Spyfu: A Comprehensive Guide

It has many different sections including:

• Top Google Ad Buys Recommendations
• Most Successful Advertisers and Their Best Ads
• Organic Ranking History
• Organic Search Ranking Analysis
• Current Ads

Well, now let’s say that it also has a high ‘Searches Not Clicked’ count.

If you want to see SpyFu’s suggestions about terms you should consider buying, click on ‘Consider Buying.‘

That’s why SpyFu has added what it calls ‘real-world signals’ such as ‘Searches Not Clicked’.

This means you can see which keywords your competitors think are important for their PPC campaigns, and helps you determine how competitive certain keywords are likely to be.

Leads, or prospects, are users who might be interested in your products or services.

But, getting leads can be a time-consuming and pretty frustrating experience.

This tool is one of the most helpful features that you get with SpyFu.

If the SERP is made up of product review pages then you know you’re not going to have any luck trying to rank a service page.

Backlinks Outreach

You can see how they tweaked them to make them more successful and use this information to tweak your own ads.

Google Ads Advisor

You’ll then be presented with a complete list of your keywords along with five metrics. These include:

• Volume
• Rank (Change)
• SEO Clicks (Change)
• KD
• CPC

This can be done easily using SpyFu’s Top Pages feature. The tool allows you to see which pages are pulling in a lot of traffic for both your site and your competitors’ sites.

When you click ‘Import‘ you’ll see a list of the domains.

It showcases your biggest keyword gains over the previous month and your ranking improvements for your most valuable keywords.

If you select ‘Copy Keywords to Clipboard’ then they’ll be added directly to your account.

Depending on your niche, your competitors’ PPC keyword lists may be small or they might be PRETTY extensive.

Below this graph is a table that shows you the keywords where your competitors overlap, and the common keywords that your competing domains are bidding on.

The Backlink Kombat tool helps you get even more specific.

You can assess how competitive the market is and identify potentially lucrative keywords.

PPC Competitors

To get a deeper analysis, you’ll need to click on the different sections

Pretty neat.

Ranking History

The ‘New pages’ report will show you pages that have just started ranking. This is useful because you can see what topics and type of content is working within your niche RIGHT NOW.

…and a new page will open up providing you with more in-depth data.

Next, you choose your competitors. You can stick with the ones SpyFu suggests or add your own.

You might find that you will need to optimize certain pages with specific keywords or you may need to create new pages for the missing search queries.

SEO Keywords

You’re then presented with a list of keywords along with metrics you can view, such as Search Volume and Ads.

Kombat finds these terms for you so you can make a decision on what to do with them.

Serpstat is a good tool but it’s not as powerful as Semrush and Ahrefs.

The most basic Ahrefs plan starts at $79 per month.

SpyFu keeps a complete record of each and every ad that a domain has run, and the Ad History tool gives you access to this.

I already covered SEO reports earlier so let’s take a look at the PPC reports.

But that’s not all. If you need more data you can use the ‘Columns‘ tab to add or remove metrics.

To use it for competitor analysis, click on the Top Pages tab and type in your competitor’s domain.

If you’re the only one targeting these terms, then you could potentially be wasting your efforts on keywords that don’t attract a large enough audience.

That being said, you won’t need to target every search term on the list. You will come across queries that will be irrelevant to your keyword strategy. So, you’ll need to scroll through the list and choose the ones that are the most relevant by selecting the boxes next to the keywords.

If two or more domains are buying the same keyword then that could be a signal that there’s value in buying that keyword.

PPC Keywords

First, you enter a keyword and choose an industry. You can also add a location filter.

The ‘Ad Copy’ metric will provide you with the domain’s most recent ad for the keyword.

Ranking History

The Keyword Research Ranking History tool lets you track the organic ranking history of your competitors for your chosen keywords.

This shows you your top five competitors ranking for organic keywords.

The search bar is centrally located on the dashboard which makes it quick and easy to get an overview of your domain.

When you enter your keyword into the search bar you see a graph with lines representing your top 10 competitors for that term.

These are metrics designed to help you find the terms that make the most sense for your site.

So, looking at the ‘content marketing plan’ keyword, I can see that it moved up 87 spots in the past year. It started off ranking in position 93 and ended up in position 6.

