KeywordSpy Review

There are many keyword research tools on the market, but one of the better ones is KeywordSpy. Keyword Spy calls itself an advanced research engine and it is a really great tool for gaining insights into your competitors’ strategies with a minimal amount of work

With Keyword spy you can easily find out who’s bidding on specific keywords, other related keywords that they are also bidding on, and a several useful metrics like ROI, cost per click, and clicks per day for each keyword. By leveraging this knowledge, you can launch your own pay per click advertising campaigns using the keywords you know to be profitable.

KeywordSpy Overview

When you first log into your KeywordSpy account, you’ll see the Keyword Research search bar at the top. Here you can search either by keyword or a domain. When you type in a keyword, the first thing you’ll see some general keyword statistics like cost/click, clicks per day, and the number of advertisers. Next to the stats is an easy to read chart showing the number of advertisers for a particular keyword for the past year. Below the overview, you’ll see a list of the top 5 paid competitors and top 5 organic competitors for that keyword. Paid competitiors are the websites that are actually buying ads targeting this particular keyword. Organic competitors are sites that rank in the search engines for the keyword.

With KeywordSpy, there are a couple of ways to drill down into the results. If you’re interested in seeing other related keywords, you can click on the link next to keywords found, and you’ll see a table containing all the other keywords that a site is bidding on. One of the most useful metrics included here is the ROI for each keyword. What ROI tells you is the amount of money expected to be earned from this keyword, divided by the keyword’s cost per click. This essentially gives you a quick way of finding which keywords are profitable. What’s great about this view in KeywordSpy is that you can sort by the various metrics, and export this data to a file where you can analyze later using a program like Excel.

For internet marketers, KeywordSpy also offers the ability to perform research on some of the major affiliate networks like Clickbank, Commission Junction, Linkshare, and several others. By going into the Affiliate keywords tab, KeywordSpy shows you what the top products are on each network, how much competition there is, and who the top affiliates are. You can even see the various ads that affiliates are using for each product. This data is invaluable if you market products on these networks.

The last KeywordSpy feature I wanted to talk about is Time Machine. Time Machine lets you see how a particular keyword or site performed over a specific period of time. For a keyword search, this lets you see who the competitors were for a keyword at different points in time and how many advertisers were bidding on that keyword for a particular month. If you look at Time machine for a domain, it will show you which keywords they were bidding each month. By taking a look at this data, you can do some investigation and figure out the strategies that your competitors are using.

Does KeywordSpy Work?

Once you get used to the Keyword Spy interface, you’ll find the site to be pretty easy to use. The big question about a service like this is whether or not the data is accurate or not. In my experience, Keyword Spy’s data is relatively up to date and accurate. When conducting my own tests, both their paid listings and organic listings seem to match what I see in Google, give or take a position or two. I did notice that when I performed some searches on some smaller niche sites, Keyword Spy did not have data on them. For example a search for PPC Coach returns no results, even though I know for a fact they do advertising on Adwords.

How much is KeywordSpy?

Keyword Spy is pretty expensive compared to other keyword research tools, but it is packed with lots of information that other tools don’t offer. For a Research Only subscription, the cost is $89.95 a month. They also offer a Tracking Only subscription package for the same price which allows you to perform real time tracking of your competitors. You can also opt for the Professional package which will set you back $139.95 a month and offers both research and tracking capabilities. Is Keyword Spy worth the price? Well that depends on your needs. If you are looking to start a pay per click campaign, you important good keywords are to a successful campaign. KeywordSpy is also a very powerful tool if you are thinking of starting a website in a new niche. KeywordSpy will allow you to quickly evaluate the competition in your niche and allow you to target the best keywords using SEO techniques. Once you see how easy it is to create that profitable PPC campaign, or locate that high paying niche, you’ll find that a KeywordSpy subscription will easily pay for itself.