There is a ton of different search engine optimization software packages out their that basically claim to be a miraculous solution to every advertising problem you could be facing, and we all know this is so far from the truth. Pay per click marketing is all about the copy and the keyword research.

The tools on the web like SpyFu will allow you to actually look at a competitors URL and analyze it. The tool will bring back a list of keywords the competitor is bidding on, how many clicks he has a day, what the average amount of money spent per day is.. and so much more. SpyFu is of course limited unless you want to pay for a membership. Most of these tools are like this, where they give you a teaser, then want you to pay for more results. If you truly are using pay per click marketing to generate most of your revenue, you might consider trying one of these tools.

What this article is really about though, is the problem that comes to most of us mentally when we resort to using tools like this. Studying your competition is a good idea for market research, it is a good idea to study his keywords and see where is customers are coming from, it is a good idea to mimic what he is doing to an extent. Here, though, is something bad. You don’t want to simply rely on the information these tools give you and do no research on your own. That it what will ultimately make your business stand out from the next, doing something your competitors are not.

So in short, if you are serious about finding a valueable search engine optimization software, you might consider a spy tool, however, I would highly suggest you just use it to extend your other optimization and research efforts. Do not simply copy what they are doing and cross your fingers. You would likely fail.

Should you use a Search Engine Optimization Tool? The choice is yours really, and I would say it depends heavily on how much weight paid traffic has on your business model. If you are generating most of your revenue through Google AdWords, then it may be beneficial for you to pick up a copy off PPC Web Spy, or to use SpyFu.com as a free alternative. SpyFu has a paid service as well, either of these tools will basically do the same thing.

You input a competitors URL and the software returns various information from how much they are paying per click, what keywords they are paying for, how much they are spending on average, as well as how many clicks they are getting per day on average. Much more information is made available to you, but surely you can already tell how beneficial this information could be to someone who needs to know which keywords to bid on for the best conversion rate.

As I have stated before, studying your competitor’s or using a Search Engine Optimization Tool should not be the only way that you perform your keyword research, but you can most definately gain a head start on the process and avoid some otherwise not-so-obvious mistakes by studying what your competitors are doing. Are they paying top dollar to advertise for “five irons”? Then this keyword is most likely converting well.