Search engines are harsh taskmasters, as most website owners and bloggers soon realize. Despite your best efforts, you may find that you are having a very hard time placing well in searches. How does your competition manage to keep getting ahead of you?
The most successful website owners and bloggers soon realize that without tools to give them an edge, it can be nearly impossible to come out in front. This is the reason for the creation of this SEMrush vs SpyFu comparison article. Tools like SEMRush and SpyFu give you much more information than you can find by doing your own research or using free tools. If SEO is becoming your worst enemy, a tool like this may be just what you need.
What is SEMRush?
SEMRush helps you do your keyword research and tracks the keyword strategies that are used by your competition as well. While you may have a great keyword strategy, knowing what your competition is doing is essential to making sure your keyword strategy is as effective as possible. This program will also run an SEO audit of your website or blog to find the best opportunities for backlinking and other tools for building the kind of sites that search engines love.
SEMRush is used by businesses and internet marketers internationally. Companies both big and small have found this tool incredibly effective in optimizing their performance. Companies like Forbes, PayPal, and Hyatt use this tool, as do the up-and-coming companies that you haven’t heard of yet.
A database of over 46 million domains and 120 million keywords provide enough data to inform practically any campaign. SEMRush tracks much more than just keywords. It also tracks the organic positioning of domains on Google search engine results pages.
What is SpyFu?
SpyFu informs you of what keywords are used by websites according to Google AdWords and also tells you the keywords that come up within specific search results. You can find out the cost for a click as well as search volume statistics per keyword.
SpyFu uses the data that it gathers to determine approximately what websites spend on advertising. By accumulating this information historically, advertisers can look at similar campaigns that have been performed in the past and determine what a prospective campaign might cost.
By seeing the keywords that competitors are using you can improve your own website’s search engine optimization strategies. Even the 2008 presidential election utilized the data gathered by this company to research keywords that candidates were using to advertise. It is also a very handy tool for discovering information about niche markets or emerging markets that otherwise have little information available. Understanding the competition is essential to business success no matter what industry you are in, so this kind of insider information about competing markets is invaluable.
Ease of use
SpyFu has a dashboard that is easy to use even for newbies. A navigation bar has tabs for all of the elements you might need, like keyword research, backlinks, tracking, reports, and SEO research. Information is centered around the value. For instance, a keyword search lets you know the cost per click and keyword difficulty and determines how much money any particular keyword is worth.
Furthermore, you can see a daily and monthly cost breakdown. This information is relatively easy to see, understand, and break down. Information is not necessarily grouped for you in a way that will tell you how to conduct your campaign, but if there is specific information you want to find out about competition in order to inform your own keyword campaign, SpyFu might be a good choice for you. Information tends to be presented more straightforwardly without as many filters and explanations as are available through SEMrush, so if you want a more general grouping of information SEMrush might be a better choice.
As mentioned in my Ahrefs vs SeMrush comparison article, SEMrush provides a somewhat overwhelming amount of information with advanced features and functionality that results in a lot of complexity. New users are likely to get lost in the vast array of features offered, especially at first. You can use filters to create extremely specific searches around keywords. You can also find a comprehensive list of where a page ranks, which can be useful for analyzing both your and your competition’s sites. As you begin to play around with this service, you will be amazed by the specificity of the searches that you can conduct. That said, this is an advanced tool that doesn’t go out of its way to be easy to use.
Pricing comparison
SEMrush pricing
SEMrush offers more features and tools than SpyFu so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it is priced higher as well. The lowest priced plan for SEMrush is about $99 monthly for the Pro package. This package is marketed to freelancers and startups. The next plan up is the Guru plan at about $200 a month, which is ideal for growing marketing agencies. The business plan, priced at around $400 a month, is a serious investment design for agencies and e-commerce projects with a huge web presence. If you need even more customized solutions for your marketing needs, an Enterprise package is also available with customized pricing.
SpyFu pricing
SpyFu is much more affordably priced, in fact, one of the lowest priced search engine optimization tools available. You will pay $33 a month when billed annually or $39 on a month-to-month basis for the basic plan. This program does not price by search results, so you will get an unlimited number of keyword searches, domain searches, backlink searches, and more. For $78 per month you can get the professional plan, which offers more leads and contacts than the basic plan and some other features. For $199 a month, you can get the Team plan which offers many more leads and contacts.
