The number of internet marketing products available these days makes it tough to sort through which ones are the best to use.

That in itself is what sets the SpyFu keyword research tool apart.  They aim to give actionable information that search marketers can use now.  It’s like the answer to analysis paralysis, instead kicking you into action with insight and direction. Let’s see how they deliver and stack up against their competition.

How is SpyFu different?

SpyFu jumps to the top of most internet marketing “must-have” discussions, and for good reason.  As a long-time player, they built loyalty with their extensive list of domains and keywords.  16 million domains and 7 million keywords to be exact.  Where similar products will monitor your keywords and domains that you give them, SpyFu takes the route of casting a wide net and letting you rake in the information on anything and everything you’d like.

When you talk to them, they explain that they respect many of their competitors for what they offer, but their services don’t completely overlap.  They add that with the competition, it’s a matter of “defending your castle” while with SpyFu, you are “expanding your empire.”

What does this mean?  If you need to scrutinize a set of pre-selected keywords every day, then something else might be better for you.  But when it comes to learning where the best new opportunities lie, SpyFu nails it.  Their core function is to provide a look at how domains use keywords—organic and paid—to succeed in their niche.

What should I expect to find?

SpyFu also gives the spending on these keywords and ad copy that the domains used.  Where it really makes itself valuable is how SpyFu narrows down the information into the keywords that are the most actionable: the ones that make a difference now and how you can best add them to your ad groups right away.

And now with added emphasis on measuring organic efforts, they give SEOs help to prioritize their focus and win over skeptical clients.

Very simply put, if you need to grab attention online, SpyFu helps you find the fastest and most effective ways to do that within your budget.

What can I do with it that makes sense for my business?

Starting on SpyFu’s main page, enter a domain or a keyword into the search box.

Once you click search, you’ll land on a page showing statistics like a domain’s daily spending to a keyword’s top advertisers.  More important, these information pages exist as launch pads where you can get more answers depending on what you are trying to accomplish.

There is a free version of basic SpyFu, and the paid subscription of SpyFu allows you access to the premium features like SpyFu Kombat, Keyword SmartSearch, and Ad History (Keyword and Domain versions).  I’ll show you a peek at each one of those next.

SpyFu looks at your query and points you to more advanced research.  For example, when you want to find out more about how monster.com advertises, SpyFu invites you to compare the job hunting site’s keyword selections against its top competitors’ picks.  When you do that you get the fastest path to the most popular and trusted keywords in that niche.

SpyFu Kombat:
Try that example yourself with selected advertisers from the domain information page or head there directly with SpyFu Kombat.  You can enter up to three domains and use their shared keywords to pinpoint where the action is in this niche.  That’s even more powerful when you see where you’re not advertising but the others are.

Keyword SmartSearch:
By collecting the millions of keywords and phrases that your competitors consider the most effective, Keyword SmartSearch mines the strongest keywords for your niche.  This puts relevance and performance over quantity for quantity’s sake.  The biggest differentiator here, though, is how you can customize this list builder.  If you know your budget limitations, you can tap SpyFu’s cost stats and ask only for keywords in a certain cost per click range, and search volume is another editable range.  Once you get your terms, you can add bid multipliers and export these directly to your Adwords account.

Keyword Ad History and Domain Ad History:
The premise behind each of these is seeing how the activity over the past year on a keyword or a domain helps you make decisions about what you are going to do now.  However, don’t overlook a major takeaway from this—headlines and ad copy patterns.

With Keyword Ad History, SpyFu uses a “Gantt chart” with color changes marking when a domain advertised on that term and where they updated their ad.  You see who had success with the term by learning those that stuck with it consistently over time.

Using Domain Ad History, you can spot every keyword a domain used over the past year.  When you’re tracking a competitor, this helps you to determine their most trusted keywords, where they just dabbled and cut bait, and where they have tested and tweaked their ads.

In both cases optimized ad copy and headlines become clear.  You get the tested results without having spent time or money.

Plus, I just got word that SpyFu has tucked Kombat History into its SpyFu Kombat results.  Combining the elements of Ad History we see here with SpyFu Kombat, you can compare three different competitors’ rankings on a keyword over the past year.  It gives you context to make your next move.  Is a keyword moving down in popularity or is it dominated by one industry player?

There are resources for both the person just building a business and one looking to improve an already-existing campaign.  Either way, SpyFu quickly exposes new opportunities to leap to the next step.

