SpyFu is a keyword research tool that lets you spy on competitors and determine the keywords they rank for in paid and organic search results.
The software has an intuitive UI and is considered a good tool for novice marketers and for Small to Medium Businesses (SMB), especially considering its lower price point compared to premium packages.
However, SpyFu’s database is lacking, it updates infrequently compared to the competition, and it is missing some of the more advanced features that tools like SEMrush and Moz Pro have to offer.
Below, we look at 10 of the best SpyFu competitors so you can determine which is the best option for your marketing needs.
Best SpyFu Alternatives
1. SEMrush
Price: $119/month – $449/month
SpyFu is limited in its functionality. It enables you to look at your competitors and determine the site keywords that they are targeting and ranking for. SEMRush, on the other hand, is a full SEO toolkit.
It offers everything from general keyword suggestions to automated rank checking and more.
Its competitor analysis enables you to compare your traffic levels down to a regional level and you can use SEMRush to identify your major competitors using the Market Explorer tool.
Using your list of competitors, the software displays their SEO profiles.
This includes keyword strategies, link locations, and whether those competitors feature in business reviews, local results, or Google snippets.
Use the Keyword Gap tool to identify words and phrases that competing sites are targeting and that are missing from your own pages.
SEMrush offers all of the competitor analysis tools of SpyFu, along with an extensive suite of other tools for analysis, campaign planning, reporting, optimization, and PR.
The company’s success is also evident in the mechanics and the quality of the tool, which is easy to use, despite its extensive offering.
Because competitor analysis is a relatively small part of what SEMrush offers, if this is all you are looking for, you will be left with a lot of powerful tools and bloat that you simply don’t use.
These extra tools and features greatly increase the price and even the cheapest SEMrush package is nearly as expensive as the premium SpyFu plan.
SEMrush may be too expensive and too involved for novice marketers, but it has a considerable range of tools and an exceptional range of features that are matched only by the tool’s high monthly cost.
It is the best choice for those looking for content marketing, SEO, PPC, competitor analysis, tracking, and reporting tools in one suite.
2. Serpstat
Price: $69/month – $499/month
Serpstat is another all-in-one SEO tool combining keyword research, SEO audits, advanced backlink analysis, rank tracking, and more. It includes extensions for all major browsers.
It does offer greater functionality than SpyFu, but thanks to a more varied range of accounts than other premium packages, it is still affordable for solopreneurs and small businesses.
Features like brandable reporting, which are available in more premium accounts, also make this tool a useful one for agencies and freelancers.
One of the more powerful features of the Serpstat software is its comprehensive site audit features.
These analyze your website and its pages to find errors that might be slowing your site or negatively impacting your SEO efforts.
Such issues include slow loading pages, text-to-code ratio, and issues that impact on user experience such as the size of links and buttons in on-page content.
Technical analysis of a website is easily overlooked, especially if you don’t come from a technological background, but these issues can impede your performance.
Serpstat provides an affordable way of combining these features with other tools, including competitor analysis.
As well as being able to monitor the progress of a competitor website, with Serpstat, you can generate a keyword map of a website.
This collects keyword data from the target website, displays the words and phrases that the site is ranking for, and gives data such as the Google traffic volume, Cost Per Click (CPC), and the amount of PPC competition.
If you need assistance with technical SEO, as well as competitor analysis, Serpstat’s most powerful tools are its site audit and reporting tools.
3. Ahrefs
Price: $99/month – $999/month
Ahrefs is a premium tool that is known for, among many other tools, its powerful competitor analysis suite.
Many of its features are automated, which means that you can leave site audits, keyword ranking history, and other reports to run according to your schedule and without you having to be on hand to force it.
Ahrefs is widely used by agencies and freelance marketers and, as such, it has a price tag to match, being much more expensive than SpyFu.
The Ahrefs suite is well-known for its high-quality keyword research tool. The web-based tool is easy to use. Add a keyword of your choice and it will generate thousands of keyword ideas. These ideas include:
- Phrase match – Keywords that include the exact word or phrase that you entered. The phrase appears exactly as you entered it but may include other words surrounding it.
- Having same terms – The keyword includes the words that make up your phrase, but those words can be in any order and may be separated by other words.
- Also rank for – Ahrefs looks at sites that rank for the phrase you entered and lists other keywords that they rank for so that you can target these phrases, too.
- Search suggestions – Search suggestions are the phrases that search engines list as a dropdown under the search box when you enter your keyphrase. These can prove a good source of longtail keywords.
- Newly discovered – Phrases that Ahrefs has recently discovered, typically because of seasonality or because it is an emerging keyword.
- Questions – These highly targeted informational keywords can have low traffic but typically have low competition levels, too, and they can be targeted by directly answering the questions.
