SpyFu Guide: How to Get the Most Out of This SEO Too

SpyFu is one of the SEO market veterans who mastered the new digital reality and offered unique solutions for website promotion. With nearly 20 years of helping online businesses, the service has collected a huge database and received hundreds of thousands of grateful clients. According to SpyFu clients’ estimates, it is among the top SEO services useful not only for optimizing websites for search engines. It can help businesses make it more attractive to consumers. 

If there were only a few providers in the SaaS SEO services market, it could probably become your choice. However, the competition in this niche is quite high, which requires offering unique SEO features to attract consumers. Has SpyFu managed to maintain its market position as the number of SEO platforms increases? Read my detailed review to find the exclusive qualities of SpyFu that will make it the best choice for your work tasks.

A Few Words About the Name and Mission of SpyFu

The creators of SpyFu position their service as a competitive intelligence platform. This meaning is embedded in the brand name itself, which was originally presented in a different version ‒ GoogSpy. Therefore, if you are hunting for your competitor’s SEO strategies, you should take a look at this platform. By studying their SEO tricks, you can upgrade your marketing campaign and advance in search results.

Of course, competitor tracking is not the only feature that SpyFu offers. Modern SEO services strive to provide a full range of marketing and SEO tools to attract consumers. If SEO SaaS companies focus on a narrow range of services, subscribers will have to pay for tariff plans on several platforms. That is why you will find the rich set of tools for high-quality and deep SEO on the SpyFu platform:

• Backlink builder;
• Rank tracking;
• Competitor analysis;
• SERP analysis;
• Keyword research, etc.

In addition to the module with SEO tools, SpyFu offers useful solutions for PPC specialists. Contextual advertising has become one of the most popular Internet marketing approaches. However, for contextual marketing to work effectively, PPC specialists must comprehensively analyze ad performance. Moreover, they must compare key metrics of their paid advertising with those of competitors to improve their strategies. SpyFu offers a wide range of tools for PPC competitor research, such as:

• Ad history;
• Competitor analysis;
• Google Ads Advisor;
• Google Ads templates, etc.

The platform’s spy capabilities do not end there. A special module, Competitive Intel (Competitive Intelligence), offers subscribers to learn even more details about the actions of competitors and the results they receive:

• Possibility to discover new market players;
• Traffic analysis;
• History of any domain for the last 14 years;
• Backlinks, keywords, ranks, ads, and other details about your competitors.

With such complete information, you will not only learn everything about the SEO and PPC strategies of your competitors. You will be able to discover a free niche that you can convert into sales growth. Let’s take a closer look at how SpyFu can help improve the results of your website in SERPs with the help of SEO & PPC practices.

Competitor Research: What Information Can You Gain with SpyFu

Sometimes, it seems that SpyFu’s capabilities in terms of competitor analysis tools are limitless. Moreover, the company is constantly adding new features to track competitors. For example, the latest innovations from the platform include using AI technology to compare websites operating in the same niche. So, if your goal is to outrank them, you can easily reach it with the help of recommendations from SpyFu. Here are the main tools that will allow you to compare your SEO and PPC strategies with your competitors’ methods of achieving business success.

Kombat Tool

If you want to understand why your competitors succeed and evaluate your current marketing position against theirs, use the Kombat Tool. It allows subscribers to compare their website domain with two other competing domains of their choice or SpyFu’s offer. You will get a lot of useful insights to optimize your marketing or SEO strategy:

• Effective keywords that increase your competitors’ search rankings and give them more organic traffic;
• Keywords found on your website that are ineffective for your market niche;
• Common keywords that influence the rankings of each domain involved in the comparison.

This analysis allows users to find stronger keywords for content optimization. By integrating them into the text of your web pages, you will become more visible to consumers because search engines will offer them for many additional search queries relevant to the topic of your website.

Convenient filters will help you identify high-performing keywords that will give a significant increase in traffic. If you see that integrating a certain keyword into your content will give a small increase in traffic, do not waste time on this task.

Kombat will also give you information about other companies’ advertising spending and evaluate its effectiveness using various metrics. You will be able to monitor your competitors’ Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns and learn about their new steps in this direction.

Interactive charts and graphs make it easier to interpret a huge amount of data. A clear visual representation of information makes it intuitive even for newbies in SEO and marketing.

Industry benchmarks are definitely a useful feature of Kombat Tool. They give an objective assessment of your website performance in comparison with other companies in your market niche. Such knowledge destroys the illusion and shows clear prospects in which your website needs to be optimized. With this Kombat Tool, SpyFu will clarify all the details of the online landscape and facilitate your progress towards your business goal.

