Semrush vs SpyFu: The Definitive Comparison (2023)

Although I haven’t mentioned it as a core feature for Competitor Analysis, Semrush Traffic Analytics tool is too good to leave out.

It gives details about your competitors’ websites that you simply cannot get on SpyFu or other SEM tools. Semrush generates insights by analyzing clickstream data from actual internet users, including:

Unique visitors to the website, pages per visit, average visit duration, and bounce rate:

Audience insights by age and demographics:

Traffic journey that tells you where the traffic came from and where it’s going:

Even the number of members in their households, employment status, and income and educational level:

It’s as if you’d received access to a website’s Google Analytics account, and is why Semrush is one of the top Similarweb alternatives. 

This is not only insanely powerful for media buyers, but also for SEOs who want to replicate the entire traffic strategy their competitors are using, and make sure they’re targeting sites that attract their target persona. You can see how I use the Traffic Analytics tool to dissect competitor traffic strategies in this in-depth guide. 

The basic version of the tool is free, but the full historical trends cost an additional $200 per month. It’s also important to mention that the accuracy of these results varies: the more popular the site, the more accurate the data.

Enter a domain in field below to see Traffic Analytics in action:

Spy on your competitors today with the Semrush 30-day free plan.

To analyze your competitor’s SEO strategy, you have to use:

• Domain Overview,
• Top Pages Report
• Keyword Positions Report

Each of these plays an equally important role.

Despite having similar SEO data to Semrush, SpyFu’s domain overview report doesn’t provide the same level of data visualizations that make it easy to quickly extract actionable insights.

Next, unlike Semrush, SpyFu’s Top Pages report is lacking: it’s missing essential metrics that will help aid your SEO decision-making. Finally, when it comes to the essentials, the Keyword Positions Report is equally strong both for SpyFu and Semrush, but Semrush goes the extra mile with historical ranking data.

My final scores are as follows:

The SEO Content Templates tool is actually two tools in one: an SEO Recommendations tool and Real-time Content Check.

After you enter a target keyword, the SEO recommendations tool will show you a list of semantically related keywords, common backlinks, readability score, and suggested text length for your article.

It will also give you other basic on on-page recommendations:

You’ll get a more detailed view in the Real-time Content Check tool. It monitors the quality of your content in four dimensions: Readability, SEO, Tone of voice, and Originality.

Your Readability Score improves as you use simple words and short sentences.

Your SEO Score improves as you include more semantically related keywords in your text, which Semrush suggests in the column on the right.

The Tone of Voice score warns you when the sentences are too formal or too casual. And the Originality Score acts as a safety check against accidental plagiarism.

You can also download this tool as a Google Docs or WordPress plugin.

The Semrush SEO Content Template tool has all the features that most content optimization tools have, such as Frase, Clearscope, or Surfer SEO. On top of that, it can also replace your plagiarism checker.

In my opinion, Semrush does content optimization just as well as many standalone tools. So, if you have an active subscription to one of them, you may be able to offset that amount on a Semrush plan you’re considering because you likely won’t need it anymore.

Feel free to try these tools out yourself with the Semrush 30-day free plan.

Here’s how a typical link building campaign looks like:

• Find good opportunities
• Save those opportunities in a CRM
• Find who is responsible for the content
• Find their contact information
• Write and send them emails
• Keep track of the conversation
• Analyze results

Both Semrush and SpyFu have built-in link building tools that automate (nearly) every aspect of link building mentioned above.

In Semrush, you start by adding keywords you want to rank higher for, and competitors you want to outrank:

Semrush will find websites that are linking to competitors ranking for your keywords and list them as Domain Prospects.

The Keywords and Competitors tabs (1) are related to prospects you found either through keywords or competitors you provided.

The All Prospects view will merge both. You can add more keywords or competitors at any time by clicking the “+ Add” button (2).

The two most important metrics to look at here are the Domain Authority Score (AS) and Rating (3). The rating metric uses proprietary technology to calculate how impactful getting a link from this domain will be, and how easy it will be to get it.

