Is there any way to find out if a competitor is using PPC and how much they are spending? I have a client paying big bucks for PPC and only about 5% of that on content based SEO. I would like to ween him off the PPC and use more strategies for organic ranking. Thanks!
In my opinion your customer is doing the right thing, spending money on PPC is easier to caculate and results are often better. There are some Scrapers around reading the Google result pages that can find competitor keywords, but you need to give them a predefined list or they rely on an internal database, they'll never find all competitor keywords. Finding out competitor bids is impossible.
Um, actually there is the social engineering method. Call the competitor, offer them SEO/PPC management services at a great price and in casual conversation, many will give you the information you want. I'm NOT suggesting that you lie, defraud, or perpetrate something illegal. I'm just saying, offer your services cheap and pump them for information. If they take you up on the offer, outsource the work and make a profit. If not, you still have the information. Win-Win.
There are 3rd party tools like spyfu, keyword spy and semrush. They're not always terribly reliable, but they give you a place to start.
Finding out competitors: why don't you just do a search using keywords your client is using? See which ads show up. Take note of the sites using PPC. As for how much they are spending, impossible to know. You can infer some price range from your own data but that's about it. Besides, knowing what they spend or even their keywords is irrelevant to optimizing your own campaign. Use the keywords you feel are relevant and bid what makes sense to you and is profitable, not what others may be bidding. Don't ween them off PPC, they'll get a lot less traffic than with SEO alone. Instead, improve it so their PPC costs are lower and conversions higher. Apply what you learn from PPC to SEO.
Yeah, I use Keyword Spy a bit - but as Magda says, they're pretty unreliable. They rely on getting data from ISPs and they vary rarely cover much of the long tail - to give you an example; I run an account of just over 400,000 KWs, in the travel / accommodation industry so not an unknown niche, and keyword spsy reckons I have 20,000 keywords. That means KWSpy picks up about 5% (probably varies on industry / niche). Don't wean them off PPC if it's profitable - why would you do that?? What you need to be doing is using analytics to put together a top level strategy report saying: We spend X on PPC and it generates this much revenue. We only spend 5% of that on SEO and it generates this much revenue. I need X amount to be able to do this and this with SEO. If we do this then we may be able to drive X amount of revenue with SEO (I know, very hard to predict with SEO - but that's why you're an expert and theyre not, you need to make a judgement call based on reasonable assumptions and figures - and then assert to them that this isn't accurate, but the potential is fantastic for only another 5%)