For the seventh installment of our Digital Breakthroughs podcast, CEO Bernard May sat down (virtually) with founder and CEO of SpyFu, Mike Roberts. As a dynamic competitive research tool, SpyFu has been a game-changer for brands and marketers who need to “dive beneath the surface” when it comes to uncovering what the competition is doing.
Beyond this, Mike reveals the path that led him down the road to SpyFu, how brands should be thinking about competitive research, and what’s to come in 2021. If you want to listen to the full episode you can find links at the bottom of this article. With that, let’s dive into this episode of Digital Breakthroughs!
Meet SpyFu CEO Mike Roberts
“So, I started out actually with another software company. And this was back in 2005. So, Google AdWords hadn’t been around super long and I was trying to learn how to advertise. But the reality was is I only had $3,000 in my bank account to spend on advertising, otherwise I would literally have to go back to work. So, I had to be right in the bets that I made. And one thing I wanted to do is I figured something out, right? I happened to figure out that instead of searching for what I thought people were searching for, which was…
My product did this thing, it took data off of a website and put into a spreadsheet or database kind of scraping things out of eBay and putting it into a Excel. And so, because I was a nerd, I called that web data extraction. Well, it turns out that most people didn’t search for web data extraction, they searched for screen scraping the web or web scraping. And I had no idea. And I actually kind of thought that that was a stupid way to refer to it.
And so, it was by happenstance that I figured that out. And so, I wanted to figure out whether or not any of my competitors had thought of any of those sort of consumer searches that I hadn’t thought of. So, that’s why I built the prototype for SpyFu. It was basically just to help myself find more keywords that people were searching on. And it did absolutely work. It worked really well. I was able to hire additional people. I went from basically, about, I don’t know, I’d say about a thousand dollars a month in sales to $12,000 a month in sales. So, it was a pretty big deal. And of course, I released that thing as a free tool online.”
The Ages of Competitive Intelligence
“Well, it’s funny because the first thing that you learn and that you should pay attention to is how you are communicating what you’re doing. This is the very first sort of premise of SEO. And in fact, if I go back to that story, the name of my product back in that day was called Provide Us, right? Which seemed like a great name to me. I was stoked to get the domain name. It was a short domain name and it sounded good. But when I changed the name of the product from Provide Us to Web Scraper Plus, literally that was the day that my sales tripled overnight. And I was able to hire my first employee. And sort of that very basic stuff.
I was just talking to my seven-year-old son, who’s an aspiring YouTuber. He’s got this balloon popping video that he’s got improperly named. And so I was like, “Check it out. Here’s how you use SpyFu. You just go on here and you find the keyword that does what your video does and find the one that’s got the highest volume and lowest competition.” He’s seven. And so, we renamed his YouTube video, I think, “slow-motion water balloon popping,” which is actually something that people search on a lot.”
Thinking Beyond Google
“So, Google is a great company. Google is a great company actually, but they’re in the business of business and they’re in the business to make money. And so, when you look at Google, they have this tool called Keyword Planner. And Keyword Planner is like… The product that Google produces, the one that lets you search the internet and stuff is amazing. It’s so great. And so Google has this ability to create really, really amazing products. But the product that is Keyword Planner, that’s designed to give you information about keywords is the worst possible thing in the entire world, because it can be very misleading. It can be slightly wrong, very often it is and in a weirdly self-serving way.”
Cleaner Research For Better Strategies
“As an example, if you were to look at, I don’t know, just the basic word, like car insurance or something, Google, by default, they’re going to tell you that that keyword gets a lot more searches than it really does. Because what they are doing is they’re taking all of the misspellings and plurals and different tenses of that same word and rolling it all up into one. Such that if you type in like a misspelling of YouTube, which is one of the most searched keywords in the world… YouTube is just a navigational search. The proper spelling of YouTube gets, I don’t know, hundreds of millions of searches. But if you type in YouTube, Y-O-U-T-U-B-E, they tell you that that search itself gets that same number of searches. So, there’s this weird lack of granularity that they have because they roll a whole bunch of, could be, thousands of keywords all into one keyword. So, they don’t tell you the truth on those things.”
“Search Volume” Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story
“And then the other weird thing is that the Keyword Planner tool will only give you search volume, the number of searches, in weird increment. So, it’s like 10, 20, 50, a hundred. It turns out that to span all of the values between zero and like 200 million searches, they only have, I believe it’s 93 discrete values. So, at some point you’re making jumps in precision of like 50 million searches a month. So, it’s actually a pretty terrible tool. And it’s really unfortunate because you’d think that they would just, at some point, be embarrassed enough to make it okay. But I think that there’s some kind of incentive that they have to make it terrible. I really don’t know why they have such a horrible tool, but it really is bad.”
