[Tuto] Spy on your competitors' websites

By Grégory Coste.

Published: October 24, 2024

Our Search Engine Marketing (SEM) tutorial helps you learn how to improve your website's traffic and identify your competitors' strengths. Learn or perfect your webmarketing techniques!

See all software Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search engine optimization, a formidable weapon for attracting new visitors

There are several ways to attract new visitors to your website:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Based on search engine queries. Close to the intentions of Internet users, it responds precisely to their requests.

Search Engine Advertising (SEA)

Search Engine Advertising (SEA) enables you to offer Internet users "advertisements" on search engines and social media, enabling them to access your site.

In short, SEM = SEO + SEA

The essential difference is that SEO enables you to build up web traffic over time, whereas visitors from your advertising campaigns will no longer be interested in your proposals as soon as they stop. SEA actions are in fact ephemeral, while your site content remains online...

Let's take a look at SEO using an analysis tool called Ranxplorer.

How do you evaluate your website and that of your competitors?

Analysis by keyword

On the second tab, keywords, "Natural Results", you'll see all the expressions and their estimated traffic:

Note that the keyword "marmiton" is ranked first. This element gives you an indication of the notoriety of this website. It implies that when Internet users are looking for a recipe, they hit the site's name.

Site awareness is an important element in corporate web campaigns

Analysis by url.

The url tab gives you the addresses of the website pages bringing the most traffic to "marmiton". This index is of particular interest to you, as it lets you know which pages "marmiton" may choose for advertising (Search Engine Advertising /SEA).

Key words to work on

In this example, going from position 3 to 1 on the keyword "crepe recipe", gives you 49,200 additional views per month: that's the potential gain in additional traffic, and it's considerable!

Improving your position in search results is an effective way to increase your visibility on the web.

Spy on your competitors on the web

Competitive analysis is an essential part of any web marketing operation. But who are your competitors?

Who are your competitors?

By clicking on "Competitors", you'll get an answer presenting the main websites in your field.

What keywords does your competitor use?

You can analyze the evolution of each of them. The first of them, "Cuisineaz", is a long way from "Marmiton", so let's see what keywords it's positioned on. We run the same query as for Marmiton, and get the following results:

The site's first keyword is blanquette de veau, even before cuisineaz, the site's name.
Although it's not as well known as "Marmiton", it still attracts 40,095 and 32,769 visits per month (lines 2 and 3).

Analyze one of your competitor's keywords

You can analyze the keyword "blanquette de veau", to see that "Marmiton" is ranked in second position. Is it possible for "Marmiton" to come out on top?

Steal your competitor's keyword ideas that you haven't exploited!

Following the image below, in the missed keywords tab, select cuisineaz as competitor 1, and select "none" competitor 2 and 3, then click on "compare".

The following results appear before your eyes.

You can instantly see :

the keywords with which cuisineaz attracts visitors to its website
these same keywords are not used by marmiton and represent potential visitor traffic.

That's what we call spying on your competitor to make the most of it!

Find ideas for keywords and content themes

Keywords related to a theme

You're exploring a domain and want to know which keywords are related to it. By entering the domain (chocolate in the example), you'll get the related keywords with a simple click. Efficient.

Let's take the keyword "chocolate" as an example, to find out about related content. By clicking on "Related keywords", you'll be presented with a list of suggestions.

Each one offers you the monthly search volume, the trend for each month of the year (one stick per month), the number of results (e.g. content directly related to chocolate cake), the price of the Adwords ad, and the competition for the keyword.

This basic information is enough to enable you to choose between several keywords for your content strategy.

Choosing these keywords means first and foremost a sufficient monthly search volume to justify your content, and not too much competition to have an impact in the medium term (a few months).

How do I search for a keyword?

We can see that "Marmiton" offers the top 3 search results. This position is strong, so there's no need to create specific content.

For Marmiton's competitors, positioning themselves on this keyword means knowing that potential results will only be achieved in the long term.

What questions do Internet users ask on search engines?

As you can see, there's no question of high traffic potential for this keyword. Even though search volumes are very low, when put together they represent much greater potential traffic: according to the long tail principle, you can attract as many visitors as search volumes to a single web page, i.e. recover the sum of all these queries.