A few months ago, I had a client who wanted to find out if the niche he was going for was profitable. At that moment, Ahrefs was among the marketing tools he was using to get the list of competitors in his niche and their marketing strategies and whether he stood a chance going against them. He also wanted to know the keywords used by his competitors to rank and the number of articles he needed to write in his niche so that he could cut through the competition. He hired us because he didn’t know exactly how to use the internet marketing tools he bought to get answers. It is essential to know why your competitors are outranking you so that you can strategize on how you can counter-attack them. The central fact in the content marketing industry is knowing to rank for because that is where the money lies. That is why you need a tool like SpyFu to show you every keyword bought on Google.
For any blogger who wants to improve their visibility, SpyFu is the best option available. Reason being that this tool has an array of tools that allows you to track and look at overlapping and specific keywords for up to 3 websites. What I love about this keyword competition tool is its stylish and attractive interface. In this SpyFu review, we are going to explore all its features and what makes it unique from other similar devices.
Table of Contents
What Is SpyFu?
SpyFu is a keyword research tool capable of analyzing the competitiveness of your keywords to improve your online search performance. You can also use SpyFu to look for the most successful search terms used by your competitors in their organic and paid search campaigns. Numerous tools are offering similar services. However, SpyFu is unique since it’s the only tool that extends its services to “spying.” What is fascinating about this tool is that you can type any website, and it will give you every keyword they have ever bought on Google. You will also be provided with organic keywords that the site has used for the past ten years and the changes made in that period.
SpyFu also allows its users to know algorithms made by Google and how they affected the website. It is possible to see when a particular company started using its AdWords campaigns and how they changed their ad copy and keywords groups to get improve conversion rates. The ultimate purpose of this tool is to understand your competitors’ secrets so that you can find ways to outsmart them and rank better. To get the best results when using SpyFu, focus on successful brands in your niche and not the shop next to you.
Both individual and professional websites can use SpyFu since it offers crucial analytic data to the user. Although my client wanted me to provide competitive analysis services, I also using SpyFu, and I will show you later on how it has worked for my client and me.
SPYFU FOR AGENCY USE
Brands and agencies can use SpyFu internet competitive analysis tool to:
- Find out the monetary value of particular keywords
- Allow clients to know the importance of ranking for specific keywords
- White label SEO reports and audits
- Help clients devise effective marketing strategies that can get them ROI
- Encourage clients to spend more since they can measure their ROI
SPYFU FOR PERSONAL USE
SpyFu is also suitable for personal use, and anyone can use to do the following:
- Since helps you get effective keywords, you can create paid advertising campaigns
- Know precisely what your competitors are spending on keywords you want to run for
- Keyword tracking in the Search engines
- Find relevant, profitable keywords
- Capitalize on the swipe file to put up successful ad copy
- Get insights about what keywords your competitors are ranking for
- Identify which keywords successful competitors use and their budgets
- Look for backlink opportunities
SpyFu Key Features
SpyFu has lots of exciting features to help you create successful ad campaigns. Let’s look at some of them and how they are going to benefit your search program. There are also photographs to demonstrate how the software is designed.
SpyFu features:
- SEO Research
- PPC Research
- Keyword Rank Tracking
- Competitive Analysis
- Keyword Research
- Backlink Research
SEO RESEARCH
SpyFu gives users organic search data and how they perform on any website. The tool allows you to get an analysis of the following data points of both you and your competitor’s site.
SEO Overview
This is the dashboard which shows overall SEO information on any website which include:
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- Organic keywords figures
- Organic traffic flow by month
- Keyword gainers and losers
- Value of organic traffic
- Type of inbound links
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SEO Keywords
This report is critical in keyword research since it gives you the most profitable organic search keywords for any website. If you want to know how your site and your competitors perform, then this is the best tool for the job.
SpyFu will give you reports on rank, keyword difficulty, cost-per-click, and searches per month & clicks per month for every keyword.
One of the notable features is how it can to sort keywords by different categories which include:
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- Keyword rank gains
- Most profitable keywords
- Page one keywords
- Almost there keywords
- Keyword rank losses
- Newly ranked keywords
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Another useful feature of SpyFu is its Keyword Groups report, which arranges related keywords in groups. As a SpyFu user, you will get insights on the topics that give any website the best ranks and the hierarchy of those topics.
SEO Backlinks
SpyFu also helps you to understand the backlink profile of any website. However, compared to other tools like Ahrefs, the feature is not that comprehensive but will give you enough backlink information. The report shows you individual backlinks pointing out to any website, and for each backlink, you will know the strength of the referring domain with its monthly traffic. Another thing about SpyFu sorts the backlinking websites into categories. This way, you will get a clear understanding of whether your website or your competitors’ has more backlinks from blogs, news sites, .edus, forms, or other types of websites.