Ads tell you how many domains are running ads for the keyword.

Although Semrush is a bit pricier than SpyFu it’s my top choice of SEO tools due to its incredible range of features.

The Keyword Top Lists feature shows you numbered lists of keywords for metrics like ‘Keywords with Highest Cost Per Click (CPC).’

In this guide, I’m going to take you through all of SpyFu’s features.

Because at the end of the day, the reason we all do SEO is to rank higher in the SERPs.

I can now investigate what caused this improvement in my rankings. For example, this could be due to building more quality backlinks or making adjustments to the content on the page in the past year.

Instead of having to sift through LOADS of data yourself, SpyFu can do the hard work for you.

This feature helps you keep on top of all the data SpyFu has collected for you about your competitors.

‘Questions‘ are based on search queries from any of the domains.

But SpyFu has detailed instructions on how to do this once you’ve downloaded your template.

Keyword Research

Keyword Overview

For example, when I click on ‘Domains with Most Organic (SEO) Traffic’ I can see that wikipedia.org spends nothing on its ad budget which means all of its traffic is organic.

Once you’ve created an account, simply log in and then click on ‘Create a Project’.

This tool means you can take a deep dive into your competitors’ ads to see which ones were successful, and how they’ve changed over time to be more (or less) effective.

It also shows you which of your keywords could be considered ‘Potential Ad Waste’.

That’s where this tool comes in.

These keywords present opportunities that you’ve missed which could be highly relevant to your business and SEO campaign.

The SpyFu Backlinks Outreach tool is designed to make the process more streamlined.

It’s mostly used by digital marketers to improve their online search performance through keyword research and competitive intelligence.

Next to the filter options you have the topics option. By clicking on this, you can see keywords clustered under their parent topic.

To view your projects you click on the slider at the right of the page and you can view all of the keywords you’ve added.

For example, are the pages ranking for your keyword listicles, product review pages, or product category pages?

If you want to use the tool to analyze your competitors’ backlinks, then you just need to type one of their domains into the search bar to see the sites linking to them.

By analyzing the SERP you’ll gain insight into how hard it’ll be to rank for the keyword you’re targeting.

I’ve entered my domain as I want to see how my rankings have fared over time.

Plus, you can use the filter to view a domain’s ‘Most Successful Keywords’ or ‘New Keywords’.

Lastly, you hit the ‘Apply‘ button and SpyFu gives you your results.

To make the most out of this tool you’ll want to use the filter options to compare your keyword rankings against your competitors’ rankings.

The graph allows you to identify patterns in your competitors’ PPC campaigns.

You can also choose to include or exclude keywords and URLs, such as /blog.

First, you need to click ‘Choose A Template‘.

You can stick with the competitors SpyFu suggests or add your own.

That’s why I’m a fan of SpyFu’s Leads feature.

You can then assess which relevant keywords are worth targeting for your business, and which are too expensive.

Custom Lists

If the ‘Domain Diversity‘ score is low then it means one or two domains are dominating the SERPs for this keyword.

As with all the data SpyFu gathers, you also have the option to export your data.

The last two metrics are SUPER informative and I’ll tell you why.

• Organic Clicks – shows you how many clicks on this keyword’s SERP went to organic results.
• Not Clicked – tells you how many users leave the SERPs without clicking on an organic result. It could mean that the users are getting their search query answered directly on the SERP. This is valuable information as it can help you avoid targeting the wrong keywords.

It allows you to upload up to 1,000 keywords at the same time.

By scrolling down, you can also view a list of the most successful paid keywords with handy metrics like Monthly Cost, Search Volume, and Paid Clicks

If you’ve been shopping around for a new tool to help you with your SEO And PPC campaigns then you may have heard of SpyFu already.

You can toggle between viewing their PPC keywords, Paid Clicks, and Ad Budgets.

Yes, the tools that SpyFu can integrate with are:

• Google Ads
• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console
• Google Business Profile
• WriterAccess
• Qubit X

Does SpyFu offer customer support and assistance?

I’ll show you how to use them and discuss their benefits for your SEO and PPC efforts.

The SEO Reports feature is great if you want all of your SEO data in one place.

Below this, there’s a full list of competitors with several metrics that SpyFu uses to determine your competitors.