Ahrefs is expensive but its database is massive and tools like its keyword research tool make it a good choice for those that want to master every element of search.
4. SERanking
Price: $31/month – $151/month
SERanking is approximately the same price as SpyFu but attempts to compete with the all-in-one suites like Ahrefs.
It does offer some good features, and targets agencies and freelancers, with its selection of white label reporting and tiered accounts for managers, employees, and customers.
It effectively bridges the gap by offering some advanced features but at a lower cost than other premium packages.
However, its database is not as extensive as SEMrush’s, and its features not as powerful.
Another area that the software looks to be targeting agencies is its backlink monitoring tools.
Agency clients want to see the number and quality of backlinks provided, and SERanking not only shows the number of backlinks but it offers details such as whether the link is dofollow or nofollow, whether it has been indexed by Google yet, and the Moz metrics of the link. It even includes social metrics.
SERanking’s competitor analysis tools are good.
You can view traffic levels as well as specific details of the keywords that a site is ranking for, the number and quality of backlinks that they have, and even the competitors of your competitors.
As well as being a more cost-effective alternative to the likes of SEMrush, SERanking does a good job of providing tools for agencies and freelancers.
As long as you don’t want the minutiae of detail offered by the likes of SEMrush, but you want the competitor analysis capabilities of SpyFu, then this is the tool for you.
5. iSpionage
Price: $59/month – $299/month
iSpionage is the closest tool to SpyFu in terms of the features that it offers, so far on our list.
Although it does offer additional tools like keyword monitoring and ranking reports, as the name suggests, the primary feature of iSpionage is its ability to spy on the competition and to determine their SEO and PPC strategies.
Despite being similar, iSpionage’s prices are nearly double that of SpyFu.
Competitor analysis enables you to identify websites that are closest to your own, in terms of service or product offering.
You can then identify the methods of advertising they use, how successful their marketing campaigns are, and you can take and improve upon their marketing plans to enjoy their levels of success.
With extensive Google and market research, you can perform analyses of your competitors yourself. You can gather link data.
You can determine some of the keywords that a site’s pages are ranking for. You can even track their keyword performance.
Using this information, you can hazard a guess at the levels of traffic they enjoy from their search rankings.
However, manual analysis is time-consuming. Not all information can be gathered from Google, either, and what information you can gather is prone to change without warning.
iSpionage lets you find this information, along with ad copy and sales page content, but it also monitors results.
It can inform you of any changes and updates so that you can keep track of your competitor and you can determine what has worked for other sites in your industry to replicate their success.
iSpionage is a more expensive but close alternative to SpyFu, but it offers more intricate detail of competitor campaigns.
You can even view ad copy and sales page content that will let you optimize every element of your campaigns.
6. Mangools
Price: $29.90/month – $79.90/month
Mangools is a host of different SEO tools under one umbrella. In some respects, this is great. Y
ou effectively get five pieces of SEO software for a fraction of the price of some of the bigger suites and you get much broader functionality than with SpyFu.
However, it also complicates matters more than it needs to.
If you can get past that, though, there really are some very beneficial tools in the Mangools suite, including those that can help with various elements of competitor research.
The Mangools tools are:
- KWFinder – With KWFinder, you can search for keyword ideas by keyword, but you can also search by domain, so you can find the keywords that competitors are ranking for.
- SERPChecker – With SERPChecker, you enter a keyword and choose a location and device type. The tool returns results as though it was Google. It also offers insights like Domain Authority and Page Authority, Citation Flow and Trust Flow, and more.
- SERPWatcher – With SERPWatcher, you can track the results of your pages for your chosen keywords. You can similarly track the results of competitor sites.
- LinkMiner – As well as monitoring your own links, LinkMiner can be used to find the links that your competitors have. It includes key metrics about the links and enables you to pick up any that you might be missing out on.
- SiteProfiler – Track and monitor metrics and optimization KPIs with SiteProfiler, including Moz’s Domain and Page Authority, and Majestic’s Citation Flow and Trust Flow.
Mangools is a useful suite of tools that can be used for monitoring a host of different KPIs from different sources.
It is also beneficial if you prefer to keep your tracking and your optimization efforts compartmentalized.
7. SEO Power Suite
Price: $25/month – $60/month
SEO Power Suite is similar to Mangools because it provides a host of different applications and tools for your marketing efforts.
However, it differs from most of the alternatives on this list because it is a desktop download. This also means that the pricing works differently, so the price for SEO Power Suite is $299/year for a standard user.
You get a Rank Tracker, Website Auditor, and Link Assistant that you get with a lot of other SEO suites.
You also get a tool called SEO Spyglass, which claims to find new backlinks faster than any other backlink checker on the market.
It analyzes more than 7 billion web pages every day to display your links and referring domains.