- PPC RESEARCH
SpyFu is a powerful tool that can get you 13 years’ worth of data on paid search activity of any popular website. Just like organic search, you can conduct PPC research for your competitors’ website as well as yours.
PPC Keywords
PPC keywords in the SpyFu interface for researching is almost similar to the SEO keywords tool. With this tool, the user can the paid keywords for any website and other important information on keywords such as:
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- Monthly searches
- Ad position
- Cost-per-click
- Monthly cost
- Ad timeline
- Total ads
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As I’m not running any PPC campaigns for my website so I’m showing you the stats from one of our competitors.
With SpyFu’s grouping technology, you can find identical paid search terms and combining them into groups. This way, you can quickly identify keyword categories that both you and your competitors’ are bidding on.
PPC Ad History
SpyFu also shows paid advertisements used by your competitor. This allows you to understand the marketing concept of your competitors and whether they are valid or not. Additionally, you can also check on the ads used with every particular keyword, including frequently used ads.
- KEYWORD RANK TRACKING
As a business, you need to track and understand your site’s position in Google search rankings. The beauty of SpyFu is that it has a keyword rank tracking feature to help you do that in a period. You need to upload your desired keywords first if you want to use this feature. This is not used to track keywords rank on your website alone, but also your competitor’s. Although this tool gives you useful information, it is not quite detailed, like in other similar keyword research tools. Another setback that the rank tracker does is that it is only updated once in a week. Other similar tools like AccuRanker and SEMrush update their rank trackers daily.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
The mentioned features are capable of spying on your competitors’. This means that you can use the keyword rank tracking and PPC research keyword features to explore your competition’s marketing strategies. However, to maximize and intensify your spying capabilities, SpyFu also offers other critical reports for competitive analysis. With these tools, you can find out who your competitors are and the keywords you share with them.
Top Organic Competitors
If you want to identify websites that you share the most organic search terms with, then the top natural competitor’s report will give you that. This report offers data on several SEO keywords for each website and the number of overlapping keywords.
Organic Kombat
With the Organic Kombat report, you can see a Venn diagram of top competitive websites. To identify which keywords you have in common with any combination of the sites, just select any portion of the Venn diagram. It’s a useful tool for finding out keyword gaps where your competitors rank in organic search, and you don’t.
Top Ad Competitors
With SpyFu, you can also get access to intelligence for paid search that relates to the above organic search reports. These reports are used to know and understand better your top competitors in paid search.
After discovering your top, the Kombat report will help you to identify the best keywords used by your competitors that you are not bidding on. After using SpyFu for sometimes now, I have discovered that identifying the competitive keywords used in paid search is the most critical intelligence offered by SpyFu.
Use SpyFu to Discover Your Competitor Keywords
Small and new businesses often undermine pay-per-click with a notion that it is too expensive to afford with their limited budget. However, it still plays a vital role in growing traffic for any website. Small businesses have to realize that PPC doesn’t necessarily have to be so expensive, and they don’t need to have experience in that field to use it. All that matters is having the right tool for the job.
WHY OPT FOR PPC ADVERTISING?
According to CleverClicks, PPC traffic converts 50% higher than organic traffic. Google also states that, on average, businesses make $2 in revenue for every $1 spent on AdWords. You learn critical lessons from your historical data, while the current data helps you to spot gaps in your marketing strategy by increasing site traffic and conversion. A good example is when successful companies make trials and errors in their paid marketing campaign, and you learn from their mistakes or successes.
SpyFu has all the PPC campaign data of any website, as long as they were created in the last 12 years. That is according to their website. Many businesses and brands have gone through the frustrations of spending hefty amounts on AdWords just as their competitors and not getting desired results. What makes this happen is that they are not targeting profitable keywords like their counterparts.
Use SpyFu to Do PPC Competitor Research
SEARCH FOR A COMPETITIVE WEBSITE YOU WANT TO RESEARCH
Head over to Spyfu.com, enter your competitor’s site in the search box, and click on the search button.
ANALYZE YOUR COMPETITOR’S KEYWORDS
Wait for some time, and you will see such an overview:
With these reports, you can compare the overall data for both organic (SEO) and paid search (PPC) keywords. To get a detailed list of the most valuable keywords used by your competitors, just click on Paid Keywords.
