Tracking Your Competitors With KeywordSpy

KeywordSpy is a keyword research search engine that allows you to study your competition and profit from their experiences.  As an affiliate marketer, you know that performing keyword research can be a time consuming task.  There are some nice free keyword research tools out there, but none of them give you the competitive intelligence capabilities that KeywordSpy offers.  With a subscription to KeywordSpy, you can easily find the keywords that sites are buying advertising for along with discovering other relevant keywords they are also bidding on.  Along with this list of keywords, KeywordSpy will also show you how profitable each keyword is using its proprietary metrics. 

After logging into the KeywordSpy interface, you can start your research by typing in a keyword or domain in the search box. When typing in a domain name, you can find out a lot of interesting information about your competition. The first thing you'll see is a graph showing their daily ad budget for the past year. From here you can see all the keywords they are bidding on, along with all the different ad variations the use. As you know, a pay per click engine like Google Adwords rewards advertisers that achieve high click through rates, with cheaper clicks and higher ad positions. So you can easily see how KeywordSpy enables you to boost your own campaigns by studying the ads of other successful advertisers in your niche.

When you drill down into your competitor's related keywords, KeywordSpy will show you a bunch of useful metrics that can tell you how valuable a certain keyword is. The ROI of a keyword tells you how profitable that keyword should be. It is calculated by taking the expected return for that keyword, divided by its cost per click. You can also see how much competition there is for the keyword along with an estimated number of clicks it receives per day.

Even if you don't do any pay per click advertising, KeywordSpy is also very useful for SEO purposes. When you search for a specific keyword, you'll also get a list of the organic competitors. Organic competitors are the sites that rank well for your keyword term in the search engines. By using the metrics above, you can use the information provided by KeywordSpy to target the more profitable keywords. The higher you rank in the search engines for these keywords, the more money you should be making.

The most important factor of a keyword research tool is how accurate its data is. After performing some informal testing, I've found the results returned by KeywordSpy to be reasonably accurate. I looked at both the organic and paid results, and the sites listed in KeywordSpy were in the same general positions in Google, give or take 1 or 2 positions. One other thing to watch for, is that KeywordSpy does not contain data for every single keyword or site. For really niche keywords or sites, you may not find any results.

KeywordSpy works on a subscription based model, and it is relatively expensive. For its research only subscription, the cost is $89.95 a a month. However, if you do a lot keyword research, the data you get from KeywordSpy can be very valuable if used correctly. You can also try KeywordSpy's free trial and get access to all its keyword research features. The only limitation is that you will only get back a limited number of results. This is a great way to see if KeywordSpy will meet your needs before you purchase a full subscription. If you're still undecided, you can check out my Keyword Tool reviews site for information on other keyword research tools.