SpyFu is the eponymous SEO and PPC research platform from the company in Scottsdale, Arizona focused on "spying" on competitors, or basically using their behaviors to refine your own through keyword and content analysis, and backlink poaching. This positional search engine optimization and paid listings management platform touts the ability to lower costs and raise rankings via a Kombat-oriented approach... basically a cute way of saying "it makes comparisons" of how well your site does in niche…
$39
per month
UpCity
Score 1.0 out of 10
N/A
UpCity is a search engine optimization software solution offered by UpCity.
If you have a Google ads PPC campaign and then I would say this is more or less essential if you want to know what your competitors are doing. You can get very useful data out of it even if you subscribe for one month. And the pricing is very reasonable. Even if you don't use Google ads, I would say this is still useful for your SEO/SMO team since it gives you a great idea of what keywords and traffic your competitors are working on.
For our purposes, UpCity is well suited to our small business clients that are looking to improve their SEO. We have had a good partnership with UpCity to provide consulting and copywriting services for local search, social media and reputation management for our clients, and their software and reporting helps us show ROI to our clients.
The way UpCity verifies items in your marketing checklist (like whether you have social accounts, you're on Google, etc,) helps my business, and others, save precious time having to manually verify them yourself.
I love the impact scores and estimated time shown on each task to give us a feel of how much we are doing each month and what value that time spent is.
The "about" and "how to" section on tasks makes it very clear how to accomplish each task.
Love this tool but would like insights from all 3 major search engines not just Google. I would also like deeper understanding of the placement for local businesses on Google Places/Maps. Insight into mobile search rankings and best landing pages per industry would also help :) Overall, SpyFu is a necessity for serious search marketers.
Usability is mediocre: They have a dashboard to track things but they have some antiquated system of ranking companies and don’t tell you what the logic is behind it. You also have no way to combat negative ratings or respond and try to correct them.
SpyFu comes with a link to tutorial videos. I recommend you watch them. The software is capable of so much you really need to watch the videos and learn how to get the most out of it. When I have a question 90% of the time it's there. When it isn't, and I reach out to them, support is always quick and concise.
I received little help from customer service rep, Sarah. She told me I should speak to a manager to “reset my expectations”. Apparently, all the sales promises of more traffic and increase SEO were an issue with my expectations, and not the company failing to deliver.
I was surprised to find I preferred Semrush when it comes to keyword research. SpyFu is great (and less expensive than Semrush), but I felt the data Semrush provided was vaster than SpyFu. I was able to get more competitors spending insights in Semrush than SpyFu. Overall, I liked the ability to use both in our keyword research for both paid and organic marketing.
We selected UpCity primarily because of the ongoing services they provide. The UpCity software is a simple platform that enables us to easily show progress and ROI to our clients.
