The keyword research tools of the Maverick Keyword Researcher come in 3 general categories. The first bunch of tools are for generating ideas for a niche/topic. The second group of tools are for getting as many alternative keywords of a niche. The last group is for analyzing the real-world statistics of the keywords.

Saved Searches

Every keyword search you make will be automatically saved into text files. I am working on a project module that assigns keywords to a project. The screen shots above do not have that at the moment. I added a lot jquery effects to make the interface more user-friendly. You may check out the list of keywords, download the keyword files and mass delete them with a few clicks of the mouse. The table design was inspired by WordPress.

Non-Google Search Engines

There are a lot of top searches and buzz lists from some non-Google search engines. I won’t reveal these search engines because I don’t want to receive another letter from them. The keywords from this tool generates the most popular keywords that are being searched on the internet through non-Google search engines.

Google AdWords Keyword Suggestions

Did you know that you get a different set of keywords if you select a different country from the Google AdWords Tool? That was what I discovered. I created a custom tool to import as many keywords from Google AdWords by selecting multiple countries. You may select up to 233 countries but it would take a long time. Most of the keywords are repeated but you may find a couple of gems in there. Usually, I simply click on the “popular countries” link to get keywords from the most popular countries.

Here’s a preview of the Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool:

You need to be gentle with this tool because Google does not like it when you use their free tools too frequently. I created a random search timer that spaces out the import queries every 15 to 30 seconds.

I combined the “Categories with most new buyers”, “Categories with fewer competitors” and “Categories with most products” into 1 page. This saves me space because the menu in the application has limited space. Then you have the “Most searched products”, “Most inquired products” and “Trade Trends” on their individual pages.

The thing about Micro Niche Finder that bugs me the most is it cannot display the search counts for imported keywords from a text file. You only get search counts if you enter a search term in the search field. Other than that, sometimes, the Brainstorm and Hot Trends features do give you the search counts. I keep getting “Dig This” for my search counts. If you click on it, you will see a list of related keywords that may or may not display the search count for that keyword. This is extremely frustrating. What’s worse? Sometimes you see weird ***** in the search count column. Overall, the search count is quite pathetic and there is no reason why it cannot be improved.

Another thing that bugs me about this software is that it does not allow me to select broad, phrase or exact matching options for the keywords. You are forced to use the exact matching options by default and I do not see any option to change that.

Micro Niche Finder was designed to prevent getting blocked by Google.com. It goes slow so that you do not need to keep entering the Google captcha. That is great but it takes more time to check all fields and search them by columns and not by rows. You check the keywords you want and search for the OCI, exact count, ad cost etc. This takes a long long time to complete. You cannot just let it run and have all the stats you want with 1 click. Once 1 column has completed its search, you have to repeat that process on another column.

There is a background downloading service that claims to automate all of this but it does not seem to work correctly on mine. It takes forever to complete and I think it hangs there and does nothing most of the time.

I can verify that the search counts, OCI and CPC are correct. I verified the stats at Google and Live Search as you can see from the screen shots above. I used the keyword “acuvue” for this example. Microsoft says there is a 86% probability that someone searching for this keyword will have the intention to buy something. These stats are correct in Micro Niche Finder. However, I have no idea where the exact phrase matches come from as this data does not seem to come from Google AdWords.

I emailed the author to ask him why he could not give us the search counts. He replied and told me it was to prevent getting “Google blocks”, which could result in a temporary ban on your IP address from accessing Google’s search engine. I do not see why he could not do the same for the search counts like what he did for the OCI, exact matches and the other fields.

Conclusion

The next version that will allow mass search counts will be 3-4 months away! I have no idea why people can say this software is great when I have found so many problems with it. I am not trying to be negative but I cannot find a lot of positives with this keyword software.