KeywordSpy.com – see what keywords are working

There is no doubt that Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is one of the primary focuses for aspiring webmasters. It is where the crucial rankings are determined that can send a website skyrocketing in to global fame, or spiralling in to the cyber scrapheap of forgotten concepts and slow crawling traffic.

Anybody who has studied the field of Search Engine Optimization will be able to testify that keywords play a large role in the success of a marketing campaign – whether it is through strategically placed keywords in the Meta tags, or keyword density in the copy.

Yes, it really is true that a choice of words could be the difference between the first page on Google and a position of anonymity in the subpages. KeywordSpy.com  is here to challenge the stranglehold of successfully marketed websites by opening up the door for other webmasters to see what keywords are working for that particular website.

KeywordSpy offers a free trial to test its services, and if we’re being honest, this is probably all that you’re going to need to compile a list of relevant keywords for your own project.

The system is simple, yet effective. You run a search for a particular keyword and a list will be returned with the competition for it. This includes the PPC (Pay per Click), and the actual popularity of the keyword itself, i.e. How many people are clicking it.

Not stopping there, KeywordSpy gives you the chance to search for a domain and find all of the keywords that are operational for that particular URL. As you can probably imagine, this is an excellent way of discovering which words are driving traffic to your direct competition. It also illustrates which keywords are offering the most traffic with the least competition.

The service is rather similar to the now defunct Google Sandbox, but the ability to search out keywords for any domain is extremely helpful during the research stages of your SEM.

To aid us further, KeywordSpy provides full export capabilities on its search findings. So if you find a website which is in line with your own, and you wish to use some of the keywords, you don’t need to flap around typing them out originally. You can simply export them to a small spreadsheet (or plain txt file) and add them to your own campaign in a couple of clicks. It’s a welcome utility and a great time saver.

The website claims to offer access to over a billion keywords in its database, and we wouldn’t dismiss that. Some websites have literally thousands of keywords in use and it can be quite surprising at first, especially if you’ve been campaigning with only a dozen or so.

While we wouldn’t go as far as to justify whether you can really boost your ad revenue campaign by 10,000% – as KeywordSpy boldly claims – the tool is certainly a welcome concept for any aspiring webmaster.

If you’re feeling a bit lost with your SEO strategy, don’t give up just yet. KeywordSpy.com offers a helpful peek in to the strategies of other competitive websites. Sign up now to enjoy a free trial and improve your search visibility with this neat online tool.

PPC bidding wars causing CPC inflation and ROI decline

PPC advertisers continue to report a decline in ROI on PPC spending. This phenomena is caused mainly by increased competition between bidders, driving keyword cost per click up and reducing profit margins for Search Engine advertisers. The proliferation of quality keyword databases such as Spyfu  - which continuously crawl search engines and expose advertisers’ long tail keyword lists to competing advertisers cause ultimately  additional competition on Google Adwords,  a higher average CPC, lower conversions and a lower ROI. The winners of increased advertiser competition on sponsored links are obviously the Search Engines themselves.

SpyFu – PPC competitive intelligence database

 I’d like to share a very important resouce: www.spyfu.com This site, by Velocityscape, is probably the best tool to figure out your competitor’s keywords. What you do is type your competitors domain and BINGO – all of his adwords keywords are yours. The data is several months old but the owner is promising an update very soon.