Click Here To Try The Free Version of Spyfu or See If The Paid Version Is Right For You

Effective keyword research is the most important step when starting up a PPC campaign.

When I first began PPC advertising, I basically used the keyword tools in Google and Yahoo, dumped a bunch of keywords into my account, and later refined my lists, deleting poor keywords and raising bids on better performing keywords. It was a ‘wait and see’ strategy. This strategy wasn’t working out too well as I was spending more time refining my keywords afterwards than if I were to spend a little time doing keyword research before activating my PPC account.

Using free keyword suggestion tools is a reasonable place to start your keyword research, particularly for new websites. But it has limitations:

• Popularity over Relevancy: Keyword tools by design favor popular keywords, but don’t mistake popularity with relevancy.
• Just Suggestions: It’s up to the search marketer to review and test what keywords will work on the site.
• Free Public Tools: It’s hard to get a true competitive advantage if everyone is using the same publicly available keyword tools.

The biggest challenges in keyword research revolve around proving those suggestions out:

How do you test the keywords?

How do you validate volume and relevancy estimates?

How do you build a proprietary keyword list?

In this post I’d like to give you some insights on the best ways to approach keyword research in order to get the best results in the least amount time using the iSpionage competitive intelligence keyword research tool.

What iSpionage can do for you?

Identify who are your competitors and find out their paid keywords using iSpionage competitor keywords look up. Once you have their keywords (could be hundreds), select the most appropriate keywords for your product niche and create a keyword tracking project in iSpionage. When you track these keywords, iSpionage proprietary software will all the competitive data relating to the keywords in the project. Within 24 hours, you will have access to your competitors’ top keywords and ad copies performance.

I am NOT encouraging you to blatantly steal your competitors but reviewing your competition is a great way to generate new ideas and make notes of what they do well, or even better than you, and apply this these tactics to your own PPC efforts.

You just need to look in the right place – namely your competitors. Another great way to is to check out your competition. Take the best efforts of all your competitors and make them your own!

With the iSpionage keyword research tool, I am getting access to my competitors top keywords and once I have learned their keywords, I start dissecting into their ad copies looking for the following things:

• Headline: Does their headline speak to your shared audience? Are they using dynamic keyword insertion? Are they using it well?
• Body copy: How effective are they utilizing those 70 precious characters? If your products/services are similar, what benefits and features do they highlight? What kind of promises or claims do they make in their ad copy?
• Call-to-action: What is the competition doing to motivate users to click-through their ad? Are they offering free information, special deals or free shipping? Is there an opportunity for you to make a better offer and blow them out of the water?

Once you are done dissecting your competition’s PPC ad texts, then you should move on to their landing page. Comb through their landing page to see how they may be talking to your audience better than you. When a user hits your landing page, you have only a few seconds to pull them in before they click the back button. What is your competition’s strategy to hold users’ attention? What elements of their design or text can you incorporate into yours?

As you can see with iSpionage Competitive Intelligence research tool, you will have the ability get an edge on your PPC advertising by mining data from the successful advertisers and incorporating their formula to create a highly optimized and efficient PPC campaign.

Through This Link You Can Try iSpionage 7-Days For Just $1

This is a long over-do thanks and shout out for Wes Mahler’s self-hosted Prosper202 PPC keyword tracking software.

Wes contacted me a couple months ago about testing out his Tracking202. Long story short, I never really got around to it. I’d previously been using something called Xtreme Conversions to tracking my PPC keyword conversions.

I don’t have time for a long review in this post but I started tracking my first campaign with Prosper202 yesterday. It’s really impressive. It’s just going to get better too.

Oh, did I mention that Prosper202 is 100% free to use.

You’re the Man! Thanks Wes.

1. Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends

Google trends is a nice little tool by Google that lets you take a sneak peak at the day’s hottest searches.

Google Trends highlights searches that have sudden surges in popularity rather than showing the most popular searches overall, which would always be generic terms like “weather.” The algorithm analyzes millions of web searches performed on Google and displays those searches that deviate the most from their historic traffic pattern.

Google Trends, which is updated hourly shows a search-volume graph, the top cities, and news results to help give context about why a search may be appearing on the Google Trends list today.

You can also compare up to five trends by putting comments in between the keywords. For example, the ipod vs zune.

2. Yahoo Buzz: http://buzz.yahoo.com/

Yahoo buzz, which is updated weekly, is another great tool when searching for the latest hot trends or when searching for new niches.

A subject’s buzz score is the percentage of Yahoo! users searching for that subject on a given day, multiplied by a constant to make the number easier to read.

