Table of Contents
Introduction
Whether you’re in a one-man agency or working for a huge enterprise, the ability to see what your competitors are doing with PPC is invaluable. With that information, you can gain a better understanding of their approach and find ways to beat them at their own game. Spyfu is an all-in-one SEO tool with great keyword research capabilities and some useful reporting features that allow you to get an idea of your competition’s paid search strategy.
Spyfu is a popular keyword research tool that offers in-depth insights into your competitors’ PPC strategy.
Spyfu is a paid tool, but it offers an array of features for all levels of expertise—from beginners to seasoned professionals.
Spyfu’s main advantage over other keyword research tools is its ease of use. When you log in, you’re presented with an interface that looks like this:
You can then enter your competitor’s website URL or search for websites by name (if you want to compare two competitors). By default, Spyfu will scrape through their paid advertising campaigns and give you an overview of which keywords they’re bidding on and what their budget is on each campaign. It will also show average CPCs and top performing ads along with ad text analysis so that you can quickly identify what strategies are working best for them at any given moment in time (the gray box is where this information appears):
The Best Features of Spyfu
Spyfu has some excellent features that other tools don’t have, and it also has some features that are available in other tools but are much better implemented by Spyfu.
Let’s take a look at the commonalities:
- Spyfu lets you search for keywords on any site, not just those that belong to competitors. This means you can do keyword research based on what people are typing into Google right now or within the past few days. It’s pretty easy to get a sense of how popular certain keywords are, even if they’re not related to your company or industry (e.g., “how long does it take to become an astronaut?”).
- You can export all of your data as CSV files so you can use them in Excel if needed—or just plain ol’ copy-and-paste into another spreadsheet program like Apple Numbers or Microsoft Excel.
Spyfu Rankings
Spyfu’s rankings feature is one of its most useful features. It allows you to view the rankings of your competitors in a given keyword, market, or industry.
The rankings are displayed neatly in a table that can be filtered by keyword, country, and time frame (past 6 months or past year). You can also sort them based on rank or growth rate.
You can even search for keywords with specific metrics attached to them—for example “keyword:” + “revenue.”
Backlinks
Backlinks are one of the most important factors in SEO. The more quality backlinks you have, the higher your website will rank in search engines.
Backlink analysis can be a painstaking process, but Spyfu makes it easy with its advanced backlink tracker. You can set up alerts to notify you when changes happen to any of your backlinks or competitors’ links.
Pricing
You can try Spyfu for 14 days completely free of charge. After that, the pricing will depend on your needs.
For small businesses and bloggers, you’ll have to pay $79 per month for 15 leads per month and $199 per month for 50 leads per month. If you’re a larger business with more money to spend, there are several plans available ranging from 500-1000+ leads per month at prices that range from $499-$999 each (plus an additional fee if they’re not billed annually).
Ease of use
Spyfu is easy to use and navigate, with a simple user interface that is easy to load and understand. You can quickly find what you are looking for because the information is categorized into specific areas of interest. Additionally, Spyfu provides clear results that are easy to understand, which makes them much more helpful in terms of making decisions about your marketing strategy.
Spyfu is a good keyword research tool with some handy PPC reporting features
Spyfu is a good keyword research tool with some handy PPC reporting features. Spyfu provides a variety of keyword information and data, from search volume to competition to cost per click.
Spyfu’s strength is its ability to help you generate ideas for new content and campaigns by showing you what your competitors are doing. You can also use it as an SEO tool by identifying keywords that have high organic search volumes but low competition (and vice versa).
Conclusion
Overall, for any SEO-related service to be effective, it must be relevant to your needs and business goals. SpyFu’s capabilities are clearly geared towards helping established businesses with a strong online presence that want to improve their search rankings and visibility. If you’re looking for more basic tools focused on keyword research, there are also many alternative services in the market that can help you accomplish this.