Spyfu Review: Pros, Cons, and Alternatives (with a Video Demo)

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Recently, I had a client who wanted to do research to identify whether a niche they were going into would be profitable.  He was using Ahrefs and other popular internet marketing tools to compile a list of competitive players in his niche and evaluate his competitors’ marketing strategies to see if he had a chance.

Unfortunately, he was left wondering, “What keywords do my competitors rank for?”, and “How much content do I need to produce to stand out in this niche?”.

He didn’t know how to use the internet marketing tools he was paying for to answer all of the questions he had, so he hired me to help.  To see this full review in video, check it out here:

After having test drove Spyfu, I was sure it would be the best tool to use to answer the clients questions, here’s why…

Spyfu Review | A Little Contextual Background on Spyfu

Spyfu is a tool that offers valuable analytic data that can be used by agencies or for personal use.  In my case, the client was hiring me as an agency to provide this competitive analysis service, but I’ve also used Spyfu for my personal use and I’ll explain my strategy with both a little later.

Spyfu for Agency Use

Spyfu is an internet competitive analysis tool that can be used by businesses and agencies to:

• White label SEO reports and audits
• Calculate SEO monetary value for particular keywords
• Help clients understand the monetary value of ranking for specific keywords
• Direct clients towards an internet marketing strategy that will get them high ROIs
• and, inspire them to spend more because they can logically measure the ROI of the work you do

Spyfu for personal use

Spyfu can also be used for personal use if you want to:

• Create a paid advertising campaign with a clear understanding of ideal keywords for your niche
• Have strategic insight of how much competitors are spending on keywords you may want to compete for
• Track your keyword rankings in the Search engines
• Discover profitable keywords in your niche
• Write successful ad copy by using competitors’ ads as a swipe file
• Get insight about what keywords your competitors are ranking for
• Discover which keywords competitors are paying for and their budgets
• and, to find backlink opportunities

Spyfu Review | Thier Products and Services

Spyfu offers three different plans to use their services: the basic, the professional, and the team.  Each plan enables you to export:

•  As many competitor lists
• As many keyword lists
• and as many reports as you want

With other software like SEMRush, Moz, Ahrefs, or others, there’s limits to the amounts of data you can export, so this is a huge benefit for Spyfu subscribers!  For me, sometimes, I come up with an idea or a competitor comes to mind, and I’ll ask myself, “I wonder what they’re doing that’s caused so much success?”, and I’ll want to know:

• What keywords they might be ranking for
• How much PPC campaigns they’re running
• How much they’re spending
• Whether the keywords are competitive to rank for
• and, other data like that…

Spyfu provides all of that data, and often times, the results can be astonishing!  I’m surprised information like what Spyfu releases is even allowed.  It’s REALLY spying.

Up until running into Spyfu, Jaaxy had been my favorite and only go-to keyword tool, however, I found that it doesn’t have all of the functionality and features of Spyfu.

Spyfu Review | Spyfu vs. Jaaxy (My other Favorite Keyword Tool)

Jaaxy was the first keyword tool I had ever used.  The data is so accurate, it has helped me to strategically plan my content marketing strategy rather than going on a whim.  I’ve tried using the free keyword tools before, but:

• They didn’t answer all of my questions
• The results of Bing, Yahoo, and Google aren’t all in one interface
• and I felt, they were too basic for what I was looking for

Then, when I started getting serious about SEO and internet marketing, I turned to Wealthy Affiliate for training, and Jaaxy was the tool they offer with the membership.  I still use Jaaxy because many of the features it has, Spyfu doesn’t have, and the training at Wealthy Affiliate is unparalleled by Spyfu, however, the data and competitive analysis that can be conducted by Spyfu is not available with Jaaxy.  Going back to the scenario with my client, I would not be able to answer his questions with the information available at Jaaxy.

If you’re looking for a keyword tool that can:

• Reveal how many backlinks a competitor has in the SERP
• Show ideal keywords, brainstorm keywords, and show you their search volumes
• or track your SERP ranking for less than 15k keywords

Then, the Jaaxy lite plan could work for you.  If you want to track more of your search rankings, you’d have to upgrade your Jaaxy plan, and you still wouldn’t get all of the competitor analysis data Spyfu has.

You can try Jaaxy and Spyfu out for free to compare the difference in the data you’ll recieve.  I recommend you checking them both out to see which answers the questions you have for your internet marketing strategy, or leave your questions below, and I’ll try to help you compare and contrast.

