Keyword spying services, are they accurate?

Over the past year some online services have popped up offereing busienss owners the ability to spy on their competitors. Spying as in knowing what organic keywords their competitors are ranking for as well as any paid advertisments and those related keywords being used.

I stumbled upon keywordspy.com while looking through my logs, to see what recent referrers I have received. Seems like someone is spying on my site :)

My question was, can these services be trusted. The answer is "sometimes". Take for example this site, those keywords do look accurate, they are driving traffic for my site. Now look at a site that gets a lot of traffic, drupal.org. Those keywords don't even give any "drupal" related results on google. Do the search yourself: site notes, making zip files, zip and postal

What's the trick? There isn't any. These services are useful but you will have to decide if the value these keyword services bring is worth the price or your time (to analyze and cross check). I think the service is useful along with doing things the hard way, doing your own manual research as well.

Their are other software tools that do things similar, like keyword elite. There are more tools available too, you just have to hunt for them. The old saying "don't throw all your eggs in the same basket" holds true for online business / services too.