You’ll see the estimated number of clicks you get from all of your organic keywords, and the estimated value of your organic traffic.

This allows you to see which domains are flying up the SERPs and which are on their way down for keywords you want to target.

So, when targeting the term I would prioritize creating content that’s more optimized for desktop users.

Related Keywords

You can then choose a specific keyword to target and narrow down your search to sets of keywords related to different categories or topics.

Once you’ve typed in your keyword, you get a summary of metrics about it.

The Reports section of the tool is where you can get SpyFu to generate your SEO and PPC reports.

The PPC Competitors tool works in a similar way to the SEO Competitors tool.

First, you enter either your domain or a competing domain in the search bar.

You can then import this into your Google account.

The Bulk Upload is a relatively simple feature.

If you want to filter out keyword matches that are sensitive or NSFW then you can apply the ‘Adult Filter.’

SpyFu also gives you a rating for the keyword.

Kombat for PPC

By using the right strategies, you can move leads along the sales funnel and turn their interest into conversions.

It provides you with actionable advice about keywords you should consider investing in as well.

This means you can probably assume that V6 was working better than V7.

The dashboard has eight tabs at the top for easy access to things like keyword research, SEO tools, PPC research, tracking, and reports.

Its individual plan is $50 per month.

SpyFu Pros and Cons

Pros

• Huge selection of tools
• Very affordable compared to its competitors
• Helps you analyze your competitors in amazing detail
• Can be used effectively for both SEO and PPC
• Levels up your keyword research game

Cons

• No SEO site audit feature
• The number of features can be overwhelming for SEO beginners. Some of them are also hard to get used to
• Does not allow you to audit your backlinks

FAQs

How accurate and reliable is SpyFu’s data?

SpyFu identifies your top-paid competitors and then presents data in a graph.

Or, you can call them at 888-201-0422 (US) and 480-409-0462 (International).

This nifty tool does exactly what you’d expect it to—finds related keywords and gives you important metrics about them such as Search Volume, Keyword Difficulty, and CPC.

These clicks usually lead users to the advertiser’s landing page, increasing their visibility and potential for conversions or sales.

SpyFu then provides you with a list of all the domains linking to your site for that keyword.

Plus, you can export your lists to your own spreadsheets.

Keyword Top Lists

You can also view the domains you’ve added to your outreach projects.

You can also refine the list further by state, industry, and tech.

They’re easy for clients to understand and clearly highlight the progress you’ve been making with their PPC and SEO campaigns.

Pricing

If only one domain buys a keyword then it could simply be a test.

Next, choose your competitors.

By using this tool, I can pinpoint exactly what tactics have been successful and use them to keep improving my rankings.

Top Pages

The information on this graph allows you to compare the trajectory of your competitors with your own site’s progress.

You can choose to view the pages with the most organic traffic or their newest pages.

To do this, you need to paste your competitor’s domain in the search box and hit ‘Search’.

For example, when you’re using the Related Keywords tool you just click ‘Add.’

SpyFu also provides you with ‘Next Generation Metrics.’

Why?

And you can choose how you want the results to be sorted.

And then choose the project you want to add the keyword to.

This process is relatively complicated so I won’t cover it here.

If you hover over one of the categories then the overlapping sections will be highlighted in the diagram.

Then, you’ll have a list of related keyword groups that you can click to view very specific questions.

This shows you the latest ads that appear on the SERP for your keyword.

Still, it’s certainly not the only SEO tool out there that I’d recommend.

Competitor Analysis

Yet, it’s still useful.

These are:

• Monthly Clicks – this is an estimate of the number of clicks expected for the top-ranking organic result
• The ‘Domain Diversity’ percentage
• The ‘Social Domains’

Let’s see how it stands up against three of its best competitors.

SpyFu Vs Semrush

The icons on the left of the screen act as a menu. You can either click on the icon to jump straight to a section or scroll down until you find it.

To start, if you want to see the domains that link to your site, all you need to do is input a keyword into the search bar. In this example, I chose “local SEO”. You can also filter your results by certain categories or page types, such as:

• Blogs
• Pages with affiliate links
• .GOV/.EDU sites
• Forums
• News sites
• Directories

Next, you choose how you want your results to be sorted. I went with ‘Biggest Rank Gains‘.