Categories include, Overall | Actors | Movies | Music | Sports | TV | Video Games.

I personally could see the Video Games section being very useful. (hint: PPC, Direct Linking, Amazon). Or maybe the hottest lyrics section (hint: ringtones?).

3. AOL Hot Searches: http://hotsearches.aol.com

With AOL Hot Searches you can find out what are the most popular AOL searches among various categories. You can view the current top electronics and gadget searches, popular auto searches, top music searches, vacation searches, personal finance searches and many more. Think outside the box! There are many great ways to use this kind of data.

4. eBay Pulse: http://pulse.ebay.com

This is one my favorite new tools that I recently discovered and plan to use often. eBay Pulse shows a daily snapshot of current trends, hot picks, and cool stuff on eBay. This tool can be particularly useful when brainstorming new affiliate marketing niches. Once you choose a main category be sure to click on the category dropdown menu again on the results page to narrow down you nice even further. For example:

eBay Pulse > Baby > Car Safety Seats

1. britax
2. graco
3. eddie bauer
4. britax marathon
5. evenflo
6. car seat
7. cosco
8. peg perego
9. century
10. britax boulevard

Now you have found a list of the most popular searched for “car safety seat” brands on eBay which also is fairly likely also the most popular on Google Search as well. Pretty cool huh!

In Affiliate Marketing, choosing the right niche and using the right keywords is key to the game.

For the complete newbie, keywords are the words and search phrases potential customers type into the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN etc) search box while looking for products and services like yours. Keyword research tools allow you to discover the most searched for phrases on different topics. Here is a list of 5 popular free or paid keyword research tools.

1. Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool (free tool)
The Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool can be found here:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Please note that Overture is now called Yahoo Search Marketing. Also, the results are based on both the plural and non-plural version of keywords. So, a keyword result for “cool book” also includes the total searches for the plural version “cool books.”

I’ll use “hiking” as an example keyword of how of the tool works. After typing “hiking” into the suggestion tool I see that “hiking, hiking boot, hiking shoes, hiking gear, and hiking backpack” are some of the most searched for hiking related keyword phrases last month via the Yahoo Search Network.

Based on this data you could create an affiliate website on the broad subject of hiking products. Better yet, narrow that down to a more specific hiking products website which reviews different types of hiking boots.

Now that I decided I want to build a website based on reviews of different types hiking boots, I can find out just what specific brands of hiking boots are searched for most frequently.

Next, I type in “hiking boots” instead of just “hiking” and see that some of the most searched for keywords are “women’s hiking boots, man hiking boots, asolo hiking boots, vasque hiking boots, merrell hiking boots, nike hiking boots, etc. You can continue to narrow this down even further if desired.

Finally, you can setup your affiliate website based on these specific brands of boots. There are a lot of “shoe” affiliate programs so you will probably find a program(s) offering these specific shoes. You can start with CJ.com.

2. Google Adwords Keyword Suggestion Tool (free tool)
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

This tool is much more powerful than that of Yahoos because it collects data from Google.com searches. This tool also has many more features including the amount of advertiser competition within the Google Adwords network and search volume. You can also sort these results by “broad match”, “phrase match” or “exact match.” Rather than getting into details on the different match type, you can follow this link to read the differences: https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6324&ctx=tltp

The tool also has a Site-Related Keywords section where you can enter a webpage URL to find keywords related to the content on the page.

3. Wordtracker (pay to use service)
http://www.wordtracker.com

Wordtracker is probably the most popular paid keyword research tool. Wordtracker’s keyword suggestions are based on over 300 million keywords and phrases that people have used. The keyword data is collected from MetaCrawler.com and DogPile.com searches over the previous 90 days.

In my opinion, Wordtracker’s keyword research tool is definitely worth purchasing if you can afford it. However, they have also just recently released a free keyword tool which will generate up to 100 related keywords and an estimate of their daily search volume. See: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com

4. Keyword Elite (pay to use service)
http://www.keywordelite.com

The Keyword Elite software is not cheap, but it is a one time fee instead of having monthly or yearly fees like those of a Wordtracker.com membership. It’s a powerful piece of software with a long list of features including spying on your competitors Google Adwords keywords. I personally own this software.

5. Nichebot (pay to use service)
http://www.nichebot.com

I have not personally used this keyword research service but it looks like it could be very useful for generating large lists of long-tail keywords for your website. It appears to include several other powerful features as well and is worth a look.