View the links according to which of your pages they are directed at, helping to identify the content that is getting the most attention and the greatest optimization yield.
With paid plans, you can schedule checks to run automatically and you can print watermarked reports.
SEO Spyglass can also help keep an eye on competitors.
Enter any URL and the software will analyze and report on that site’s backlink profile over the past 12 months.
This can be especially useful if a new competitor has just raised their heads.
The analysis includes information such as dofollow/nofollow, the number of links lost and gained, and more.
SEO Power Suite is another tool that has a broader range of features than SpyFu, but in this case, it costs less than its competitor.
However, it is a desktop download, rather than an online tool or a browser plugin.
8. Moz Pro
Price: $99/month – $599/month
Like SEMrush and Ahrefs, Moz Pro is very well known in the SEO and marketing industry.
It is an expensive tool but it does offer a good variety of features.
Best known for its keyword tool, Moz Pro also offers ranking tracking, site audits, and a Link Explorer tool, most of which can be used to spy on some element of competitor websites.
Moz is perhaps best known for its implementation of Page Authority and Domain Authority.
These are scores that are used to measure the quality and power of a website and its individual pages.
The scores primarily measure the value of links to a website and its pages.
The more links, and the better the quality of those links, the higher a page’s PA.
If a website has a lot of links spread across multiple pages, and those links are good quality with minimal instances of spam, the site’s DA will increase.
It is harder to increase DA than PA, but for years these two metrics have been used to measure the quality of a website and the value of a link.
The spam score is another metric introduced by Moz.
It compares 27 characteristics witnessed on millions of banned and penalized sites.
The Moz machine learning system then identifies how likely a page is to be considered spammy by the search engines.
Not only does a spam score indicate that a site might get penalized by search engines, but it devalues the quality of a link from that site.
Moz Pro was once the SEO suite of choice for agencies and professionals, and it still has some very good features.
However, despite having a premium price tag that is orders of magnitude higher than SpyFu, it doesn’t have the same depth of features as tools like SEMrush.
You will prefer it to SpyFu, however, if you are already accustomed to Moz’s look and dashboard.
9. AccuRanker
Price: $109/month – $2,000/month
AccuRanker is a SERP rank tracking tool, which means that it will monitor your position in the search results and it will provide you with regular updates and custom reports.
You choose a plan according to the number of keywords you wish to track, with a basic account starting at 1,000 keywords.
As well as adding your own domain, you can add up to 10 competitors for each domain and the software will track their rankings, too, although only for the keywords that you are already tracking.
This means that AccuRanker is good for tracking competitors for your ranked keywords, and you can see who is rising and who is dipping.
You can import keywords from Google Search Console or via CSV. You can also add them manually or you can use AccuRanker’s keyword suggestions.
To discover competitor keywords, you will either have to manually search the likes of Google or add them as a separate domain on AccuRanker and trust that the software is good at recognizing likely search phrases.
The use of AccuRanker is highly restricted.
It is useful for monitoring a site’s ranking, but a lot of other tools do this and more.
Unlike SpyFu, it does require some meddling to turn it into a useful competitor keyword discovery tool, too.
For the price, it is best reserved for agencies that need the incredible level of ranking details that it can provide.
10. LongTailPro
Price: $25/month – $98/month
LongTailPro was designed for niche website owners to find longtail keywords.
It has a number of account options, and they all provide tools for keyword research and discovery, SERP analysis, rank tracking, and backlink analysis.
Longtail keywords are phrases that consist of multiple words.
They receive minimal searches each month, but the people that are searching for these terms are highly motivated and very targeted.
A single keyword might only drive 100 visitors to a website per month, but these visitors will yield a very good conversion rate and bring in a higher profit per visitor than more generic keywords.
One of the ways that LongTailPro can be used to discover keywords is through competitor keyword analysis.
Add a URL and the online software will return the keywords that site ranks for.
It will include a keyword competition ranking, monthly search volume, the CPC bid required to feature at the top of paid search, and the rank value.
The rank value is the total amount that LongTailPro estimates a site can be monetized for if it reaches the top position for this search term.
LongTailPro is designed for niche websites, and for entrepreneurs that own a portfolio of these sites.
However, it can be used by any small business or website owner to discover highly targeted keywords.
It tracks results while also allowing you to spy on competitor pages. You will prefer this tool to SpyFu if you prefer to concentrate your efforts on the low-hanging fruit that are long-tail keywords.
Conclusion: Best SpyFu Alternatives
SpyFu is a powerful competitor keyword discovery tool, but it has its limitations.
We found SEMrush to be the best alternative. It is pricey but it does everything you can hope for from an SEO analysis tool.
For more targeted keywords, LongTailPro can deliver hundreds of keywords while also tracking your SERP positions.