Absolutely.

You can also export the keywords you find to your Google Ads account.

You can click the ‘Trendline‘ box to see a line indicating the overall trend in terms of rankings.

Bulk Upload

Here you’ll also find tabs for:

• SEO Overview
• Competitors Analysis
• Kombat SEO
• SEO Keywords
• Ranking History
• Top Pages
• Backlinks
• SEO Reports

For example, in the image above, I can see that there are two topics I don’t have content for; ‘Squarespace SEO’ and ‘SEO analyzer’.

There are four keyword categories:

• Core Keywords
• All Keywords
• Questions
• Missing Keywords

That’s why this is a really nice feature.

Win-win.

Reports

Then, you can refine the search even more by using the filters for:

• Google Ads Budget
• SEO Clicks
• Available Contact Info
• Technology

‘All Keywords‘ refers to search terms that any of the domains is targeting.

For example, the rockcontent.com/blog/seo-vs-google-ads/ page is linking to writeraccess.com.

This information will be really useful later on when you start using the Ad History tool (I’ll get into this soon).

Plus, SpyFu even sends you weekly tracking updates about your own domain.

It gives you details including:

• Ad copy
• Headline
• Ad position
• Display URL

If you hover your cursor over the ‘Outbound Links’ metric you’ll also see the other sites that these domains are linking to.

The ‘Export as CSV’ and ‘Export to Google Sheets’ options allow you to transfer them to a spreadsheet.

Let’s say you’re looking for questions related to the keyword ‘Artificial Intelligence’.

If you understand which keywords they’re bidding on, the associated costs, and the search volume then you can make more informed decisions about your own paid advertising campaigns.

In the ‘Filters’ section paste your domain in the box right under ‘Compare to Your Site’s Ranks’

Plus, you can:

• Ask SpyFu to include or exclude specific terms
• Set a search volume range
• Set a keyword difficulty range
• Set a word count range

This is where SpyFu’s Top Pages feature comes in:

• It shows your competitors’ most successful pages in terms of organic clicks from the SERPs. You can also see which keywords those pages are ranking for.
• It breaks down a domain’s keywords and their corresponding click estimates into page-by-page detail.
• The tool provides keyword metrics like ‘Organic Clicks’ and ‘Not Clicked’. This helps you to make strategic decisions and prioritize keywords.

There are other SEO tools with comparable features, but SpyFu truly stands out when it comes to competitive analysis, or “spying” (hence the name).

SpyFu Setup

So, you can click V8 and take a look at the ad copy to get an idea of what could work for your campaign too.

But how does it work?

Next, you assign a status to the project and give it a rating based on its importance.

As usual, it gives you metrics data so that you can decide which keywords to target.

The PPC Kombat tool gives you great insights into the keywords your competitors are bidding on.

Like Semrush, Ahrefs is also more expensive than SpyFu.

Now, let’s take a close look at the Kombat for SEO tool itself.

There are reports designed for different stages of the sales cycle including:

• Pre-sales
• Onboarding
• Planning
• Retention
• Upselling

After you enter your domain into the search bar, you’ll see a list of keywords with the following metrics:

• Impressions per month
• Cost per click
• Cost per month
• Potential clicks per month

Of course, that’s really useful but this tool does much more than that.

The second group tells you what you could expect to get from ranking for the keyword.

Before I delve into the Kombat tool, I’m going to fill you in on the filters that you can use in any of SpyFu’s keyword research features.

These can provide you with more ideas for creating content around a certain topic.

It puts your domain up against your competitors in the form of a Venn diagram.

If you’re looking for a tool for SEO, paid search ads, and content marketing then Semrush is the one for you.

When you’re trying to build links, outreach can really suck.

Google Ads Templates

Ahrefs is an exceptional all-in-one SEO platform.

The URL results below show you the rank, rank change, domain strength (out of 100), and estimated monthly clicks.

Plus, you can include or exclude keywords from your searches which is great for excluding branded terms.

Backlinks

So, it’s important that you can focus on keywords that relate to the same theme.

The ‘Pages With the Most Organic Traffic’ report will give you insights into which topics are driving the most traffic.

Overall, SpyFu’s Backlink tool is good for finding backlink opportunities quickly and easily.

