You’ll have noticed lots of very useful features in Market Samurai, and sometimes trying to get to grips with them can seem overwhelming. It’s easy to get sided into just using the features that you know best, but you really want to learn to use this software to your best advantage.

I’ve been using Market Samurai since last August, and have found a fair number of ways to speed up and improve my use of it. I wanted to share them with you, so here’s my first of a series of tips about using Market Samurai.

This post is about using the first screen that you see after you’ve clicked on the words “Keyword Research”.

1. Using the “Add Permutations” Button

If you’re going to generate keywords, then you want to use the Add Permutations button after you’ve generated the keywords, not before.

The “permutations” of a keyword phrase are all the possible orders of the words in the keyword phrase.

For example, there are six permutations of “bluebell scented soap”. They are:
bluebell scented soap, bluebell soap scented, scented bluebell soap, scented soap bluebell, soap bluebell scented, soap scented bluebell.

A 2-word phrase has 1×2 = 2 permutations,
a 3-word phrase has 1x2x3 = 6 permutations,
a 4-word phrase has 1x2x3x4 = 24 permutations, and so on.

The “Add Permutations” button will add the permutations of the main keyword of your current tab, and the permutations will appear at the bottom of your keyword list:

So if your tab’s main keyword is bluebell scented soap, then clicking on the button will add all the permutations of bluebell scented soap to the bottom of your keyword list.

It won’t add permutations of the other keywords in your list. For example, it won’t add permutations of “scented essential oils”. So if you want to analyze the various word orders of “scented essential oils”, you open a new tab for it. Just click on the key symbol to the left of the phrase “scented essential oils”, and that will open the new tab for you:

Remember, if you’re going to generate keywords in your current tab, then you want to use the button after you have generated the keywords, and not before. Otherwise, the newly generated keywords will over-write the permutations.

2. Using the “Add Keywords” Box and Button and the “Import” Keywords Button under the main Keyword list

If you’re going to generate keywords, then only use the Add Keywords button after you’ve generated the keywords, not before. The same applies to the Import button under the Keyword list window: use it after generating keywords, not before. They work in a similar way to the Add Permutations button above.

You can paste or type additional keywords into the Add Keywords box beforehand, but if you click on the Add Keywords button before you generate keywords, the generated keywords will over-write the ones you just added.

Suppose you have a list of words in a .txt file that you want to analyze: then you can either copy and paste them into the Add Keywords box above, or you can click on the Import button circled in yellow above and navigate to your .txt file.

If you’re going to use both buttons, then the order in which you use them doesn’t matter. But if you’re going to generate keywords, remember to do the generating first.

3. Using the Positive and Negative Keyword Boxes and their Update Buttons

Only click the Positive Keywords Update button if you want every keyword in your keyword list to contain a word from the Positive Keywords box. Only click the Negative Keywords Update button if you want none of the keywords in your keyword list to contain any of the words from the Negative Keywords box.

When you type or paste words into the Positive Keywords box and click Update, Market Samurai removes every keyword from your Keyword list that doesn’t contain any of those words. For example, if you just put the word “soap” into the Positive Keywords box and click Update, then Market Samurai will remove all keywords from the list on the right that don’t contain the word “soap”:

Another way to remove all keywords that don’t contain the word “soap” is to click the word “soap” anywhere in your keyword list and then click the check (tick) mark to the right of it:

When you type or paste words into the Negative Keywords box and click Update, Market Samurai removes every keyword from your Keyword list that contains any of those words. So if you want to remove from the list any keywords that contain, say, “olive” or “soy” or “goat”, then you can either type those three words into the Negative Keywords box, or you can click each of those words anywhere in the keyword list and then click the cross to the right of them. If you do it this second way then you only need to click each of the words once.

4. Using the “Export” and “Clear” Buttons

When in doubt, export. And especially: export before you click on Clear. Which brings me to this mantra: when in doubt, steer clear of the Clear button.

The Export buttons create .txt files of the list of words above the buttons, which you save onto your computer. By exporting the words, you avoid the frustrations of having to recreate a list.

The Clear button under the main keyword list does exactly what it says: it clears everything out of the keyword list box.

The Clear button under the Negative Keywords box clears everything from the box and puts all your negative keywords back into your main keyword list.

The Clear button under the Positive keywords box puts everything back into the main keyword box.

These are all great reasons to export.

5. Before Deleting Individual Generated Keywords

Instead of spending time going though the generated keywords to delete them, click on the Analyze Keywords button and first get search or traffic numbers using the minimum searches filter.

This way, you get rid of a lot of unwanted keywords immediately. Then get the SEO Comp (SEOC) with a maximum filter. Then if you want you can start deleting some keywords. You’ll see that in the example above that won’t be necessary – we can go straight on to check all the other boxes that we’re interested in.

This can save you a lot of time. Market Samurai is a lot faster now than it ever was, so let the software do the sifting for you.

6. Using the “min” and “max” Phrase Length Features

If you change your minimum and maximum phrase length, there’s no need to regenerate your keywords – your keyword list will automatically change:

A little bit of Market Samurai magic…

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