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SpyFu Review

SpyFu lives up to its name. It’s a tool that enables you to spy on other businesses. It’s all perfectly legal industrial espionage, though. All’s fair in love and capitalism. In fact, it’s quite possible that your competitors are using SpyFu to spy on your business. So you should return the favor. When you learn what other businesses in your industry are doing to enhance their visibility in the search results, you can imitate those strategies. That will give your brand greater exposure as well.

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SpyFu SEO Overview

It’s astonishingly easy to use SpyFu. All you have to do is enter the domain name of a competitor. Yeah. That’s it. In response, SpyFu will give you a series of reports. They’re packed with data, charts, and key insights about organic and paid search results for that website. One of those reports is the SEO Overview. Use it to learn about:

•    The types of pages that link to the website

•    Similar sites

•    Front-page keywords

•    Flaws exposed by Google updates

The SEO Overview is a good starting point to gain some insight on your competitor’s organic strategy.

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SpyFu Main Features

Below, we'll discuss the key features of SpyFu, and how they would benefit your search programs. We'll also share some photos of our demo to give you a sense of the software's design.

SpyFu SEO Research

This feature allows you to identify content and keywords, including backlinks, that help your competitors outrank you, and it also helps you track every website that operates within your niche. In this way, the SEO research feature shows you how rankings and content change over time, and it can help you catch up-and-coming competitors more quickly.

A handy keyword group analysis tool makes organizing SEO keywords into groups—usually a very tedious and time-consuming task—quick and effective, and you can custom brand your SEO reports to land and retain specific clients.

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SpyFu Keyword Rank Tracking

SpyFu has a tool that tracks the position of your website in Google search rankings over time. To use this tool, you have to upload your desired keywords. Like most tools in SpyFu, this keyword tracking tool can be used to monitor the performance of your competitors as well.

While this is a valuable feature, SpyFu keyword rank tracker significantly lags the competition. SpyFu's rank tracker is only updated once per week. This is a major disadvantage to tools like AccuRanker or SEMrush, that refresh their rank tracker data daily.

SpyFu Data Exportation

Once you’ve found all the data you’ve been looking for, you can easily get a copy of it. By using the Export tab, you’ll be able to download it as a spreadsheet or a PDF.

This way, you can have everything analyzed and ready for later inspection. Also, you’ll have the most recommended keywords for future marketing campaigns.

SpyFu Adwords Advisor

Besides the obvious benefits of SpyFu, this feature could help you a great deal. When using this tool, simply type your website’s URL.

After that, Adwords Advisor will suggest the most effective keywords for you. Of course, this is also based on your competitor’s analysis and its history with certain keywords.

SpyFu PPC Keywords

The interface for researching PPC keywords in SpyFu is nearly identical to the SEO keywords tool. This tool allows you to see the paid keywords for any website, along with some key information:

•    Ad timeline

•    Cost-per-click

•    Monthly cost

•    Monthly searches

•    Ad position

•    Total ads

SpyFu uses its grouping technology to find similar paid search terms and combine them into groups. This makes it easy for you to identify the categories of keywords that your website, or a competitor, is bidding on.

SpyFu Historical Comparison

The fact that you can find 12-year data of your competitors’ online activity can be beneficial on many levels.

First of all, you’ll be able to notice the mistakes and errors that they’ve faced. The helpful reports presented by SpyFu will show you what your competitors did wrong.

In addition to that, you’ll learn how they corrected their path. By watching their progress and the methods they’d used to fix their mistakes, you’ll find ways to fix yours as well.

spyfu pricing

SpyFu Pricing & Cost

SpyFu offers three plans that cost between $39 and $299 per month (free 30-day trial).

•    Basic Plan: $39 per month. Ideal for individuals who do not need API access.

•    Professional Plan: $78 per month. Ideal for companies that want to track 15,000 keywords or have API access.

•    Team Plan: $299 per month. Ideal for teams who need 5 user accounts.

spyfu review

SpyFu Pros

•    "For that, it's pretty good as they scrape search results for a ton of keywords/queries. It was good from a benchmarking perspective to see where my site stacks up against the competition."

•    "Amazing competitive tool for Search Engine Marketing. Have the ability to type in a competitor's site and gain useful insights into their Search campaigns."

•    "It provides fantastic insight that helps our digital, creative, Go-To-Market and sales teams create more effective marketing materials and campaigns all while understanding our prospects better."

•    "It gives you great insight into your competition and your competitors competition. It helps us make an educated guess based on real analytics to help improve our site and our client's site."

SpyFu Cons

•    "One of the cons is that you get a limited information, or rather access to it, if not using the paid version."

•    "The only downside is many of the old Landing pages are not cached or visualized so when you click on the link to view the competitor's page, it doesnt exist more often than not."

•    "There are often times where SpyFu fails to show any metrics at all in cases where it should. It doesn't seem like a bug but rather a lack of info."

•    "We've found other software options to be more accurate with the data by testing it on ourselves. Sadly, you have to take every report with a grain of salt."

SpyFu Concusion

SpyFu is an excellent keyword research and competitive intelligence tool that is ideal for businesses on a budget looking to improve their performance in online search. The primary benefits of SpyFu are:

•    Better understanding the online marketing tactics used by your competitors

•    Identifying high-value keywords that you can use in paid and organic search campaigns

While other search tools offer similar functionality, SpyFu is one of the only tools that specializes in this area. As a result, it can offer the benefits above at a much cheaper price-point than alternatives like SEMrush (i.e. $39 vs. $99 per month).

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