Seeking Accuracy and Insights
“There’s a bunch of ways. Basically, you get a sample of users and you see what they searched for and then you extrapolate it. It’s very similar to how Google would do it if they were doing a good job. I guess the other thing that you have with SpyFu of course… I mean, we sort of have this curse of knowledge, you and I, having used the tool. And I made it, right? That is that, of course, with Keyword Planner, you can’t type in your competitor’s website and see the keywords that they buy and rank on. And that’s obviously the core meat and potatoes of SpyFu’s original value proposition is that you can download your competitor’s keywords and see their ads and that type of thing.”
Desktop vs. Mobile Impact in Research
“But there’s also quite a few different new metrics that you can get from Google that are pretty difficult to find, unless you’re looking at your own analytics. And that’s like the split of mobile versus desktop. There’s a lot of keywords that are highly, highly desktop. And I mean, we hear a lot about how everything is moving mobile. And it’s true. There’s a lot of searches that are very, very mobile. And so, you want to make sure that you have a mobile-first experience. But there’s also a lot of searches that are very desktop-centric. So, broadly, if I paint with a broad brush, people tend to make purchases on their desktops more often than they make purchases on mobile. And so, the keywords that are desktop-heavy tend to be more transactional and stuff.
So, these are the types of metrics that we have along with our stuff, how much mobile is there? What percent of clicks go to ads versus organic? Which percent of searches don’t get clicked at all? Right? There’s a lot of things that are just sort of answered in the snippet. And so, you have kind of this opportunity to do on-SERP optimization instead of on-page optimization.”
Competitive Research: Getting Started
“So there’s a very simple, straightforward process. Okay, so, there’s a few places to start. It kind of depends whether you’ve been around for a while or whether you’re trying to start from scratch. But kind of one of the things that works for everybody, right? Because your mileage may vary on a lot of tips that I can give. But one thing that basically always works is a process of improving your existing content. And we have this section on SpyFu called Top Pages. What Top Pages does is it shows you any website’s most trafficked pages. And so, when you’re looking at which content of your competitors is doing a good job of actually getting SEO traffic, you can use Top Pages to do that.”
Leveraging “Top Pages”
“So, you just type in their site and we’re going to immediately show you their topmost traffic content. But you can apply that same idea to your own site. And what you do is you go to this thing called Top Pages, you put in your own site, we’re going to show you your own top content.
And what I want you to do is look at that content. And we show you the title. And we also show you the top keywords that piece of content ranks on, right? So I want you to make sure that the top keyword that’s driving the most traffic to your site is actually in the title.
It’s a really fast audit. You make sure it’s in your title and then you make sure that it’s in your H1.
Then the next thing that I want you to do is take that same keyword… So, let’s say that that keyword was “plumbing repair Tacoma,” right? So you want to take that “plumbing repair Tacoma” and type that in to the filter on this Top Pages tool and see if there’s any other pieces of content that also rank on that same keyword or variations of that keyword.
And then I want you to either get rid of that content, redirect that content, combine that content into the other piece of content, or do a cross link. It’s a decision that you make based on what you’re looking at in the content. But when you’ve got various different pieces of content all ranking on the same topic, you want to combine all that stuff.
Generally speaking, you want to combine it all into one mega sort of authoritative piece of content. So, that’s a process that can work for everybody that has anything that’s existing.”
Reverse Engineering With Competitor Research
“So, that’s kind of the next step, right? And I’m kind of focused on this improving your own content. So, just a second ago, you’re talking about building a whole bunch of content. And when you’re building a whole bunch of content, you have a basic idea, you have a goal in mind, right? I want this piece of content to rank for… What did you say? A foundation leak or something like slab leaks?
Okay. So, I want this content to rank for slab leak. You post the content and you know how it is, right? There’s almost like a rule, it’s a power curve rule. You publish a hundred pieces of content, you’re not going to have a bell curve of content. Let’s say, you’re not going to have an average of a hundred clicks. And these things don’t vary very much.
It’s going to be something like, you’re going to have three pieces of content or five pieces of content that get like 5,000 clicks per month. And you’re going to have 50 pieces of content that get like six clicks per month, right? So, I want you to focus on those unicorn pieces of content that actually stuck. And I want you to improve those, right? That’s the way to do it because you can fight what Google is saying, but if they like a piece of content, you want to make them like it more, right? Just double down on those pieces of content.”
Leveraging Winning Content for Better Rankings
“And so, the next step is you go through those winning pieces of content and find any questions that you didn’t ask, add videos to these pieces of content. Just pile everything that you have into those big winners. And unfortunately, it is a numbers game. You kind of have to just produce a bunch of pieces of content and then see what happens.
