KeywordSpy vs. KeyCompete
By: Cristine Reyes
In the past months, there are claims that the well-known KeywordSpy is a reseller of KeyCompete. To check the veracity of the alleged buzz, I decided to sign-up to both systems and compared their respective services. After a series of tests, I boldly claim via this post that KeywordSpy is far superior than KeyCompete.
For those who are dying to disagreement with my claim, give me some minutes to explain.
Both tools let you search either by domain or by keyword. So, you may take a peep on what keywords a particular site is bidding on, or alternatively you may see what sites are bidding on a particular set of keywords, but KeywordSpy’s database is definitely bigger and more updated, plus, they have local databases for UK, US, Ireland, Canada, Australia and South Africa, and they have promised to include the European market in the coming months.
First, I used both systems to search for top advertisers of the keyword “tents” and grabbed their keywords lists. I produced a list of about 8,000 from KeyCompete and another 8,000 for KeywordSpy and stopped because I have this short attention span. Well, anyways, I imported my keywords, setup my campaign in AdWords, sat back, and waited for results. I am happy to report that in just weeks, I tripled my ROI with the keyword lists I made with KeywordSpy while those I chose from KeyCompete seemed to be rubbish. As far as business goes, KeywordSpy is really brilliant.
Also, if you are to test the KeyCompete service using your own domains or websites, you will surely conclude that many of their results are equally short and inaccurate. Add to that, its pricing scheme by subdomain is outrageous!
Moreover, when I get all my assumed “competitors’ keywords” from KeyCompete, there is no way for me to know whether they are really good keywords. Their “Column Rating” feature is an underdog, compare to KeywordSpy’s Ad Ranking, PPC and Competitor Count features. Man, no way for you to get totally accurate PPC reports with KeyCompete.
And this is what killed me — their e-mail support! The KeyCompete support took a week to reply to my question and the answer is too far away from my question, and it seems that the reply is just a copy-pasted portion of texts from their website. The KeywordSpy Team, on the other hand, is very helpful and knowledgeable to deal with. They even appreciated the feature suggestions I made. And aside from their pie and bar graphs that represent the PPC Summary or competition level among certain regions, they also have the ClickBank affiliate search engine which gives affiliates the real competition landscape at ClickBank. And I have heard from my SEO buddy Chris that KeywordSpy is into integration of Organic Keywords and Backlink result! Whew! This is amazing! KeyCompete really “can’t compete” with KeywordSpy.
So this post is a cautionary reminder to everyone, I have found no better service from KeyCompete. I actually cancelled my subscription to them after a month trial. Their service is none other than… poor.
