Competitor Keyword Research Tools for AdWords PPC & SEO
Accounts start from $39 per month or $16 per month (Billed Annually)
Ryan Murton is the Head of SEO & ASO at Badoo & Bumble. With over 10 years experience in online marketing, he has worked across various industries. He also consults for numerous well-known brands.
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How do you know if SpyFu is going to be a useful tool for you? First, It makes sense to review how competitor analysis can aid your SEO and PPC campaigns. In certain market niches, getting results with search marketing can be extremely competitive. With many companies vying for the same core audience segment and search terms, any advantage in efficiency or rankings can make an enormous competitive difference.
As ever, search engine marketing can be broken down into two key categories: organic and paid. SpyFu has a range of services that can help improve the intelligence of your search engine marketing campaigns, and spread those learnings across your organic rankings as well as your PPC campaigns.
There are 2 types of customer who should consider using SpyFu:
If you are a business owner in a competitive niche or part of an in-house digital marketing team, SpyFu is a great tool for aiding your understanding of competitors’ search marketing efforts. Using this data, you can adjust your own tactics in order to identify your most valuable keywords, differentiate yourself from your competition, and derive learnings from your competitors’ campaigns.
If you are an SEO or run an agency, SpyFu provides a collection of data sources and services that can be used in conjunction with your existing client services – including branded reports and data exports.
If you’re in a highly competitive niche (such as medical services, insurance, or business loans), PPC is probably already a large slice of your customer acquisition budget. As you gather more insights about your competitors’ keywords, ad copy, and monthly budgets, you can put this data to use to improve your own campaigns without necessarily needing to build all your campaigns up from first principles.
The best place to start when beginning your competitor analysis is to identify who the competitors are in your space. SpyFu has a very handy tool that allows you to simply search by domain name, and get a full list of sites that share advertising keywords.
From there, you’ll be able to dig into each domain individually and export a visual overview of their account over time – SpyFu data can retrieve up to twelve years of historical data, but typically returns the last five years. As you scroll down, SpyFu also lists out the individual domain’s additional competitors, keywords ranked by budget and traffic, and historic ads.
Though SpyFu does have a feature that can make Google Ads recommendations – we’ve found that the best use for this data is quite individualized. There is never a one-size-fits all approach when it comes to PPC. The best performing results of any campaign always come from a mix of creativity, research, and analysis.
No doubt, this data will give you very valuable insights; but applying them effectively is the real trick.
Moving on from PPC, SpyFu has a very similar interface and set of services for its SEO tools. Just like the PPC tools, SpyFu makes it very easy to unearth competitors – simply type in a domain and SpyFu returns all domains that are ranking for similar keywords.
From there, you can dig into individual domains to understand their ranking performance in much more detail with breakdowns into: Competitors, Shared Keywords, Top Performing Keywords, Backlinks, and Ranking History.
One of the more powerful features allows you to compare shared keywords across three different domains. This allows you to potentially identify gaps in your competitors’ rankings, and surface high opportunity keywords.
Obviously, another key area of interest for SEO planning revolves around researching the highest performing keywords to target for your site. SpyFu has a few neat little tools that can make this process more efficient, and leverages SpyFu’s proprietary data.
One helpful tool allows you to generate a list of related keywords, and filter down these results by search volume, cost per month, and SEO ranking difficulty. SpyFu state that they pull a lot of this data directly from Google’s keyword planner, but their addition of a few extra metrics makes this a very dense information source for keyword planning.
In addition, there is also a handy tool for grouping and organizing keywords to aid in your campaign structuring. Simply add in your keyword list, and then you can export them with an additional data layer to a variety of formats.
Like a lot of tools in the SEO space, SpyFu also allows you to export branded SEO reports that help communicate the value of building on an SEO strategy by using a series of compelling templates.
With the click of a button, you can export an SEO Dashboard, SEO Rankings Report, and a Google Ads Advice report. These reports are very information dense – but their best feature is how they clearly communicate the value-add of a strong SEO presence.
Ryan Murton is the Head of SEO & ASO at Badoo & Bumble. With over 10 years experience in online marketing, he has worked across various industries. He also consults for numerous well-known brands.
Overall, SpyFu gives a really substantial range of datasets to enable detailed PPC and SEO competitor analysis. Their pricing scales sensibly, and their core value offering – being able to search through this data – is available across all account tiers.
Though SpyFu surfaces a lot of data, the interpretation and strategic implementation is still ultimately up to the user. There are a few areas of recommendation that are surfaced in a number of the features but, as with any competitor analysis, copying and pasting these insights is never going to have the best results.
If you’re keen to continue to develop your SEO and PPC strategy and get to the bottom of what your competitors are up to, SpyFu is a great place to start. There are enough features out of the box that will kickstart your research, and allow you to dig deep into your toughest competition.
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