The new SpyFu brought improvements to navigation. You can reach most tools and features from a single search, and we’ve organized the results pages to make sure they’re easy to access.

When you search a keyword, SpyFu returns information like:

It drills into much more, ready in interactive grids and charts:

Just like with an SEO search, the keyword search triggers an overview page for you. It curates the best findings from every tool we’ve ever created.

This overview section is made to help you speed through multiple keywords or follow specific keywords in depth. It’s going to serve high-level metrics to help you get a sense of the keyword, but it also connects you to pages where there is more detail or history. Watch for these stats and metrics:

Search volume fluctuates throughout the month so we show you an average of the entire month by local and global searches. Local searches are country-based, so if you’re looking at US data, it will be the volume from Google.com in the US. Likewise for UK data using Google.co.uk searches in the UK.

This helps you determine how often people click the ad once they’ve seen it. It’s a measurement of keyword success (as a paid keyword) and engagement.

Click-through rates (generally) drop off as your ad positions slips farther away from the #1 spot. We calculate the closest CTR for the number 2 position throughout the month.

When you’re prioritizing organic keywords for your SEO campaigns, it helps to know which ones will take more attention and effort for you to reach your ranking goal.

Think of it as a scale of 1-100. There’s no magic number you’re shooting for, but it helps you compare an 82 difficulty keyword to a 35 difficulty one. Either one might be better matched to the audience you’re trying to reach, so use the score to estimate your time investment in ranking for that term.

Just like with the search volume figures, these cost estimates are averages to cover the cost changes that happen throughout the month. This is an average cost that an advertiser would pay for one click on this ad at any given time during the past month.

Since costs can vary for match types (broad, phrase, and exact), we include those here. Since costs can vary depending on which ad position you reached, we used the #2 spot in our calculations.

This is what Google estimates you would spend each day to advertise consistently on this keyword. It is a daily figure, but costs and clicks fluctuate over time, so we use an average here.

Since costs can vary for match types (broad, phrase, and exact), we include those here. Since costs can vary depending on which ad position you reached, we used the #2 spot in our calculations.

This figure helps you understand how competitive this keyword is for advertisers, and also how consistent they are.

If you click through this section, it navigates to the Advertiser History tab for your keyword. There, you can tell which specific advertisers are running ads and how long they’ve been doing it. If there are advertisers who dropped this keyword after buying ads for it, we’ll show you those, too.

Details like this are important when you’re trying to improve your rankings for a keyword. When much of the top-ranked content is actually a domain’s home page (tvguide.com is the home page vs. tvguide.com/sports), then that could be a factor in how well your own content would rank. Some keywords have dedicated websites making up their top organic results list, as opposed to single pages on the topic.

If you’re looking for more detail, you can click through to see the actual home page examples that rank.

Sometimes top 50 results include content like images, news, videos, places and shopping. When that’s the case, we alert you to the non-traditional results by highlighting the right icon.

If you’re looking for more detail, you can click through to see the URLs of the content that ranks. Viewing the cached page from here might help you find those results at a glance

We learned that when you study one keyword, you’re usually looking for others like it in the niche. Consider this section a valuable starter set toward similar (and very valuable) keywords.

These are keywords that your competitors are actively bidding on. You can trust them to be more profitable than those usual lists of long tail variations would be. When you click through individual keywords, you get that term’s overview page.

Click the “view more” link at the bottom, and it opens our interactive, filterable keyword generator in a new tab.

Find the advertisers that have been dominating this keyword. They have been bidding on this keyword consistently, and with purpose. They bid higher (in general) to land in the top ad positions, and they test and update new ad copy variations regularly.

Since we have been tracing their ad tests on this keyword, you can review the latest ads domains have been running along with the evolution of that copy over the past 9 years (if they’ve been advertising that long). This portal to Keyword Ad History gives you the top 10 strongest advertisers by default, showing the most recent 2 years of ads. (See earlier ads using the “previous months” link.)

Click the link at the bottom of the section for a full list of all past advertisers and ads on the same keyword over time. There, you can learn which domains stuck with a keyword consistently over time–and at higher rankings. They’re the ones to follow for pointers on their best, optimized ad copy and headlines.

In the same way that you can find a history of the ads that ran on the keyword, you can also find out how current SERP ranked domains have ranked for this keyword over time. It helps to compare rank changes between competing domains. You can get a sense of which ones have staying power, an important piece of knowledge when you’re trying to emulate domains that rank.

The added markers on the chart help you compare any rank changes to Google’s algorithm updates.

Expand this chart by adding URLs at the top to compare them against the existing content that ranks. Also, if you click any of the URL links on the chart, it opens an overview page for that specific piece of content.

Our approach to a backlinks tool turns your usual backlink discovery on its head. This section makes it faster, clearer, and more reliable to find valuable links that help you rank.

It used to be that you had to take all these extra steps to find domains that rank for a keyword before you could hunt down the backlinks that those sites get — not to mention having to grade those links again just to make sure they were worth your efforts. Frankly, that’s way too much unnecessary work.

In this section, you find the right inbound links to help you rank for this keyword. These sites are the ones sending link juice to domains that rank for this specific keyword and others like it. Convenient, huh?

While it’s important to know who ranks for a keyword that you want to rank for yourself, it is far more valuable to know what factors go into that ranking.

This section helps you find common elements across the content that ranks. In addition to showing you the content in the top results, we also pinpoint patterns in on-page details like “keyword is in the URL” or “home pages that rank” to help you see what you might adjust to improve your ranking chances.

The link at the bottom of the section lets you open an analysis with metrics for all of the top 50 results.

When you search a keyword to see its current ads, what you’re seeing might be affected by spending caps, scheduling, quality score, geo-targeted ads and personalized search. Since we collect ads from different times, days, and locations we get around many of those restrictions to show you a fuller list of current ads running for that keyword.
The link at the bottom of this section will open the full list of current ads in a new tab.