Semrush vs Spyfu – Battle of the Competitor Keyword Research Tools 2022

To excel in the digital marketing industry today, you must be good at SEO. However, there has been a lot of debate regarding the best SEO tool that is ideal for competitor analysis. Read on to find out WHR Marketing’s winner in this Semrush vs Spyfu comparison.

Semrush vs Spyfu – What do they both do?

Initially, Semrush was a SEOquake company that served as an SEO browser extension. With a simple click on the internet, you are assured of getting backlinks data, crucial information on how to use schema and metas, and keyword density information. In the year 2008, it rebranded to Semrush.

Today, it is the most sought-after cloud-based SEO service with millions of users all over the world. The Semrush platform has various tools that are ideal for a site audit, on-page SEO checker, and position tracking, social media management, and backlink profile assessment.

Spyfu vs Semrush – On the other hand…

Spyfu was founded to enable businesses to integrate their SEO and PPC work plan strategy for improved performance. The main objective of the founder was to ensure that businesses can turn their competitors into their best advisors. Spyfu allows you to see how your rivals’ keywords are ranked and the traffic they are generating. Although many people use Spyfu for keywords and search trends.

Spyfu offers organic search, crucial information on backlinks, paid ads, Ads history, keyword difficulty, organic ranking history, and competitor analysis.

With this background information, let's look at the features to know which tool outsmarts the other.

Keyword Research – Semrush vs Spyfu

Semrush Keyword Research

People love Semrush because of its keyword research capabilities. After typing your target keywords, Semrush generates a keyword overview report that outlines the major keyword metrics. It allows you to see the monthly search volume, related keywords, ad copy, keyword difficulty, and relevant keyword variations. In case you are looking for in-depth keyword analysis or you want to get semantically-related long-tail keyword suggestions, consider using the keyword magic tool. Once you type the seed keyword, you will get several keyword suggestions to choose from. With the long list of keywords, it's ideal to sort them out using keyword groups. You can categorize the groups based on volume or the number of keywords. The match modifiers play a crucial role in achieving a specific and targeted result.

Once you have settled on the keywords that you intend to use, add them to the keyword manager. This helps in saving and providing valuable information once you revisit the webpage.

The topic research tool comes in handy when brainstorming on the relevant topics and headlines to write about. You can also get keyword ideas through google ads. For accurate data results, you must have an active account.

To maximize your profit ensure that you google optimize, pinpoint powerful words, and find negative keywords. Other keyword research tools worth exploring are AnswerThePublic and Youtube Autocomplete.

Spyfu Keyword Research

Semrush and Spyfu have some similarities when it comes to keyword research. To start the process, you must enter your intended keyword into the tool. The keyword overview report shows you all the vital information about the keyword such as questions relating to the keyword, monthly search volumes, and similar keywords.

The report also informs you about the successful advertisers with the target keyword, websites that are ranking for using the keyword, and related keywords. The major drawback of Spyfu is that it can’t filter the keywords either by geography or device.

Keyword Research Verdict – Spyfu or Semrush

Semrush crowns it for keyword research due to its amazing features. The topic research tool will give you the best topics that resonate well with your intended audience. This increases the likelihood of it appearing in the search engine result pages.

Spyfu is not ideal for an advanced SEO user as it does not provide a detailed keyword report. On top of that, Spyfu only operates in UK and US. If you are not within these countries, then the accuracy of your keywords may be wanting.

Usability – Spyfu vs Semrush

Semrush Usability

It is user-friendly and better structured for both first-time users and experts. You can easily familiarize yourself with the onboarding process and it has some guidelines that make it easy for you. The user dashboard is well designed.

You can get all the key features on the primary navigation menu which is on the left side of the tool’s dashboard. After logging into your account, there is a search bar where you can type a keyword and conduct a search.  Generally, learning the tool will be a piece of cake even for novice users.

Spyfu Usability

After logging into your account, there will be a pop-up with links showing you how to find your way around the tool. Though it may seem to be a good way to start, learning the features can be an uphill task for beginners as they have to do it on their own.

One of the major setbacks of Spyfu is that its features are old and outdated. Some sections like Adwords Template need to be updated.

Usability Verdict – Spyfu or Semrush

For usability and user-friendliness, Semrush is the best.

Competitor analysis tool

Semrush Competitor Analysis Tool

The competitive research toolkit helps you know your competitors, the keywords that help them generate traffic, and their online ads. The toolkit has been divided into various categories such as SEO, social media, advertising, big picture, and content and PR.

Within these categories, there are sub-categories for each. SEO comprises several features such as organic research, backlink gap, and keyword gap. Advertising involves Advertising research and PLA research.

