Has anyone tried SECockpit as their Keyword Research tool ?

[iung]

I'm looking for a tool to help with keyword research, and judging by the presentation and few reviews I could find, SECockpit at http://swissmademarketing.com/secockpit/ seems to be a nice product. They pull their data (partly) from SEOmoz, which is a good sign.

Any feedback ?

Thx

Gil

[SamHaenni]

Hey Ryan

Glad you asked! Our competition formula uses

• On Site Factors (Keyword in Title, Description, URL, ...?) 
  -> is the page actually trying to rank for the term
• Page Competition Data (PA)
• Domain Competition Data (DA)

I agree 100% with your example of a Wiki Page, that's why the DA part of the formula has only a very small influence on our competition value in comparison to the PA part.

The reason why results 1-3 may show a lower competition average than 8-10, is because Google sometimes shows results, which don't appear competitive according to SEOmoz (eg. Videos, News, etc...) -> that's why we recently changed the default view in SECockpit to show the average competition over results 1-10.

Don't hesitate to ask anything else!

[RyanKent]

Hi Sam,

I have a question about the tool's difficulty assessment. When watching the main video on your site, at about 4 minutes in there is a review of data using "dog training" as the seed keyword. The 8th result it the phrase "how to train your dog". If I am reading the graph correctly, the orange bar indicates difficulty. What seems strange is to obtain a 4-7 Google ranking shows as very easy, yet to obtain an 8-10 ranking shows as very hard for the same keyword.

I will make a guess that your process examines the DA/PA of the pages involved and assesses difficulty based on those metrics? I am not sure if that is the best method as a Wiki page, for example, is generally on the first page of SERPs for most queries. Also there are EMD names as well which may make it appear easy to beat from a DA/PA perspective, but otherwise it is a much higher level of difficulty to beat.

I like the tool and will likely try it out, but I had these questions previously and your reply here led me to going ahead and asking these questions. I hope you don't mind.

[SamHaenni]

Hi Gil

This is Sam from SwissMadeMarketing - I'm the main developer of SECockpit - so I hope you don't mind me joining the conversation

I think we all agree that to determine the competition for a keyword, we need to look at what's ranking in the Top 10 positions on Google and get good data (preferably from SEOmoz

Unfortunately, many Keyword Tools use the "No. of Competing Pages" figure to determine competition - which is a pretty useless number for many reasons (we explain why here: http://swissmademarketing.com/secockpit/launch-2-rpdl-23fb6/)

Fortunately, there are keyword tools - eg. Market Samurai - which allow you to do a proper competition analysis for a keyword - this means, scraping the Top 10 results from Google, getting the Google Page Rank of the Page & Domain, etc, etc.

The bad news is, doing this for ONE keyword in Market Samurai takes you around 1-2 mins. So, what do you do with a list of 100 or more keyword ideas? Waste hours and days? I don't think so.

This is where the real power of SECockpit lies. We've built a Server Farm, which can get the entire competition data for about 200 keywords a minute. This includes:

• Search Volume / CPC data from Google Keyword Tool
• Top 10 Ranking Results from Google Search
• SEOmoz Information for every URL (mozRank, Page Auth, Domain Auth, Backlinks, etc)
  (- we even get additional information like free Exact Match Domains)

We then crunch all that data into a simple 0-100 competition value (similar to the "difficulty" value shown in the SEOmoz Keyword Tool).

This means, with SECockpit, you can order large lists of keywords by their "real" difficulty within minutes.

Look forward to any questions you may have

Cheers,
Sam

[JamesNorquay]

Hi,

This tool looks like Market Samurai to be honest which is a once off fee, this tool is a monthly fee.

You can use the SEOmoz API to make your own program to do this, example:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/competitive-analysis-in-under-60-seconds-using-google-docs-12649