Keywordspy - Keyword research tool

Which is the Better Spy?

(KeywordSpy vs. Spyfu)

A Chinese philosopher named Sun Tzu once wrote, "If you know your enemy and yourself, you will win every battle."

Such words of wisdom is applicable to any online business, wherein before creating your own advertising tools, you must first
know your competitors. And speaking of online business and competitors, I simply love it when I run across keyword tools that
pull back the curtain of the hidden data of my business competitors. And in this quest, I was torn between two keyword spies –
 I am referring to Spyfu and KeywordSpy! Of course, they aren’t real persons, but today’s big two in keyword research.
The question that goes like, “Which is the better spy to which I will give my fat man hug?” simply bugged my mind.

Anyway, to run a competition between the two keyword tools, I decided to signed-up at the same time to their monthly
subscriptions.  Oh, by the way, prior to my monthly subscription with them, I went through their respective
system trial - for KeywordSpy, its for free and for lifetime, while for Spyfu, it’s good for only 3 days for a price of around $6.
Honestly, with my dry runs, both opened their doors for me to see what keywords are working for my business competitors.

Both provide full downloading capabilities on their keyword and domain results. Their Export Tools are great time savers
and very useful in saving yourself from typing-in the results one gets from them.

With my impressions, I found them both simple and effective, it’s just that KeywordSpy’s interface is more good looking,
I found Spyfu’s result page to be too loaded with texts and lacks graphical presentation. Especially now that KeywordSpy
has this pie and bar graphs that give you an idea of the competition level of certain keywords in specific regions.

Spyfu, on the other corner, lets users like me see an estimate cost of a keyword in Google Adwords system per/click basis, and the approximate amount I will need to spend on a campaign for that keyword per day. But then, sadly, what I found is just a bit correlation between my clients’ actual PPC spending and the figures reported by Spyfu. For the domains I checked, Spyfu was off, I guessed the numbers presented are neat information, but needs better accuracy.

Having UK clients, I also noticed that Spyfu is very US-oriented, they concentrate mainly on websites in America, no data for British keywords. But then, I have read press releases that their UK data is coming soon allegedly. This gives an edge to KeywordSpy that has local and regional geo-targeted databases, hence it serves its purpose very well in different countries.

Oh, did I mention that Spyfu is the rebranded name of GoogSpy? It usually caters Google advertisers and majority of their data are Google-based. The same goes with KeywordSpy that mainly serves Adwords community, but then it is claiming that the results are also applicable to other advertising systems, which includes but not limited to MSN’s AdCenter and Yahoo’s Overture.

With regards to the “freshness” of their data, KeywordSpy takes over, as it updates its database twice a month. Meanwhile, Spyfu data are refreshed every 30-60 days, so it can be out of date and results might be out of sync for keywords. This was proven when I found out that they are still showing my Valentines Day keywords this month of October! So, I supposed it’s not good for seasonal campaigns which is probably the reason for its low subscription price which is around $39 and obviously far lower to KeywordSpy’s $90.

Though Spyfu is more affordable, shows sub-domains, and even allow drilldowns to individual pages in some instances, in the end, I decided that my pocket is for Spyfu but my mind is for KeywordSpy. The latter is worthy of its price, and it’s an effective resource that should not be missing from the bookmark arsenal of serious advertisers like me.

Now you know who got the spot for me to live with the Chinese philosophers’ words of wisdom above.

My Spy is KeywordSpy!