To toggle between different analytics segments, use the sidebar on the left of the screen. This means that you can identify your main competitors who use organic or paid keywords. You can also get information on shared keywords, some of the keywords they rank for, and much more. Another critical report is the recommendations of effective available keywords.
It is always good to analyze your website to find out if you are on the right track or not. Even if you are doing well, there is still room for improvement. This also helps you to discover your strengths and weaknesses.
EXPORT AND DOWNLOAD THE KEYWORDS
Click on the Export tab if you feel that you are ready to download your competitor’s keywords. There are two options to do this: as a CSV (a spreadsheet) or a PDF.
You are now good to go since you are equipped with the most valuable keywords in your niche, for future use.
SpyFu Pricing
There are three main price plans in SpyFu that range between $39 and $299 per month with a free 30-day trial.
- Basic Plan – This plan goes for $39 per month and is a perfect option for persons who don’t require API access.
- Professional Plan – With a price tag of $78 per month, the professional plan is a beautiful pick for companies wanting to track 15,000 keywords or have access to API.
- Team Plan – This plan costs $299 per month and is best suited for teams who need five user accounts.
Pros vs. Cons
Since I am still using SpyFu, here are several pros and cons that I have noticed.
Pros
- Flexible and affordable plans
- Offer useful features for competitive analysis
- Reliable support that responds quickly
- You can use numerous data
- It helps users to build compelling campaigns thanks to detailed information about valuable keywords.
- It has a smooth learning curve compared to other similar tools.
- Simple and easy to use interface
- Allows you to identify the keywords both you and your competitors rank for
- You can easily monitor changes in your SEO ranking
Cons
- Its Reports tool is not comprehensive enough to give users error, broken link, or other info. Similar tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, and Moz provide this information.
- Unfortunately, SpyFu doesn’t offer any social media reports. Therefore, you will have to look for an alternative tool if you want to know what’s trending in your niche.
Main Differences between Spyfu vs. SEMrush
These two tools are reliable since they do what they advertise. They are all paid tools. So, which one should you go for?
I have given you all the features of SpyFu and what it can do for you to remain competitive in the online industry. Let’s now compare SpyFu with its fierce rival – SEMrush and see which one offers the best services.
Here are five of the main distinctions between Spyfu and SEMrush:
- SEMrush still caps each tier, but SpyFu offers unlimited search results on higher price plans
- SEMrush has 8 years of experience while SpyFu has10 years of competitor data
- SEMrush is more of an SEO platform, whereas SpyFu offers more competitor analysis functionality
- SpyFu doesn’t have a Traffic Analysis tool, while SEMrush does
- SpyFu’s overall keyword research tool is not as comprehensive as SEMrush’s
HERE IS THE INFOGRAPHICS WHICH SHOWS THE MAIN DIFFERENCES BETWEEN SPYFU Vs SEMRUSH
SpyFu Customer Support
You can access SpyFu’s customer support via chat, and phone call, which is available between 4 am and 5 pm on weekdays. Moreover, they also have a quick response team that can be reached through this form.
SpyFu Competitors
SpyFu is an excellent keyword research and competitive analysis tool that gives other devices a run for their money. However, if you feel like it is not the right tool for you, here are the top SpyFu competitors or alternatives that are worth it:
- SEMrush
- Ahrefs
- KWFinder
- Serpstat
- Alexa
See More:-Best Keyword Research Tools for SEO
SpyFu Review
For competitive keyword research, this great tool will do you justice. The data provided by the SpyFu website keyword checker is simple and straightforward and helps you come up with keywords that are relevant to a specific niche. SpyFu pricing is also accommodative for everyone. Its array of tools makes me handle just about any product that I have without breaking a sweat.
If you want to improve your online search performance as well as spy on your competitors, SpyFu is the right tool for you since it has all the necessary features to give desirable results. If you decide to have added this software in your toolbox, it will help you better understand your competitor’s online marketing strategy. It will also help you to discover profitable keywords that you can use in paid and organic search campaigns. Other numerous tools offer similar solutions, but SpyFu is the only tool that specializes in the competitor analysis and does a great job. Compared to SEMrush, SpyFu’s price plans are much cheaper. Try it out for free to experience what it offers first hand, and you won’t be disappointed. You can read other SpyFu reviews to make an informative decision.
For any concerns and questions about this topic, you can always leave them in the comments sections. I will be glad to assist you!
I am always available if you need to hire SEO expert for your website. I have a team of SEO experts with more than 10 years of experience and have handled 40+ SEO projects including PPC, Adword campaigns, local SEO, and SMM. Since we started, we have had 451+ satisfied customers and we guarantee SLA. You can fill the form and get a free quote from here.
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