The tool's competitive intelligence comprises of traffic analytics package and market explorer package that costs more than $200 per month. The traffic analytics enables you to see data on your rivals’ domain traffic. This will inform you of your rivals' strengths and weaknesses, assess a new niche and develop effective buying strategies.

Semrush Organic Research Report

The organic research report shows you the websites that you are sharing keywords with. For every website, ensure that you see their traffic, count the paid keywords, and know the keywords that you sharing. The organic research overview report reveals your organic keywords, organic competitors, and organic traffic. You must be good at link building for your website to rank. Semrush enables you to conduct a competitive analysis of your competitors SEO.

The advertising research report comes in handy as it helps you to scrutinize your rivals paid advertising tricks. From the report, you will know the keywords that your rivals are using to bid together with the corresponding search ad. To see your rivals PPC ad copies, click on the ad copies tab. If they have spent a fortune in advertising, it will be reflected in the ad copies.

There is also a brand monitoring tool that checks how often your brand and your rival's brand has been mentioned online. It also has a social media tracker that monitors the social media pages to see the growth and engagement levels of your competitors.

Spyfu Competitor Analysis

The competitor analysis on Spyfu shows you top organic keywords, monthly SEO and PPC clicks, top pages, top paid keywords, and backlinks.

If you want Spyfu to inform you of your customers, then type your domain and go to the competition section. There you will see your organic competitors and paid competitors.

You should be keen on the section of the top page as they reveal your rivals top-ranking pages when conducting an organic search. If you are smart enough, consider reverse-engineering the pages to get keyword suggestions with the potential of generating traffic.

By clicking on the Adwords Advisor, you get to see the Top Adwords Buy recommendations that best suit your competitors. You can use them to maximize your PPC campaigns.

Competitor analysis tool Verdict – Semrush or Spyfu

Semrush’s competitor analysis tools outshine that of Spyfu due to the presence of brand monitoring tools and social media tracker. For effective analysis, one must be aware of their rivals’ social media presence and check their brand mention online. Semrush also offers a well-detailed report that is more accurate compared to Spyfu.

Spyfu vs Semrush – Price

Cost of Semrush

Its pro plan costs $119.50 per month. The plan allows you to access all the tools and features apart from the historical data and product listing ads. If you are a freelancer or an in-house marketer you can try this out.

With the package, you can enjoy services such as site audit, post tracking, brand monitoring, on-page SEO checker, backlink and audit, position tracking, and social media poster and tracker.

The guru plan costs $229.50 every month. People who are in small-medium businesses and marketing agencies can consider this plan. Here there is no limit to the topic ideas for your blog thus enabling you to generate more traffic for your content.

The package offers extended limits, historical data, content marketing platform, post tracking, branded reports, brand monitoring, on-page SEO checker, and social media poster and tracking.

Semrush business plan charges $449.95 per month. This is specifically for large enterprises with an extensive online presence. With advanced digital marketing tools, you can be sure of improving your campaigns and strategies.

The best thing about this plan is that it has a product listing ad tool. The tool allows you to assess Google shopping ad campaigns from advertisers, see the performance metrics of your rivals and get to know their target keywords. This will help you learn how your competitors are using specific keywords to improve their ads.

Cost of Spyfu

Many people love Spyfu because of its free plan that allows you to carry out unlimited searches. Its free for life plan gives you unlimited searches with 10 search results. For the basic plan, you will pay $39 per month. You get unlimited search results, unlimited data exports, and 5k keyword rankings that are tracked every week.

The professional plan costs $79 monthly. Its features are custom branded reports, 10,000 API rows, and 15k keyword rankings weekly. For the team package, you must part with $199 monthly. It is an amazing package as it gives you 5 user accounts, 75,000 top list results, and 40,000 keyword rankings weekly.

Semrush vs Spyfu Pricing Verdict

Going as per the prices, one would opt for Spyfu as it is pocket-friendly. However, if you want your business to thrive, Semrush's SEO features will make you stand out in the online marketing space.

Semrush vs Spyfu Summary

Semrush allows you to see who's ranking on what, and the tools it has (especially for competitive research) make it a very valuable tool for checking out your competition. Spyfu is not nearly as valuable because it doesn't let you spy on your competitors that easily or in-depth.

There are highly valuable features in Semrush such as keyword rank tracker, rank checker, competitor tracking and backlink audit among others. These tools will help save time and energy with their efficient way of scanning for keywords and measuring them via Google search engine rankings, backlink profile analysis and social media stats respectively.

Spyfu offers only limited data about market conditions thanks to its fixed list of analytics components.

WHR Marketing ranks Semrush as the best SEO Tool when it comes to competing with Spyfu. When it comes to usability, keyword research and competitor analysis, it has it all. See for yourself by signing up for a free Semrush Trial.