Competitor Analysis Tools

If a business is not interested in the activities of its competitors, it may not even notice how its consumers turn to alternative providers of certain goods or services. New entrants to the market usually aggressively lure consumers, trying to get their market share. To stay abreast of all changes in the business landscape in your niche, use the competitor analysis tools on the SpyFu platform. You will get a lot of valuable information that will help you build a competent marketing campaign:

• Closest competitors who are vying for your target audience;
• PPC metrics of competitors and their budget expenses per click;
• Efficiency of new keywords in relation to organic traffic they bring to other websites;
• SEO rank change after updating Google ranking algorithms and much more.

Key Features of SpyFu for Analyzing Your Website

While monitoring your competitors, don’t forget about your website and assessing its successes and failures. SpyFu offers a full range of SEO tools to accomplish these tasks.

Organic Research

This tool allows you to find top-performing keywords that provide the largest share of organic traffic. When updating content on your website, leave them to avoid losing your positions in SERPs. Having discovered such keywords on competitors’ websites, you will open up additional opportunities for increasing organic traffic.

By regularly monitoring organic traffic, you can easily identify emerging trends. This will help you quickly adapt your website to new trends to avoid losing your SERP positions or customers.

PPC Research Tool

To get a competitive edge in your paid advertising, use a rich set of PPC tools from SpyFu. They will evaluate the performance of paid keywords and highlight the most successful ones in terms of clicks and investments. For each of the paid keywords, you will see the following useful metrics:

• Search volume;
• Mobile searches;
• Monthly cost;
• Paid clicks;
• CPC (cost per click).

Moreover, you will get SpyFu recommendations for Top Google Ads Buy. These are not just profitable PPC keywords that will give you the best return on your investment. Using them, you will meet lower competition, which means you will get the main share of their search traffic.

All this information will allow you to improve your paid ads and achieve greater efficiency from them. In combination with SEO of the website, you will significantly increase the traffic to your website and open up new potential for the growth of your business.

Keyword Research

SpyFu is good at identifying and prioritizing profitable keywords that can help attract organic traffic. Regardless of the plan, you will get a full set of important metrics for SEO and PPC tasks, such as:

• Monthly search volume;
• Estimated clicks;
• Similar keywords;
• Search queries that use this keyword;
• Mobile vs. desktop performance;
• Paid clicks;
• Cost-per-click;
• Keyword difficulty, etc.

For each keyword, you can find a list of the best backlinks and sort them. This is a great way to find the best resources for guest posts and build your backlink profile. For example, you can filter blogs, forums, news portals, etc. For each backlink, you will see the domain strength, the monthly number of organic clicks on the page, and other statistics.

SpyFu provides the ability to research keywords in bulk. Therefore, you will not have to spend much time solving complex problems. Just download the entire list of keywords and get detailed analytics for each of them.

In the SERP Analysis section for keywords, you will see a ranked list of web pages that contain the keyword you are looking for. For each URL, it is indicated whether it has maintained its position or has moved up/down. New URLs are also marked with a special icon. Next to each website is a column with the Estimated Monthly Clicks that the domain can receive thanks to its position in the SERP.

Rank Tracking

To assess what type of content on your website contributes most to your SEO, use Rank Tracking feature. You will be able to monitor the position of your website in SERPs for specific keywords. In this case, you can evaluate the current state of affairs and their historical performance. Use the Organic Ranking History feature to see your metrics in dynamics. Set up the timeframes that are important for your analysis and optimize your content according to all the results of your research.

By studying the historical dynamics of specific keywords, you will objectively evaluate the impact of your SEO efforts and avoid ineffective practices.

This tool also provides valuable statistics that will show your website’s visibility on the Internet:

• Total number of keywords that contribute to your website’s ranking;
• Total search volume of the keywords;
• Total number of clicks, etc.

This information will be a starting point for comparison when conducting website SEO. For example, by saturating the content with valuable keywords, see how your metrics and rankings in search results have changed over time. Also, analyze how this has affected your sales to find out the effectiveness of the SEO campaign.

SpyFu offers different timeframes for rank tracking, such as a month, 3 months, a year, 2 years, etc. This way, you can study the details by setting short timeframes or analyze long-term trends.

SpyFu Recon Files

SpyFu transforms intelligence data about your and competitors’ websites into informative Recon Files. This is a relatively new feature that has analytical and predictive potential. If you manage your own website, you will be able to estimate your opportunities in case of website optimization. If you work in an SEO or PPC agency, you will be able to show clients how much profit they will get from SEO website optimization or PPC campaign adjustments.

These files consist of three sections with detailed information and illustrative graphs and charts:

• SEO Value
• Competition
• Opportunity

This way, you will see both the strengths and weaknesses in your website SEO compared to your competitors. Moreover, SpyFu will calculate how much profit you will get if you improve the organic rankings of the website. Comparing this with the profit they get from their current SERP positions, customers will definitely choose website SEO.

