finder in how it finds keywords for you to use. KSP uses the drop down boxes from the Google suggest tool to build a list of keywords for you to work with.

These keywords are the ones that you see when start typing a search into the Google search box. This is not the Instant feature – that one is for changing the results page based on what you type into the search box. The suggestions are those phrases you see underneath the search box.

KSP 2.0 collects all those suggestions according to a set of rules that you input into the software. That sentence makes it sound so complicated and it is actually a very simple thing to do.

You pick a target keyword phrase and type that into the keyword phrase box. Then you pick some prefixes you want to attach to the keyword phrase. I usually choose letters of the alphabet in groups like a-g.

You click the search type you want to do and click the start searching button and the software will bring you back a list of the keyword phrases it finds with your keyword phrase and words in front of your phrase that start with letter o f the alphabet.

Clear as mud, right? 

Here is an example.

Let’s say I want to write about learning French. I use speak French as my keyword. I type this phrase into the keyword box and add the letters a,b,c,d,e,f,g into the prefix keyword area.

I click the search button and Keyword Sniper Pro will bring me back a list of keywords that have speak French in them and that also have other words in front of speak French.

Keyword phrases like “a way to speak French” or “do I really need to speak French” (those are for example purposes only). There are a couple of different kinds of searches you can perform and jack explains those very well in the documentation for the program.

By the time you have gone through the alphabet, you have a huge list of keyword phrases that came right from the Google suggest boxes. I mean sometimes you get thousands of keywords. Not always, it does depend on your keyword phrase that you start with.

Then you can remove the duplicates and get the software to copy the keyword phrases over to another tab on the software and KSP will semi-automatically put the keyword phrase into the Google Adwords Keyword Tool for you.

When you click the search button, you will find even more keywords from the GAKT that are related to your original keyword phrase. Click another button and the software puts all those results back into your original list along with the search volume figures.

Then you select some of the keywords to find competition numbers for.

All of this within the software itself.

And actually it is way easier to do than it is to write about it.

The result is that you can get (depending on your niche) an enormous list of keywords to use in creating articles or content for your websites.

Searching for keywords like this is a fabulous idea and Keyword Sniper Pro is an awesome way to do this.

Since these tools do different things, they are not really in competition with each other. I personally use Micro Niche Finder as a quick way to find some keywords to start with and then I put the best of them into Keyword Sniper Pro to build myself a huge list of phrase to use in the content of my websites.

This system works for me because I write a lot in a number of niche markets. One or the other may work better for you.

If you want software to quickly hunt through only the initial results from the external Google Adwords Keyword Tool and you are making small sites with just a few pages, then more thatn likely Micro Niche Finder is the software for you.

If you are going to create lots of content for an authority site, then Keyword Sniper Pro is the way to go.

If you’re like me, and you have a mix of sites, then get both.