Keyword research tool comparison
SpyFu gives you extensive information about how each keyword ranks, as well as statistics about the daily clicks, search volume, and more. This is an awful lot of information about keywords, much more than you will be able to get doing your own research using free tools. That said, SEMrush gives you that and much more. Increased filters allow you to search much more specifically for your keyword or keyword phrase. You can adjust variables like the word it begins or ends with and choose whether you want a phrase or exact match, as well as many other specifications. Both companies offer similar accuracy in the information that they provide, but SEMrush has much more information overall.
Competitor Research comparison
SpyFu was designed to help you spy on your competition, so this is one of the few categories where they excel to the same degree as does SEMrush. Both companies are much better than competition for competitor research. Both of these companies let you see the SEO and PPC strategies of your competitors.
You can see how your competitors keywords are ranking and which keywords are most profitable. Learn which keywords your competitors are bidding on as well as how successfully these keywords are generating traffic. If you are choosing an SEO aid primarily for this reason, you may appreciate that SpyFu gives you unlimited search results with both of its more expensive plans, while SEMrush has generous caps for each pricing tier. SEMrush, however, is better at analyzing social media and public relations campaigns, so if these are very important to you SEMrush might be a better choice.
Backlink analysis
SpyFu is a good source of information about backlinks that may potentially benefit your website. It will tell you which backlinks are already helping other sites that are similar to your’s rank as well as the common backlinks that your competitors are benefiting from. This can make it much easier for you to target the backlinks that you should be creating and the relationships that you should be building around backlinking.
SEMrush gives you much more information about the backlinks that you already have. You can see what links direct to your website and see whether there is any information attached to incoming links like a URL or domain that can tell you who is coming to your site. Furthermore, with SEMrush, you get a convenient chart that puts each backlink into a category with percentages so that you can target your efforts.
PPC comparison
Both companies allow you to spy on your competitors, including the pay-per-click strategies. SEMrush has a keyword tool specifically developed for PPC research, so if analyzing your competitor’s payments per click is most important to you then this may be the better company for you to choose. It is also easier to understand and analyze the data produced by SEMrush than that provided by SpyFu.
Site Audit comparison
A site audit tells you an awful lot about your website with one complete report. You can learn what you need to do to improve your SEO ranking, including specific tools and strategies for improving specific areas of your site. SEMrush offers a complete site audit tool that gathers information rapidly and delivers a complete report so that you can begin improving your website instantly, without having to manually analyze data like that provided by SpyFu.
Features comparison
SEMrush offers more features overall, which makes sense with the higher price tag. They don’t offer as much historical data as does SpyFu, only five years against SpyFu’s ten years, so if long-term data analysis is what you are after SpyFu might be your best choice. That said, most other features including position tracking, keyword research, advertising research, traffic analytics, topic research, backlinks, and more are all superior with SEMrush. SEMrush also includes some great features like an Ad Builder and display advertising which takes it further than just a research tool.
Projects and Reports
SEMrush projects are highly customizable marketing tools which allow you to get marketing data that is outside the database. When you launch a project you can see a bunch of different tools including site audit and position tracking as well as many others, each to focus on a specific aspect of your online marketing campaign. This allows a much more customizable and specific report to be generated than the ones available from the main search bar.
SpyFu can generate reports taken directly from Google that contain huge amounts of information. In fact, almost any report that you can find on SpyFu can be exported or printed to PDF to meet your needs. You can present a large amount of information very rapidly so that you can impress a potential client easily.
Customer support comparison
Both companies provide tech support Monday through Friday. Their hours are slightly different but comparable. SEMrush offers more extensive support through their higher priced plans and customized support with their Enterprise package.
Which SEO tool is better?
SEMrush and SpyFu both offer extensive support to help you identify trends in your own and competitors SEO strategies. If you are only using your own research and free keyword tools at this time, you will find either program to be a vast improvement and an incredible time-saving strategy.
If you are serious about improving your SEO and making your website profitable, and especially if you are a business utilizing your marketing project budget to invest in SEO marketing, it is worth your while to invest in the more complete functions available through SEMrush. If, however, a very long scale report on keywords is important to you or budget is an important consideration, you may decide to go with SpyFu.