KeywordSpy vs. Spyfu

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

Such word of wisdom is applicable to any online business, wherein before creating your own advertising tools, you must first know your competitors. And at this point, I’ll simply discuss about the keyword research tools you might have heard before, Spyfu and KeywordSpy.

To run a competition between the two keyword tools, I decided to sign-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 trials - for KeywordSpy, it’s for free and for lifetime, while for Spyfu, no free trial really. With my dry runs, both opened their doors for me to see what keywords are working for my business competitors.

With my impressions, I found KeywordSpy far more simple and easy to navigate. Not to mention its feel and look, really advanced. While Spyfu, it just looks jurrasic and messy with all the text just placed everywhere.  And the system is too sluggish! It’s maybe because they load their pages with a lot of unrelated information that lacks graphical presentation. Unlike KeywordSpy, it has this pie, bar and scattered graphs that give you an idea of the competition level of certain keywords in specific regions which are easy to figure out.

I don’t even want to speak about comparing the databases of the two, in which I think Spyfu has no chance getting of close because it only has 1% of the keywords that KeywordSpy has. With the latter’s massive 1 billion keyword database and counting, I don’t think anyone can ever compete with that.  In online research tool business, the bigger the database one has, the better it is for online keyword researchers. And this is something KeywordSpy can claim as its core advantage over the others.

Going back with Spfu, they have this thing that 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 needs better accuracy and their search system needs a wide ranged improvement as it is very archaic.

Having UK clients, I also noticed that Spyfu is very US-oriented, they concentrate mainly on websites in America, no data for British keywords. While KeywordSpy has local and regional geo-targeted databases (US, Australia, UK, South Africa, Canada, Ireland and more country domains in the coming days); hence it serves its purpose very well in different countries.

Freshness of data is a major factor as well, which KeywordSpy takes over, as it updates its database every two weeks. Meanwhile, Spyfu’s data are refreshed almost every 3 months, so their records are really outdated. Although both have export functions, it’s obvious that KeywordSpy has a better one when I tried it out.

KeywordSpy is the tool I was waiting to come along. I have tracked how it keeps on adding new valuable features every now and then, and the folks behind it are always hard at work, you cannot go wrong, unless you don’t own it. KeywordSpy is simply an effective resource that should not be missing from the bookmark arsenal of serious advertisers like me. Add to that, KeywordSpy is a multiple tool in just one subscription – a keyword tool for advertisers, an affiliate savior with its affiliate search engine, and an SEO partner with its backlink feature. To tag it as the “Leader in Keyword Research Technology,” is very true in my opinion.

After all the testing, I can say that KeywordSpy.com is by far a much superior product.