Spyfu Review | Interesting Software Features

When I saw the clients’ request, I immediately went to my community at Wealthy Affiliate to ask “What tool would you use for this project?”, and you can see…

I got quite a few different responses.  Some said SEO Powersuite, some said, SEMRush, and some even inboxed me about Moz and Ahrefs, and I did my research to decide which software would:

• Pose the least financial risk (since I was using the software specifically for one client project), and I wasn’t sure about their credibility, or if we’d be working further beyond this short term project
• Answer the questions
• Be the most efficient (since he wanted data on 100 or more different large websites)

These are some features that made Spyfu my #1 choice above the others that were recommended to me:

• At a starting price of $33/mo, it’s very reasonably priced which made it a low financial risk.  Other competitors charged $99/mo or $130 for the competitive analysis software download, which would have taken alot of the profit out of the project
• They had no limits on how many competitors I could research for the client
• They gave more data than what the client was asking for
• They enabled me to white list the reports (the first month was only $39)
• and, the data helped the client to decide whether they were pursuing a viable niche

Spyfu Review | A Little Walkthru Using Their Software

When you log onto Spyfu, this is what you see…

When you type in a competitor’s website in the “overview” tab, it will show you a clear glimpse of:

• Their approximate SEO traffic
• What the value of their SEO traffic is worth
• How much traffic they’re getting from PPC
• Their PPC budget
• The top competitor sites they have: both paid and organic
• What keywords they are ranking for and what keywords they have in common with their competitors
• What keywords they’re bidding on and what keywords they share with competitors
• Suggested paid keywords for PPC
• and graphs to demonstrate it all

As an example, you can see the data that populates when I type “Vistapint.com”…

You can see:

•  They spend $1.58M monthly in PPC ads
• They recieve $10.9M worth of SEO traffic
• They’ve been online for 12 years and 3 months
• and, much more when you scroll down or look at the other tabs!

From this results page, you can click on any component of the data (organic keywords, paid keyword, Competitors, and others), and find even more data like:

• Search volume for the keyword
• Keyword ranking difficulty
• You can export the competitor’s keywords: organic or paid
• you can build keyword lists to guide your SEO strategy
• and, you can track SERP changes

There’s alot of valuable things you can use Spyfu to do, and you can definitely get your ROI even if you only use it for personal use.

Spyfu Review | Pros vs. Cons

Here’s the pros and cons I noticed from working with Spyfu:

Pros

• Great price
• Great for competitive analysis and spying on competitors
• Good support with quick response
• Unlimited data export
• You have all of the information necessary to build a content strategy with profitable keywords
• Not a big learning curve like other software
• Very easy to use
• Find out what keywords you and your competitors are ranking for
• Track the changes in your SEO ranking

Cons

• The Spyfu Reports tool doesn’t provide error, broken link, or other info like SEMRush, Ahrefs, or Moz does
• Spyfu doesn’t give any information about Social Media or Youtube, so if you’re wanting to know what’s trending in your niche on social media or Youtube, you’d have to use an alternative tool like Jaaxy or SEMRush.

Spyfu Review | A Video Playlist

Here is a video playlist that shows other Spyfu users using the software.  Check it out to see how they use it and the value you could get by using it yourself:

Spyfu Review | Try it Out For Yourself Free!

If you’re interested in giving Spyfu a test drive for yourself, I’d highly recommend it.  Since I’ve tried it, I’ve been logging in daily and learning alot from the data there.  It could also be beneficial if you’re an agency.  You can use the data to pitch new clients, to show proof to old clients, or to cross reference other tools you’re using.

Spyfu Alternatives

If you’d like to try other tools for competitive analysis, on-page SEO analysis, or overall to improve your results online, these are my top recommendations:

• Jaaxy
• SEMRush
• Wealthy Affiliate
• SE Ranking

Final Words on this Spyfu Review

The goal of this article was to show a clear review of Spyfu. For me, I think Spyfu is worth the price and provides lots of valuable data for a much lower cost than alternatives like SEMRush or others, however, if you’re an agency, you may want to use multiple tools so you can have the different data nuances of each.  If you want to reverse engineer SEO or PPC marketing strategies of your competitors, Spyfu would be perfect for that.  If the competitive analysis information or keyword data is what you need, you should check out Spyfu to see if it can serve your needs.

If you have questions or concerns about this, don’t hesitate to leave them in the comments section.  I’d love to help you out!

Now, it’s Your Turn…

Have you tried Spyfu?  What was your experience? Have you tried an alternative tool?  What strengths did you notice as you looked at this Spyfu review?

Spyfu

7.6

Reliability

7.0/10

Pricing

8.0/10

User Friendly

8.0/10

Support

8.0/10

Features

7.0/10

Pros

• Easy to use
• Reasonable price -- Much less than than other competitor analysis software
• Helps with niche and content strategy ideas
• Helps identify potential CPC for target keywords

Cons

• Not fully accurate -- You have to take the results and do further research, but this is normal for all keyword and competitive analysis software
• Many keywords aren't populated with the search and volume data

Try Spyfu for FREE!