Search Engine Optimization

Keyword Spy Review

From the homepage: Keyword Spy is a keyword research tool which tells you exactly which keywords work and which do not by gaining access to your competitors’ keywords. Keyword Spy system helps you pin point easily the keywords that are driving traffic to a particular website.

• Learn keywords your competitors are bidding on – Priceless if you’re running PPC campaigns. With one click you can learn all the keywords your competitors are bidding on. It takes time, effort and a lot of budget to develop effective keyword lists, yet here you get it for a flat fee. You can run reports on as many website as you wish.

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• See Competitor ad copies, headlines and landing pages – Don’t just learn keywords your competitors bid on – see their ads! For each keyword you can see: ad headline, and ad copy. Here’s the sweetest part – you can see their landing pages for each unique keyword!

• Organic keywords that send referrals. - Learn what your competitors rank for on search engines and in what positions. This service is also free with SEO Digger.
• Keywords used by competitive site affiliates – Many marketers rely on affiliate networks for promotion. Affiliates run their own websites, do their own SEO and pay per click campaigns. Affiliate Keyword feature lets you see the keywords your competitor affiliates bid on. All you need is the domain name of your competitor!

Keywords

Once you select competitive domain and run a search for it, Keyword Spy will produce keyword results. Keyword information includes data such as:

• ROI – Known as Return of Investments it is the measurement of the profitability of a keyword. ROI is computed by dividing the benefit of a keyword investment against the cost of the keyword.

  This is another unnecessary measurement, like Wordtrackers’ KEI.

• Position - Position of the ad on search results
• Competitors – Number of competitors bidding on this keyword
• Clicks Per Day - Estimated number of click per day for keyword
• Price per click – estimated price per each click.

Summary Page

Another cool feature. To get to the summary page , you need to: 1. Select competing domain and search for it. 2. Select a keyword this competitor bid on.

Keyword Spy will flash some real valuable info:

Top Competitors

Market Coverage

The graphs are self explanatory. Real valuable insight.

Some Tough Questions

Where does keyword spy get data from?

Keyword spy does not specify this. Quick Google search revealed a Google Group discussion where one of the members made this statement:

I recently noticed hits from a keyword spy service on my site. Is there a way to conceal the keywords that I use.  Is this service revealing my Google Adwords keywords or merely puling what is in my meta tag.  I don’t want my competitors knowing my advertising strategy. Thanks

And another member answered:

There are dozens (perhaps hundreds) of “keyword spy” services out there.

They generally follow AdWords (and YahooSM & MSN AdCenter) links, creating a database of:

In some cases, these services may also try to determine some “derivative” data, such as “most common keyword(s) on your landing page” and “pagerank”; some will also suggest the ability to identify your bid rate, based on other data (such as the bid rates paid by their client[s] for the same keyword, and the relative position of your ad compared to the client’s).  They may also gather factual data (for example, extracting your WHOIS data and perhaps attempting to scrape email, telephone, and mailing-address data from your site).

Depending on the depth and breadth of the spybot’s activities, they might also try to identify some of your “negative keywords.”  What they absolutely do NOT have is any data from Google about your AdWords campaigns, which keywords you use (other than the ones they use to find your ads).

So where do they get data?

Not clear. it seems they scrape it from all over the web. Said that – their keyword data set looks very impressive, for many websites.

What ad networks are featured in the results?

From that same post and from a number of other posts, we assume its Adwords, Yahoo and Adcenter.

Regardless, if you got PPC on your hands, give Give Keyword Spy a run – you might find some useful keywords.