Web Design Ireland

I did promise a bit of a review a while back of SpyFu. Unfortunately getting access to the system took a bit of hoop jumping, and thanks to a bit of a dodgy credit card voucher validatation on the site I’m only getting round to getting a look at the interface for myself. I’ve now happily bagged a free trial for the month, thanks to Sidra (the marketing director) for Spyfu UK. So lets get to it and take a look at some of my own keywords.

Note (I did find some quite a few errors within the system, needing ironed out, but considering that this is a new service in the UK - some of this is to be expected). Apparently after reviewing some of the problems on the board this is a result of too much success too soon..and traffic and scaling has become a bit of a nightmare for the team, regardless - what you do get when it is up and running is remarkable, considering the company is so young.

SpyFu can be split into two main features, one is the keyword research aspect, which allows you to see what sort of traffic certain keywords get - the other - is finding out what keywords your competitors are chasing. So basically this covers the needs of two types of webmasters, the ones who haven’t ventured yet into the Adwords space, and the ones who already have and need to find out alternative keywords to chase, based on expected traffic. It also has benefits for the SEO guys who need to know what keywords are likely to perform if they manage to reach the top of the search engines, and is one of many keyword tools at your disposal.

Keyword Research

SMS Marketing

I’ve ranked (ok) in the SERPS organically for this keyword for a while now, and its clear to see why it wasn’t much of a struggle to get there, no link building, just on page optimisation for it. In case you are wondering Im on the second page of the Big G for this term.

So basically anyone that bids on this keyword with Adwords can expect around 2 clicks a day, so you can assume that organic results at the top of ye olde Google will get the same kind of interest. Not going to set the world on fire. However all is not lost you can find out what other keywords your competitors might have bought…which leads me to a few more traffic worthy phrases. Spyfu gives you some useful information when you enter a keyword into the interface. Namely the people who bought other keywords.

Competitors also bought these keywords:

bulk sms
sms service uk
sms service provider
text marketing
sms service providers
sms services uk

Finding traffic from those keywords..

I decided to pump bulk sms back into the interface, with the following results:

So I could expect maybe 8 clicks per day for this keyword, with an outlay of £30 per day, so we are getting onto keywords which generate more traffic, and will most likely convert better. Still nothing that is going to set Google Analytics on fire.

So what happens if we decide to try something a bit more vague? Do web visitors who aren’t savvy still use one word keywords in the search engines? The answer is a definite yes, and is unlikely to change for some time.

Here we see that you can expect 4 thousand to 5 thousand visitors per day for an outlay of around 1 to 2K. Major bucks, and clearly a majorly competitive zone to be in, and clearly a keyword worth chasing. For me personally, I would use this as a good gauge of a good keyword to chase organically, as I dont have any kind of Adwords spend at the minute.

Domain Name Research

If you have a particular competitor that you’d like to gauge both traffic levels and Ad spend on then the domain name tool within SpyFu is a bit of a dream.

Imagine for a moment say..that you are a retailer, and you’d like to know what sort of marketing budget is behind some of the countries leading brands. Asos.com, Amazon.co.uk, Tescos.co.uk. All of whom utilising Google Adwords extensively to bring in new business..Here’s the result of that spend.

Amazon Argos Ark Clothing Asos Burton Debenhams Gadget Shop iWoot JJB Sports John Lewis Reem Clothing Topshop

As you can see, it gives pretty insightful data back to you if you are prepared to put the research effort in. We did try it for some Adwords people whom we knew their spend, and it was a little inaccurate, however I dont think you can expect to get it spot on - considering they aren’t Google themselves. I found the service to be pretty darn useful.