As with all of SpyFu’s features, this tool also allows you to export your data and analyze it on a spreadsheet.

SpyFu however, is the better option if you want to view your competitor’s paid ads.

These are keywords you’re targeting that none of your competitors are.

The tool also lets you track the different versions of the ad copy that a domain ran for a period of time.
The different versions are numbered so you can tell them apart (V1, V2, V3, etc.)

To analyze your keywords, paste your domain in the search box, set your region, and hit ‘Search’.

Plus, you can apply other filters:

• ‘Start Rank’
• ‘End Rank’
• ‘End Rank Change’
• ‘SEO Clicks’
• ‘SEO Click Change’
• ‘Search Volume’

You can choose to receive this report on a monthly basis.

Nice!

…and the tool will give you results based on the filters you’ve set. You’ll get a side-by-side view of the keywords both you and your competitor rank for and the positions in which they rank.

With this tool, you can take a closer look at your competitors’ keyword rankings as well as analyze your own.

The good news is that each plan gives you unlimited access to all of SpyFu’s data.

SEO Research

They work in a very similar way to the SEO reports.

The 2 metrics to pay close attention to here are, Rank (Change) and SEO Clicks (Change).

Setting up a project with SpyFu is incredibly straightforward.

By simply entering your chosen term into the search bar, you’ll be supplied with useful data you can use for your own keyword research.

You’ll get an idea of what type of content you’d need to create and you’ll also be able to work out the users’ search intent

You can analyze the ad copy that’s clearly working so that you can better optimize your own ads.

You can also use the keyword filter option to narrow down the results to specific keywords that you’re targeting.

These are:

• Ranking Difficulty
• Number of homepages and Gov, Edu domains
• Number of keywords in title
• Number of keywords in URL

But, they’ll be organized into clusters of related terms.

You can view all of your SEO and PPC reports whenever you want in the ‘Reports‘ tab.

Paid clicks refer to the traffic generated through online ads where the advertiser pays a fee for each click on their ad.

To view these, use the ‘Buy Recommendations’ filter option.

Click ‘Finish‘ and let SpyFu do the rest.

When you click on the ‘Competitors‘ tab, you enter a domain in the search bar and SpyFu presents you with a nice graph.

This is really good for tracking competitors’ most successful ad copy for a specific keyword.

If you scroll down to the bottom of the page you’ll see the ‘Current Ads’ section.

If you hover over the ‘Ads’ column then you can see the number of domains that have advertised for the keyword and the actual domains.

NICE.

PPC Research

PPC Overview

SpyFu is more suitable if you need a solution for keyword research and competitive analysis, without prioritizing backlink analysis.

Google Ads Advisor is where you’ll find the best recommendations about which keywords you should consider buying.

As with the other keyword tools, you can also apply different filters to narrow your search.

With the Basic plan, you can export 250 leads per week.

Tracking

A great way to do this is to use the ‘Groups’ view on the left side of the page.

Thankfully, SpyFu’s dashboard and UI prioritize simplicity and a clean layout.

Firstly, you type in a competing domain.

Sounds pretty awesome, right?

Advertiser History

Domain Top Lists is pretty simple compared to the other features SpyFu offers.

SpyFu’s team crafts these templates to help you get your Google Ads going in a matter of minutes.

You can also search for keywords or individual URLs depending on which feature you’re using, and it allows you to change your region to make sure the data is fully relevant to you.

SpyFu’s approach to link building is different from many other SEO tools.

Kombat for SEO

The tool also provides a ‘Negative Match’ option to view keywords that SpyFu thinks you should drop for your campaign.

So, let’s say a keyword has a high search volume. Sounds like it might be worth targeting, right?

When you’ve applied your filters, SpyFu lists the keywords your competitors are paying for that you’re not.

Below that, you’ll find related keywords that your competitors also rank for and keywords that advertisers bid on too.

All of the data SpyFu uses for this is taken directly from Google’s SERPs.

Within the Ad History tool, you’ll notice a color coding system used. When you see that an ad has been the same color for a period of time it means that the same ad has been running for that entire period. When there’s a color change, it means the ad has been altered or completely changed.

By doing so, you could save money and reallocate it to more lucrative keywords.

Generally, SpyFu’s customer support team has good reviews on sites like Trustpilot.