These two metrics will help you filter out any bad websites right from the start. You will, of course, still have to open the rest and find link opportunities manually. Once you’ve found an opportunity, you can select one of the premade outreaches strategies:

These are basically different email outreach templates.

Here’s how your prospect shortlist looks like:

This screen is similar to cold outreach tools with the standard analytics: delivery, open, reply, and backlink earned rates.

When you’re ready to contact your prospects simply click “Contact”. You’ll be taken to a screen where you’ll be able to build your outreach campaign:

Semrush will automatically find contact emails.

Check the ones you want to reach out to. Keep in mind, though, that the contact finding tool is not a replacement for a specialized lead database. It lacks that level of accuracy.

Now all you have to do is connect your mailbox to Semrush and you’re ready to start sending emails.

SpyFu’s workflow is similar: enter a keyword you want to rank higher for, and you get a list of link prospects:

SpyFu’s tool is drastically simplified.

Instead of Relevancy Score or Backlink Quality Score, SpyFu has Outbound Links and Domain Strength.

Outbound Links is a useful metric. The more outbound links a page has, the less “link juice” each individual outbound link will pass. It could also be an indicator that the site is selling links (but that is a topic for another post). 

As for the Domain Strength metric, well, I’m not sure I know how its calculated. SpyFu’s official definition is “domain with high strength pulls in high amounts of quality traffic and carries high authority across any competitive keywords,” which doesn’t explain much.

Adding prospects will import them to your Project Manager:

Opening one will show additional detail: 

The design is less inviting than what Semrush has.

In the bottom right panel, SpyFu suggests potential contacts. I find that these are usually guest post authors or C-suite executives. Guest post authors typically don’t have influence over their posts once they go live. And most executives won’t bother with link partnerships.

Hovering over or clicking on the contact will give you their role in the company and contact information:

Here you’ll see a short bio, email address, and as many social media profiles as SpyFu could find. This is better than Semrush, which only gives you email addresses and company social media profiles.

That said, SpyFu does not have email sending capabilities.

It works as a project notebook: you have to “Log a Contact” yourself every time you reach out:

It’ll open a popup box where you describe the interaction you’ve had with your prospect.

Without a doubt, the winner is Semrush. It has:

• More intuitive user interface and experience.
• Bulk keyword and competitor analysis
• Better prospect suggestions
• Built-in sorting mechanism and shortlisting that feels like a CRM
• Built-in email sender
• Essential outreach analytics

SpyFu is better at finding contact information, but still not a substitute for other standalone tools such as Hunter. Semrush provides a level of functionality that would allow you to replace a dedicated link building solution. 

A Rank Tracking tool tracks the position (rank) of your webpage for a given keyword in the SERPs of your choice.

Therefore, frequent position updates and change history are crucial features of a rank tracking tool. In this section, we’ll compare how Semrush Position Tracker compares to SpyFu’s.

Before a rank tracker can work, you have to give it keywords to track.

You can ask Semrush to A) generate a list of keywords for your target domain automatically, B) import them from another campaign, or C) pull them from your Google Analytics account:

Here, I’m using Semrush suggestions, and have selected the domain report source:

Semrush has a very advanced rank tracker. Not only is the standard Ranking Overview table packed full of helpful data like Search Intent, Starting Position, and SERP Features that you own:

You also get the option to see your Ranking Distribution:

Your Top Keywords and how they improved or declined since being imported: 

And even Keyword Cannibalization risks:

And the best part? Semrush updates Position Tracking data every 24 hours.

Here’s SpyFu’s interface for importing keywords:

Just like Semrush, SpyFu also helps you generate a keyword list for importing. It has four suggested groups for keywords you may want to track:

You can select one or multiple keywords groups and open a list view.

And that’s the rank tracker.

It does what it promises: shows your traffic and SERP positions for selected keywords.