The advantage of these files is that they link and accurately calculate ranks and value. To accomplish this, SpyFu gives a probable estimate of the number of clicks on higher SERP positions and then converts them into dollars. Not many SEO platforms can do this, but SpyFu is definitely good at it. Therefore, your staff will not have to invent anything when trying to convince consumers to order a comprehensive SEO of a website. The benefit from implementing this task will be obvious to them from the very beginning.

If you are running PPC campaigns, SpyFu Recon Files will help you optimize your budget. They will point out weak keywords that are just eating up your money without bringing any significant results. They will also estimate the potential savings that can follow if you give up these useless keywords. Find top-performing keywords with Google Ads Advisor. Buy them for your ads to easily convert them into clicks.

White-label Opportunities

Impressive reports with a lot of information and illustrative graphs, tables, and charts are an important component of the success of SEO and marketing agencies. When customers receive such detailed reports, they are even more convinced of the professionalism of the SEO agency. With White-Label opportunities from SpyFu, you can offer your clients advanced reports with your company’s brand. Thus, innovative software from SpyFu will make a significant contribution to increasing your profit and retaining customers.

Who Can Benefit from SpyFu

The competitive intelligence platform SpyFu will bring a lot of insights to any specialist looking for the best solution to increase organic and paid traffic. Its advantage is that SEO professionals analyze the performance of the website they manage and competitors. Thanks to this, they can discover effective practical solutions that lead to promotion in SERPs. SpyFu is popular among individual users and large agencies:

• Freelancers use SpyFu to promote their websites and provide SEO/PPC services to clients. Cheap subscription makes such cooperation with the platform profitable, and advanced tools speed up the execution of all tasks.
• Website owners can boost their website’s rankings without hiring SEO specialists. The platform is intuitive, and all reports and recommendations are detailed. Therefore, even without SEO knowledge, you can achieve decent results.
• Small businesses can successfully compete in their niche and increase market share through comprehensive competitor analysis. By thoroughly studying their effective SEO/PPC strategies, they can eliminate their weaknesses and become leaders.
• Professional SEO and marketing agencies. Automating routine tasks for analyzing and monitoring competitors greatly simplifies and speeds up the workflow. And the White-Label capabilities provided by SpyFu raise the reputation of these agencies among customers.

SpyFu Pricing Policy

SpyFu’s prices are among the lowest on the SEO and PPC SaaS services market. And since the platform provides high-quality and comprehensive services, its tariff plans are even more pleasing:

• Basic plan ‒ $39 per month with the opportunity to analyze 6 months of historical data.
• Professional plan – $79 per month with the opportunity to analyze 10+ years of historical data

However, even these prices can be reduced during promotional campaigns. For example, the Basic plan currently costs $9 per month, and the Professional plan costs only $49 per month. Considering the platform’s rich functionality, these are almost free services.

Another feature of SpyFu’s pricing policy is that it does not offer a free trial mode. Other SEO services allow users to evaluate their functionality for free during some period. SpyFu has abandoned this practice to attract subscribers but guarantees a full refund within 30 days of using its services. If a subscriber is not satisfied with the quality of the platform’s tools, they can request a refund and receive it in full.

However, this does not mean that by subscribing to SpyFu services, you are getting a pig in a poke. The website landing page allows you to perform certain keyword, URL, or domain checks in free mode. Therefore, new users can appreciate the information that SpyFu provides with the help of this feature.

Benefits of SpyFu for Businesses

• Comprehensive understanding of your competitors. You will learn all the details about organic traffic and PPC performance of other companies in your industry. Thanks to this, you will be able to identify gaps in your SEO strategy and discover opportunities you didn’t know about before.
• Budget allocation insights. Get more out of your investment by analyzing your competitors’ budget allocations. SpyFu will tell you how they distribute their advertising budget across different platforms and channels.
• Real-time PPC strategy monitoring. SpyFu users can track competitors’ ad activities in real time. This allows you to instantly adapt your strategy to their moves to maintain or increase your consumer base.
• Handy filters. SpyFu offers many options to customize your searches. With handy filters, you won’t waste time analyzing information not essential for optimizing your website.
• Integrations with Google tools. To make working with multiple services easier, you can integrate SpyFu with various Google tools, such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Ads, and Google Business Profile. This will make your findings more data-driven and reliable.
• Budget-friendly pricing plans. SpyFu SEO and PPC tools are cost-effective for individual users and agencies. Even if you have fewer orders than usual in a month, the low price of the platform’s services will not affect your budget in any way.
• Simple intuitive dashboard. SpyFu does not try to impress users with a lot of data and buttons on the dashboard. Thanks to this, you can work without distractions and solve all your tasks quickly.