But my recommendation is to sort of ride the wave of what Google is giving you on those, as opposed to sticking with your original plan and trying to rank it on whatever you want to rank it on. You want to rank it on what Google is… Unless it’s completely different and completely out of line with what you’re trying to rank for.”
How the Content Game Has Changed
“Well, SpyFu doesn’t look at the content and tell you what’s within the winning content yet. It’s something that I’ve been certainly looking at, trying to reverse engineer everything that Google does. But what we do is we sort of prioritize the list and say here’s the stuff that you want to try to improve right now.
And in our tests that sort of making sure that the title tag and the H1 tag has your most important keyword in it, that tends to get you about one to one and a half… It’s actually about 1.4 positions that that’ll increase. We’ve done that on about, I don’t know, 25 pieces of content. And we’ve actually sort of documented our own results. And 1.4 positions doesn’t seem like a lot, right?
But every position that you move up, it gets you about 30% more clicks on that keyword. So, when you’re looking at a keyword where you’re getting 500 clicks, you’re going to get 200 more.”
Smarter, Not Harder, Content Optimization
“Oh, it takes two minutes. Yeah. And you just can constantly do it. As you’re producing content, you see what’s happened and you make sure that you have those really basic optimizations. But then the other stuff where you see other pieces of content, kind of where you’re looking at cross-linking or canonicalization opportunities, if you’ve got one of these unicorn pieces of content getting in any way cannibalized by some crappy piece of content way down your curve, even if it’s a great piece of content and you love it, you got to combine it. Pull everything in or de-optimize that other one.”
Time to Talk PPC and Paid Media
“So, at the top level, we’ve been collecting data for 14 years and so what we have is for every website in existence, about 99.7% of companies, we have their entire AdWords campaign from beginning to end. And so you can see every ad that they’ve ever written and every ad that they ran as a test against it, and every win and loss. So if you think of a company that’s been around for a really long time in internet years, like Groupon, we’ve been collecting data for six years before they were a company. So you can see the very first ad that they wrote, written by their CEO in the early days.”
Researching Ad Variations
“And then you can see the A, the B, the C, all the way through… It’s way past Z. I don’t even know how we call them. I think it’s like B-E or something, you sort of roll around the alphabet. There’s 52 variants or something that we see. And that’s real important because seeing all that history is useful because people tend to make the costly mistakes early in their ad campaigns, right? There’s keywords that they buy and they spend a lot of money on, and then they pull. And those are the types of things that you can avoid by looking at…
Ideally, you want to look at big competitors, big national competitors. Those are real useful to look at. Even if you’re a small local business, you want to look at people that are inspirational, that are doing a great job, and that have an engine and a team and a whole process. And you can leverage their million dollars a day in spend to your niche.”
Where Is the Market Headed?
“So, trends-wise from the industry, some things that you need to sort of think about are… Obviously you’ve got these sort of zero clicks searches, where basically the question is answered on the SERP, right? So, there’s strategies to deal with that. And by the way, zero search searches are actually coming, where if you type in something like, I don’t know, like weather, it’ll answer it right in the suggest box.
So, certain things are going to go away. And these are kind of the broad things that everybody wants to think about. From a tools perspective, from what we focus on. SpyFu, has this massive repository that’s unlimited data, right? You can use SpyFu all you like and do all the research that you can possibly do. And it’s an all-you-can-eat tool for $39 a month.
And we focused on having the richest data that we can possibly have for a long time. And one thing that I’m focused on right now is making sure that things that we give you, that we actually give you straight-up recommendations, actions that you can take today and actually prioritize those actions by how easy they are for you to do and how effective they’re going to be. And that’s where I see us focusing our time over the course of the next three years. We’re making the product have an opinion and give you actionable recommendations right now.”
Keeping on Top of a Changing Industry
“I follow kind of the standard. I get a lot of stuff from Twitter, I suppose. I’ve got a relatively curated group of people that share things that I find insightful. Yeah, I mean, I’m personally kind of into AI and machine learning. There’s a few podcasts. So the podcast that’s quite good if you guys are into that type of stuff. But obviously, my goal is to essentially reverse engineer Google and apply machine learning to figure out how to give you the right answers and the insights based on truly, truly petabytes of data. And so, I don’t spend quite as much time learning about marketing trends as I spend about how to make answers out of huge amounts of data.”
How to Connect With Mike Roberts!
“I’m mike@spyfu.com. I’m @mrspy, M-R spy on Twitter. I’m sporktopus on Reddit. Or you look me up by just typing in SpyFu and finding the CEO on LinkedIn.”
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