If your website isn’t hitting traffic targets, there are a few strategies you can take to make it thrive again. One of the strategies most companies use is to study competition. Unlike brick and mortar retail, online businesses have excellent digital tools to help them monitor competitors. One of these tools is SpyFu.
SpyFu is a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tool that can help your business improve its online presence immensely by analyzing what competing organizations are doing. This tool can help site managers understand the approach their competitors are taking. SpyFu allows you to overtake your competing sites in search engine rankings when used to its fullest.
How Does SpyFu work?
SpyFu uses web scraping technology developed by Velocityscrape to identify keywords your competitors purchase for online advertising. By web scraping publicly available data, you gain deeper insights into the marketplace and know what these other sites are up to.
In addition to uncovering how your others are doing in the marketplace, the SEO crawling software can shed some light on areas where your competitors get it wrong. This gives you a chance to create your own SEO campaign that focuses on untapped areas in the industry.
Although it doesn’t give the actual budget your competitors spent for PPC, you can get a rough idea of how much they spend. SpyFu can give you 10+ years of ad variations and show you the keywords your competitors have bought in AdWords. You’ll never need to guess which keywords will work best because SpyFu looks at your competitors bidding history and recommends profitable keywords you should buy.
Features of SpyFu
Ease of Use
SpyFu has an intuitive interface; all you need to do is type your competitor’s website into the search bar. After that, SpyFu will present you the following information about your competitor:
- Their organic ranking for every keyword
- The keywords they’re running on AdWords
- Their ad variation for the past twelve years
You can use this information to understand your competitors’ strategies and find ways to rank better than them.
Keyword Ranking History
SpyFu has been collecting ranking data on hundreds of millions of keywords since 2006. This enables tracking of any website’s keyword ranking history. This data can analyze how your competitor performed in the past. If you request a website’s keyword ranking, the report may include the competitor’s strategy to improve their rankings. In some cases, the report may include bad SEO strategies that hurt the site’s Google ranking. From the information given, you can decide which strategies to use and which to avoid.
Keyword Grouping Tool
With this feature, you can get instant keyword groupings, CPC data, and search volume. You’ll also know the topics your competitors rank highly and keywords that rank together.
Extensive Research
SpyFu users have access to three great research tools:
Keyword Research
If your business focuses on content marketing, knowing how to do keyword research is critical because organic searches heavily depend on keywords.
You can use the SpyFu keyword research tool to search and identify how other sites rank and their best content. After finding your competitor’s SEO strategy, you can target new keywords in your own SEO campaign and create content that reaches new segments.
All you need to do is type in your competitor’s website on SpyFu’s search bar and initiate a search. SpyFu will present you with a complete list of keywords your competitor ranks for. Each keyword will include data search as cost-per-click, number of searches per month, number of clicks per month, and keyword difficulty.
After that, you can choose to take the following actions:
- Export the complete list of keywords
- Measure your competitor’s total organic clicks in monetary value
- Filter keywords by relevance
- Check the website’s ranking at a given point in time
PPC Competitor Research
Analyzing your PPC competition reveals valuable insights to help you construct a winning advertising campaign. It also provides you with a complete view of the PPC landscape and reveals areas you can capitalize on. You’ll get to understand your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses and help you avoid their mistakes.
With the SpyFu PPC competitor research tool, you can do the following:
- Monitor PPC competition
- Find PPC negative match recommendations
- See which keywords they use and you don’t
- Track your competitor’s ad position
Backlinks Search
Once you generate a report with SpyFu, you’ll be able to see the website’s backlink information, the domain’s strength, and traffic per month. SpyFu sorts the report according to type, so you’ll see the sites that give you or your competitors more backlinks than others.
It’s pretty easy to use this tool; you just type in a keyword then search. The software will display a list of backlinks and websites highly likely to promote the keyword ranking.