Unlike Semrush, SpyFu shows the position history for your keyword from even before you started tracking it. It goes all the way back to 2016.

Besides this, SpyFu does not have any other statistics or special features like Keyword Cannibalization monitoring.

And a big shortfall is the fact that keyword positions get updated weekly as opposed to daily.

SERP positions vary during the week. I was wondering if SpyFu actually tracks the positions daily in the backend, but just shows the average position over the week on the frontend. I couldn’t find anything on their self-help section, so I asked support:

And the answer is, sadly, no.

SpyFu’s Position Tracker does deliver on its promise, and has a great historical view that is useful even before you started tracking the keyword. However, it updates the keywords only once a week, while Semrush updates rankings on a daily basis. On top of that, Semrush has a plethora of other useful analytics and reports making it the superior Rank Tracking tool.

Finding keywords for PPC Advertising is much like finding keywords for SEO.

First you analyze competitors, create a list of seed keywords, expand those seed keywords, determine which will bring you closer to your goal, and finally track positions once you’ve placed your bids.

To do all this, you use the same tools as you do when performing keyword research for SEO. Meaning there is no need to go over them again here, as my conclusion will be the same. If you haven’t read the chapter on SEO Keyword Research, Competitor Analysis, or Rank Tracking, the following links will take you there.

That said, there is ONE tool that’s very important for PPC advertising that’s not important for SEO: Ad History. We’ll compare the Semrush and SpyFu Ad History tools in the next section.

The goal of the Ad History tool is to help you discover keywords that competitors are bidding on (or have bid on) and see the ad copy and landing pages they’ve used for the ads.

This tool is invaluable for leveraging the hard work your competitors have already done in finding message-market fit. You can find their unprofitable ad variants and save your ad budget.

Here’s Semrush Ad History window showing a list of keywords a website has bid on in the past 12 months:

The Coverage % metric will help you determine how long they’ve been bidding on a given keyword. For example, if they’ve been bidding on a keyword for 2 months out of 12, their coverage would be 16%. I like to sort by this filter to find keywords they’ve been bidding on for a long time, as that could mean that those keywords are profitable for the company.

When you find the right keywords, clicking on the blue squares opens snapshots of the ads that ran for them.

The number in the blue square tells you the highest position that the ad got placed in that month.

Below it, you can find the landing page URL and the Google ad copy. At the bottom, you can see the Volume and CPC metrics for the keyword in that month.

Three areas for improvement:

First, the panels only show the ad copy for the body of the ad. They do not show the headline.

Editor’s note: Semrush also has a tool where you can do the reverse: enter a keyword and see a list of competitors who placed bids in the past 12 months.

Here, if you open the ad snapshot panel, it will show ad headlines.

Second, the panels are too small to fit the entire ad copy, which makes doing month-by-month comparisons difficult at times.

Third, there are no indicators that would say if the ad copy has changed from month to month. Or if it did change, how much it changed. With this, you could easily determine whether:

• The ad is a clear winner (no ad changes in the past few months),
• The ad copy is not quite there yet (few ad changes),
• The ad is still in the heavy testing phase because the competitor couldn’t find a profitable version (heavy ad changes).

Here’s SpyFu Ad History view:

The ad boxes represent ads that this domain has run for the keyword. Ad boxes that are in the same color mean that the ad has the same headline, but not necessarily the same ad copy. (A step up from Semrush’s interface. I also like that SpyFu’s panels are big enough to fit the entire ad. It makes month-to-month ad comparison effortless.)

Looking at these boxes and the colors can get confusing. If you’re feeling lost, SpyFu has another panel on the right side that shows the most frequently used ads:

Again, the goal of the Ad History tool is to find which ad copy works best for your competitors and kick off your next PPC campaign from there; leveraging all the testing your competitors have already done. With a panel like this, you can read top ads from 15+ of your competitors in 5 minutes, and get a crystal clear idea about what kind of messaging works in your industry.

