Internet Marketing Toolbox: SpyFu
SpyFu is a keyword research tool that let’s you discover your competitors’ keyword strategies for their pay per click advertising and organic search engine optimisation.
Larger organisations are using services like Experian’s Hitwise competitive intelligence tool, but at just £14.95 for a 3 day subscription, SypFu is well suited for small businesses looking to sharpen up their search marketing activities.
The free version provides you with a websites top organic and paid key phrases. In this example I’m researching the organic and paid key phrases being targeted by a local Nottingham web designer.
This data gives not only a better understanding of key phrases, but also provides competive information on your competitors’ product offerings, target markets, and how they are positioning themselves in the market place:
You can research by your competitor’s domain name, by selected key phrases, or by industry sectors.
With the paid-for version, I can then see a comprehensive list of phrases that I can download to a spreadsheet including Ad copy, landing page URLs and bid estimates.
You can also see changes in key phrases usage, changes in budgets. You can get a glimpse of what is working well for your competitors, and what they have decided is not working well:
I decided to test the accuracy of SpyFu to “spy” on some of my own client’s Pay Per Click Advertising. On the one hand, some of the data is highly revealing, but there was alot of inaccuracies in the results SpyFu reported. In some examples the budgets were widely inaccurate, and the price per click not representative.
This is because of the way SpyFu gathers competitor data, and the way it then calculates some of the results.
Nevertheless, the information it provides is very useful, and I would suggest using Spyfu to:
- get an overview of the phrases your competitors are bidding for
- identify new competitors who are bidding in your market space
- discover the organic keywords driving traffic to your competitors’ websites.
- Download this data to a spreadsheet and use it in your own PPC strategy, or to guide your own SEO
- analyse the overlap in PPC advertising key phrases between your own and your competitor’s campaigns
- see all the copy of the adverts a competitior is running, including their landing page addresses
July 3rd, 2009 at 9:44 am
The problem is with those kind of services is that the data is often cached and not real time. I’ve not tried SpyFu admittedly but I find that PPC Kahuna is a very good solution.
July 3rd, 2009 at 9:05 pm
Is it worth paying for this if the data is rubbish? I looked at it and it was full of American keywords like Minnesota even in the UK edition. How can it have American words for British results?
July 7th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
i like SEMRush more
guess it’s much better than spyfu, suggest you to check it out)
July 20th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Is there any way to get it to update it’s records? They aren’t real-time, i know, but can i provoke an update?
July 9th, 2010 at 10:17 pm
I think that one of SpyFu’s core strengths remains one of the areas that’s been there since the Classic version, their estimates for competing PPC spend volumes. While I tend to error in favor of KeywordSpy in terms of depth of keywords intelligence, in terms of accuracy on the competitive PPC budgeting considerations I’ve found SpyFu’s estimates tend to be more accurate (I’ve tested on a few instances of my own).