Domain Search
Let’s say you’re an online business owner looking to improve your rankings, but you don’t know who your competitors are. The domain search feature will be great for your business niche because it’ll help you find competitors you didn’t even know existed. With this feature, you can connect with other businesses in your niche and discover new strategies to improve your business position.
AdWords Advisor
This feature comes in handy when you don’t know what keywords to use in your business niche. SpyFu generates recommendations depending on the content of your website. All you need to do is choose any of the recommendations, type them into the SpyFu search box and let it do the magic. The software will give you a list of keywords from other businesses in your niche that you can use to significantly improve ranking.
SEO Competitor Research
SEO Competitor research can give you insight into why your competitors outrank you and what you need to do to improve your search rankings. With the SpyFu SEO competitor research feature, you can research your competitors’ links, keywords, and content and employ their tactics in your SEO strategy.
Instead of coming up with your own keywords, content, or links, you can use this tool to see what’s working for others and build upon their success.
SEO competitor research includes the following:
- Keyword gap research
- Competitor backlink research
- Top content research
- Keyword ranking history
- Detailed reports
- Keyword group analysis
Keyword Tool Alternative
This feature is used to obtain keywords. You just type in a keyword, and SpyFu will generate keywords that match your preference. You can filter the results by search volume, advertisers, cost-per-click, etc.
Ad Click-Through Rate
Ad click-through rate is the number of times web users click on an advert when searching for a particular keyword. SpyFu’s ad click-through rate data isn’t comprehensive compared to other SEO tools, but you’ll see the number of expected monthly clicks for a given keyword.
Tracking Result
SpyFu allows users to track their ranking results every week. Even though it’s a little bit disappointing that you can only track results once a week, the reports are comprehensive enough to let you know if your strategy works or not.
Pricing
SpyFu doesn’t offer a free trial, so you’ll need to subscribe to a paid plan of your choice to access its features. All its paid plans come with the following features:
- Keyword search
- Backlink
- Unlimited domain
- Unlimited data export
SpyFu has three pricing plans:
Basic Plan
This plan costs $33 per month billed annually or $39 billed every month. It comes with the following features:
- 250 sales leads and domain contacts
- Ten domain reports and pay-per-click (PPC) reports
- Six months of historical data
- 10,000-row search results
- 5,000 weekly tracked keyword rankings
Professional Plan
This plan goes for $58 per month billed annually or $79 billed every month. The plan comprises the following features:
- 500 sales leads and domain contacts
- Custom-branded reports
- 30 small domain SEO report
- 30 Google Ads Advisor PPC report
- Access to SpyFu’s Application Programming Interface (API)
- 15,000 weekly tracked keyword rankings
- 10+ years of historical data
- API access
Team Plan
The team plan costs $199 per month billed annually or $299 billed each month. This plan has the following features:
- 2000 sales leads and domain contacts
- Five user logins
- 40000 weekly tracked keyword rankings
- 10+ years of historical data
- 50000 top lists results
- API access
- Unlimited small domain SEO report
- Unlimited Google Ads Advisor PPC report
SpyFu has a 30-day money-back guarantee if you’re not satisfied with their services. You can cancel your subscription anytime via email, live chat, or phone.
Pros of SpyFu
- Wide variety of keyword search and management tools
- Supports interactive reporting and deep PPC/CPC
- Can track backlinks
- Helpful in finding paid and organic search programs
- Reports come in easily readable graphs
- 30-day money-back guarantee
- Unlimited search results
- Site monitoring tools
Cons of SpyFu
- Data generated can be challenging to analyze and navigate
- Data generated is only dependent on data stored in SpyFu’s database
- It may take time for new users to understand its ad metrics
Verdict
SpyFu is one of the best keyword research and competitive intelligence tools that digital marketers use today. This cloud-based suite of marketing tools offers excellent reporting on your strongest competitors, the keywords they rank for, and the ads they buy on Google. Even though novice digital marketers may find it challenging to use, it’s an excellent tool for professionals and people starting their campaigns.