Disadvantages of the Platform

• Smaller databases compared to similar ones at Semrush, Ahrefs, or other top SEO services. Database size is essential for SEO research. The more data a platform has, the more in-depth analysis of a particular metric you will get. Although SpyFu will provide a lot of useful information, other SEO platforms will be able to offer even more.
• Lack of web-wide crawling. While SpyFu does a great job identifying competitors’ SEO and PPC strategies, it falls short in some areas of SEO analysis. For example, you won’t be able to effectively audit your site for technical errors due to the lack of advanced web crawlers.
• There may be questions about data accuracy. As for data on large competitors, SpyFu provides fairly accurate data. And if you specify inactive or not very popular sites for analysis, you may encounter some inaccuracy in the data.
• Many SEO marketing platforms offer free tools with a limited number of uses. Some of them, such as Sitechecker, Semrush or Ahrefs, have dozens of such tools. SpyFu also allows you to check keywords, URLs, or domains for several key indicators for free. However, compared to competitors, its selection of free tools is limited.
• Lack of real-time data alerts. Other SEO platforms allow you to set up instant alerts on various issues relevant to subscribers. SpyFu provides this option only for some features.

Alternatives to SpyFu

SpyFu excels in its competitive intelligence, ease of use, and cheap pricing plans. Choosing between its services and alternative SEO SaaS services depends on what tasks you set because each SEO platform has unique specifics that help it stand out from the competition and attract subscribers.

Sitechecker

If you are interested in technical SEO, you should take a closer look at Sitechecker. This platform has evolved from an on-page SEO plugin. Its crawlers meticulously study the site’s pages to identify technical and non-technical SEO errors. Any issues with indexing, blocking, compromise, hacking, and other problems are immediately known to subscribers thanks to instant alerts. This way, you will be protected from the situation when the site starts losing its positions in SERP due to unexpected unfavorable factors. Sitechecker uses its own data and data from Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Therefore, you can be sure of their accuracy and reliability.

Semrush

SpyFu competes with Semrush for subscribers who want to analyze the effectiveness of PPC campaigns. Few SEO SaaS services offer this feature. Therefore, if you want to solve SEO and PPC tasks on one platform, the choice between SpyFu and Semrush will be the most obvious. Each of the platforms has its advantages, so you just need to decide which features you need most:

• SpyFu offers many options for tracking competitors and lower tariff plans.
• Semrush has a larger database and more SEO tools. At the same time, its tariff plan is at least 3 times higher than SpyFu. 

In addition to the cost of the tariff plan, SpyFu has other advantages over Semrush. It does not limit certain features for subscribers who have chosen cheaper tariff plans.

Ahrefs

If your main goal is to build an effective backlink profile, Ahrefs database is the best for this purpose. Its crawlers are the second most active on the Internet, so you will get many unique opportunities to increase the reputation and rank of your website through backlink optimization.

Moreover, Ahrefs offers many useful tools for working with website content. This will allow you to quickly integrate valuable keywords or otherwise optimize the content of web pages. Ahrefs is currently integrating many AI-based tools. Although SpyFu also introduced an AI-based side project, it has a narrower focus and is devoted to tracking competitors. Ahrefs takes a broader approach in this regard and integrates AI to solve many problems related to content optimization.

The Bottom Line

SpyFu services will be of interest to those specialists engaged in competitor analysis. The platform offers many tools for solving this task. By applying them to tracking your main competitors, you will know everything about their paid and organic traffic, SEO and PPC strategies, etc. You will never miss the entry of new competitors into your market niche. You will learn how they will try to steal your consumers. This will allow you to develop an effective marketing strategy to protect your interests and market share.

In addition, you will be able to perform many key tasks to improve your website’s position in search results, such as Keyword Analysis, Backlink Research, Rank Tracking, Organic and Paid Traffic Analysis, etc.

Although SpyFu offers many valuable tools for SEO and PPC specialists, some tasks are better solved on other platforms. For example, you will not be able to conduct a high-quality site audit to identify technical and non-technical SEO issues. However, if you integrate SpyFu with the free Google Search Console, you will be able to solve this task without signing up for a paid subscription on another SEO resource.

SpyFu’s database is inferior to impressive alternatives from top SEO platforms, such as Semrush and Ahrefs. Their keyword databases contain tens of billions of keywords and tens of trillions of backlinks. However, the cost of a subscription to such SEO services is 3 times higher than SpyFu. Therefore, if you are looking for a cost-effective way to analyze competitors and increase organic and paid traffic, SpyFu will be the best option.

To evaluate its capabilities and range of features, use the free SEO and PPC tools on the website’s landing page. You will get detailed reports on keywords, URLs, and domains with some limitations. This way, you can decide how good SpyFu is for your needs and make an informed choice.