SEO and advertising research tools
4.5/5 (81 reviews)With over 9 years of historic ranking and AdWords data, all corroborated with cached copies of search result pages, SpyFu aims to assist users in improving their SEO (search engine optimization) and advertising strategies by exposing their competitors’ tactics. Unlimited domain, keyword and backlink searches, backlink results, and data exports allow users access to extensive data available on their competitors, and also their own sites.
SpyFu’s AdWords advisor reports give campaign-specific keyword recommendations, based on user-selected competitors’ strategies, by collating their most successful adverts. The information provided by three-way domain comparisons can also be used to tailor advertising strategy, showing the user core keywords employed by all three domains, those which are shared between two sites, and keywords exclusive to the user.
Users can also build lists of companies to approach, based on factors such as their location, ad spending, and paid keywords, and access advanced contact information for these sales leads, including phone numbers, email addresses, and details of technologies currently in use on their sites.
Pros
The volume of information that can gathered. Not only can you track competitor keywords but it's an excellent prospecting tool for lead gen, which is a lesser known aspect of the software. The relative ease of use is another bonus, the reports and dashboards are a lot clearer and easier to use than many of the other SEO tools I use/have used.
Cons
It's a bit pricey, but it has proved itself in terms of ROI from both improved SERPS positioning and lead generation. Customer service could be a little better too.
Thanks for taking time to share a review, Melanie! I hope we can wow you in the future should you need any customer support. We're available via live chat on our site and email, with Facebook messages, and Twitter giving an assist. We love to hear that you're getting a lot out of the tool. Right on!
Generally speaking, SpyFu has been great, it's a powerful tool, and often you'll run into clients who require this level of analysis both organically, and paid. I've come back time and time again over the last 10 years or so.
Pros
The UI is easy to navigate, and lots of ways to continue your search via finding more competitors, and looking at their competitors and so on. On the SEO side, this software is fairly indespensible, though it has competitors which do similar things at different price points. SpyFu however has been my go-to for many years, and having tested many of the competing products, especially during darker times for SEO many years ago, SpyFu did a quick job of staying current, which is one of the most important things for software like this. When there's changes to algorithms, or how we gather data, who's the most reliable source to get you that info? SpyFu has been that for me.
Cons
Generally the cost is prohibitive. More PPC level insights would be useful, but really they're working off whatever data they can get access to, and do a fairly good job of it. 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. This feels like a huge waste of time.
Overall, this is a very good first-to-go-to tool when you start a project to see how the existing competitors are doing and then accordingly create the strategy. Though, not only for the starting project, but can also be used for existing project analysis. It helped with analyse to see the loopholes that were harming rankings lots of time.
Pros
This is the best SEO analysis tool out there when it comes to watching what's the SEO market's current situation to understand how to start optimizing your website for the best possible start. Before launching any website or project, SpyFu is one of the first tools I go to to analyze the competitors, where they spend money, how are their currenty rankings, what keywords they use or rank for, etc. I sometimes even use its backlinks checker of the competitors with Ahrefs and while cross checking it always gives the reliable data. What's more, the reporting section or the reports itself are very good. They are intuitive and very easy to understand, which makes it easy to present to third-party who doesn't understand much of SEO. Makes life easier!
Cons
A bit more flexibility on the data aggregation in reports would be good. Also, it would be awesome if the developers focused on the local research slightly more.
I've been able to gain an edge over my competition by seeing what they're doing and what's working. I've also been able to build a list of negative keywords to avoid paying for needless clicks in my PPC campaigns.
Pros
I think this is one of the best SEO tools out there for competitive research. It gives you actionable data on what your competitors are doing online, including the keywords they're targeting. I've found that the data SpyFu gives you is fairly accurate and if you use it, it's fairly easy for it to pay for itself. I use it to find out who is bidding on what keywords and what they're doing with their paid campaigns. For example, if I find a company that has spent a ton of money on a particular keyword over a long period of time, I know it's profitable for them and it's worth checking out.
Cons
I'm not a fan of their lead generation tool because it doesn't filter out as many businesses as I'd like. I also think that they should offer better keyword ranking tools, such as segmenting based on search engine. For example, you might rank #1 in Bing for a certain keyword and #2 in Google. This would be helpful information to know so you can focus on the appropriate traffic source.
SpyFu provides you with tons of data about any website you enter. It all comes down to how you use that information to improve your website's ranking and SERPs. The tool itself is great.
Pros
I have been using SpyFu for years now. It is one of the best competitor analysis tools out there. I mainly use it to see for what keywords my competitors rank for and where they get their backlinks from. This is, however, just the basics. You can do a lot more with SpyFu.
1. Find keywords for PPC. See what keywords your competitor is targeting in a PPC campaign and what it is paying for those keywords.
2.AdWords analysis will give you an overview of any website's AdWords campaign and how it is going for them.
3. SERP analysis is another great area where SpyFu will help you identify keywords and SERP position of your competitors.
Cons
1. Most often, the data that SpyFu pulls is outdated. This is one area where they need to work.
2. You get to see PPC details of AdWords only. No Facebook, Bing, or other PPC networks.
There are three subscription levels available:
Basic - $79/month (paid monthly) or $49/month (paid annually)
Professional - $193/month (monthly) or $75/month (annually)
Agency - $999/month (monthly) or $833/month (annually)
Free accounts are also available, with limited functionality.
Advanced contact information, including social media contacts, telephone numbers and email addresses allows users to reach out for linkbuilding.
AdWords advisor reports contain actionable details for specific changes to make to improve users' ROI on advertising campaigns.
3-way domain comparisons show which keywords are core to all three companies, shared between two, or unique to the user, revealing which keywords should be invested in and which may be a waste of money.
SpyFu has over 9 years of organic ranking data and AdWords history, and keeps cached pages accessible as evidence for all keyword stats.
SpyFu's SEO ranking graphs allow users to follow the history of a domain or page alongside updates to Google's algorithms and filter keywords to see the cause of any downward turns.
Below are some frequently asked questions for SpyFu.
SpyFu offers the following pricing plans:
Starting from: US$49,00/month
Pricing model: Free, Subscription
Free Trial: Not Available
There are three subscription levels available:
Basic - $79/month (paid monthly) or $49/month (paid annually)
Professional - $193/month (monthly) or $75/month (annually)
Agency - $999/month (monthly) or $833/month (annually)
Free accounts are also available, with limited functionality.
SpyFu offers the following features:
SpyFu has the following typical customers:
Large Enterprises, Mid Size Business, Small Business
SpyFu supports the following languages:
English
SpyFu has the following pricing plans:
Free, Subscription
We do not have any information about what devices SpyFu supports
We do not have any information about what integrations SpyFu has
SpyFu offers the following support options:
FAQs, Online Support, Phone Support, Video Tutorials
In terms of helping to give SEO clients an edge it's a great tool, and its lead gen capabilities are excellent as well. It's a 'stay in the toolbox' software when I have trialed and tried out many more that have long since been retired.