Micro Niche Finder is one of the two tools I use every day for keyword research (the other one is Market Samurai in case you wondered). Micro Niche Finder has some extremely strong points for it, and some minor niggles against it. Overall, the positives win hands down.

Micro Niche Finder’s power lies in these two features

• Excellent keyword search results
• Unique Strength Of Competition indicator

Need keywords, you got keywords

One major weakness of many keyword research tools is that when you use them to generate more keywords based on your seed keyword, the results are either too narrow in scope, or completely off the wall irrelevant.

Micro Niche Finder does an excellent job in retrieving related keywords, and even branches out laterally to find semantically related long-tail keywords without any further research. It is not perfect, though, and nothing still replaces doing a bit of manual work to discover a wide enough scope of keywords to comb through. Nevertheless, often I don’t even have stray outside Micro Niche Finder to find good keywords with massive search volumes and low competition.

And the winning feature is…

…The Strength Of Competition index. This one single feature is worth many times over the measly $97 dollars the software costs.

You see, it is not enough that a keyword has a high search volume and low amount of competing pages. The real key to determining good keywords is understanding how strong the competition on that particular keyword is, regardless of the number of pages you are competing against. It is the quality of the competition that counts, not just the number.

You might have a keyword that has a few hundred competing pages, but they are so well optimized for the keyword that you stand little chance of ranking well for that keyword. Similarly, you might have 1,200,000 competing pages, but could still easily rank well for the keyword. It all depends on the quality of the competing pages.

Micro Niche Finder has a secret formula (but of course) that measures the inanchor, inurl and intitle counts of the competing pages, and comes up with a number from 0 to 1000 to represent the strength of competition. It then simply labels each keyword with three traffic lights:

• GREEN – easy-peasy, go for it now
• YELLOW – tough, but possible, and
• RED – don’t even think about it,

Personally I believe there is more involved in the calculation than the three counts, but who cares – it works!

Compared to the competition analysis modules of other keyword research tools, Micro Niche Finder blows them clean out of the water. For example, Market Samurai has a great competition analysis module, but it is difficult to interpret, and each keyword has to be analyzed individually.

I was initially somewhat skeptical about the apparent simplicity of the system, but after using it for almost a year and having cross-checked the results with a whole pile of other keyword tools and experience, I have come to rely on the SOC traffic lights almost exclusively.

Data displays and other nifty stuff

Micro Niche Finder returns three tabs of results: Broad Match, Exact Match and Phrase Match. Each tab has the usual goodies of Local Search Count, Global Search Count, Trend and Exact Phrase Match.

In addition to that MNF returns average ad cost for the keyword and Microsoft’s Online Commercial Intention figure.

A handy feature is Measure of Backlinks figure that gives a ballpark estimate of the number of backlinks required to land on the first page of SERPS. With Google constantly updating its algorithms, this measure is getting less and less reliable, as the quality of the backlinks is weighing more heavily in Google’s thinking.

If you look for keyword domains, you can check the domain availability of each keyword straight from Micro Niche Finder. This feature is also a great time saver, if you’re a domain-whore, like me.

Speed and Google-love

Micro Niche Finder is not the fastest tool on the planet, and is considerably slower than Market Samurai. Considerable here is a relative term – to me it doesn’t matter is screening 200 keywords takes 5 minutes or 3 minutes, really.

Micro Niche Finder uses Google results exclusively. You can choose the "Search Engine Courtesy" setting to avoid getting blocked by Google for making too many queries too quickly. In addition to this, if you have massive searches, you can do the queries on the background. While much slower, this will ensure that Google does not block your IP because of too many requests.

Geographic results

Micro Niche Finder supports all of Google’s regional engines for searches you might want to do in a specific country, say Australia or UK, so you can drill your keyword research right down. Micro Niche Finder also allows you to choose a different language.

Project Management

Micro Niche Finder automatically saves all your searches for later analysis. This is a great timesaver, since you never have to run a search twice unless you choose to do so.

Micro Niche Finder also features "Project Baskets" in which you can collect your favorite results from several searches.

Other handy options

If you are battling with finding your next hot niche, Micro Niche Finder can help you. "Hot Trends" returns a random list of hot search terms right now (At the time of writing Stevie Nicks if ranking hot with tons of searches – who’d have thought!), and "Brainstorm" returns an ever-changing list of potential niches.

You can drill down or up for each keyword, or perform a LSI (Latent Semantic Index) search on any keyword – this is an awesome feature to find more semantically relevant keywords.

You can also find affiliate programs for products, search Clickbank Marketplace and Amazon as well as retrieve articles from E-Zine articles on any keyword with a click of a button. This is all good stuff and a real timesaver when you learn to use it. I don’t mean it is hard; I just tend to forget that those features are there .

Support

James J. Jones, the author of Micro Niche Finder provides good support and personally replies to inquiries, very quickly. On top of that, Micro Niche Finder has a large and lively user community so it is easy to find help if it is needed. The support consists of

• Support website with knowledgebase and a good ticketed support system. The knowledgebase covers pretty much every question you may have
• A frequently updated blog with a lot of important information in regards to Search Engine Optimization
• Helpful training videos

James updates the program frequently, and updates are free for life. In fact, Micro Niche Finder 5 is coming out in February 2010, and the price might go up with the new version. Now is a good time to get your foot in the door when the price is still the low $97.00!

Micro Niche Finder gives you two licenses by default, so you can install the software on two different computers. On top of this, you will receive a USB drive (in the mail) with Micro Niche Finder on the go, should you need to use the software at, say, client’s offices.

Bonuses

As is common, Micro Niche Finder comes with a bunch of bonuses. These are actually really good value and I learned quite a few new tricks from the bonus material provided.

The bonuses are:

• Lifetime updates and support
• Additional license for the second installation
• MNF To Go USB drive
• Squidoo Advantage eBook
• Adsense Page Generator Tool
• Fast PLR Profits eBook
• Yahoo Answers Traffic Guide eBook

So, what’s wrong with it?

Nothing is perfect, and neither if Micro Niche Finder. I don’t have any major beefs with it, but here are the issues I’d like to see some improvement.

- The program is not quite as polished over all as it could be
– User interface is clumsy
– Occasional glitches with keeping the Google Adwords sessions active

Verdict: Should I get it?

This is one keyword research tool you should have, no matter who you are. Keyword research is getting more important by the day, and Internet Marketers, bloggers and anyone with a website will have a massive edge over their competition with the information Micro Niche Finder provides. This is one powerful piece of software you should get right now; I can promise you won’t be sorry.