On a final note: SpyFu has an impressive backlog of PPC ads that goes back to 2007. (By comparison, Semrush goes back to 2012). It makes sense. SpyFu started as a Google Ads intelligence tool back in April 2005.

On their help page, SpyFu claims that “[they] keep cached pages of every Google SERP [they]’ve ever captured. And Cache goes back as long as [they]’ve been around.”

When it comes to PPC Keyword Research, Competitor Analysis, and Rank Tracking, the overall winner is Semrush.

But when it comes to spying on your competitor’s ads, I have to give it to SpyFu. Their design choices make more sense, and their ad snapshot panels make it easy to see which changes your competitors have made to their ads over time.

Now the question is: which tool will give you the most value?

That depends entirely on who you are and how you’re planning to use the tools. But before we go into that, let’s first get a better feeling for the price and value that each tool delivers in its plans.

Here are the monthly costs of Semrush plans. All of these are for a single user. The cost of additional users is noted in brackets:

• Low-tier: $119.95 [+$45]
• Mid-tier: $229.95 [+$80]
• High-tier: $449.95 [+$100]

Semrush offers a modest 17% discount (2 free months) to everyone willing to buy a yearly license.

With their base, low-tier plan you’ll get access to most of their key features (including SEO and PPC Keyword Research, Competitor Analysis, Rank Tracker, and Link Building Tool). You won’t, however, have access to the Content Creation Suite or their Historical data—that means no Ad Histories.

Their mid-tier plan extends the use limit by roughly 3x across the board. For example, the number of tracked keywords goes from 500 to 1500. You also get access to some powerful features, like customizable reporting and an integration with Google Data Studio. This tier also unlocks access to the content creation and optimization toolset.

Finally, the high-tier plan extends use limits by an additional 3x. You also get access to more niche features such as their API.

Here are the monthly costs of SpyFu plans:

• Low-tier: $39
• Mid-tier: $79 (first month is $39)
• High-tier: $299 

SpyFu offers a whopping 50% discount if you commit to a yearly plan.

SpyFu’s high-tier plan is the same as its mid-tier plan. It’s essentially a mid-tier plan bundle for 5 users. Speaking of user seats, SpyFu doesn’t offer them. If you want to get SpyFu for your other team members, you’ll simply have to buy them a plan individually.

Right off the bat, with the SpyFu base plan, you get nearly all features. The only two missing are API access and customizable reports. The mid-tier also increases the amount of data you can access.

While SpyFu’s SEO toolset is solid, Semrush is a category leader when it comes to the quality of its SEO Toolkit. Users get access to some of the best keyword research, competitor analysis, link building, content optimization, site audit and rank tracking tools on the market, all from a single integrated platform. 

Unless you’re planning on the Semrush mid-tier ($229.95/month) plan which has the Ad History tool, your best bet would be to use the Semrush low-tier ($120/month) plan—for PPC keyword research and competitor analysis—in combination with SpyFu low-tier ($39/month) plan—for it’s Ad History tool.

For small budgets, just the SpyFu plan will do.

SpyFu’s link building tools have a way to go. Even if you have a shoestring budget of only $40/month, spend time finding your link opportunities on Google for free and use that budget on email finder software.

For professional link builders or agencies, or even part-time link builders who want to be more effective with their time, Semrush is a great solution, especially since it is part of an all-in-one SEM platform.

If you’re using more than 2-3 tools, or if you manage a marketing team of any size, I highly recommend Semrush.

Although it’s more expensive, you can also consolidate a lot of marketing tools and workflows into a single platform — especially with the mid-tier ($229.95/month) plan which unlocks the Content Marketing Suite and Historical Data, granting you access to all the tools discussed in this article.

Semrush also provides several project and campaign management tools that make it easy to monitor progress across a range of digital marketing areas – SEO audits, keyword rankings, backlink audits, PPC keywords, organic traffic, and social media engagement – from a single dashboard.

With this in mind, Semrush provides an extremely high value-to-price ratio.