[Tuto] Spy on your competitors' websites

By Grégory Coste.

Published: 24 October 2024

Our Search Engine Marketing (SEM) tutorial will help you find out how to improve your website's traffic and identify your competitors' strengths. Learn or perfect your web marketing techniques!

See all software Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search engine optimisation, a formidable weapon for attracting new visitors

There are several ways of attracting new visitors to your website:

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

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

Paid search (SEA)

Search Engine Advertising allows you to offer Internet users "adverts" on search engines and social media enabling them to access your site.

In short, SEM = SEO + SEA

The essential difference is that SEO allows 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 content on your site remains online...

We are going to look at natural referencing using an analysis tool called Ranxplorer.

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

Analysis by keyword

On the second tab, keywords, "Natural results", you can see all the expressions and the estimated traffic:

Note that the keyword "marmiton" is ranked first. This gives you an indication of how well known this website is. It implies that when Internet users are looking for a recipe, they type in the name of the site.

Site awareness is an important element in company web campaigns

Analysis by url.

The url tab gives you the addresses of the pages on the website that bring the most traffic to "marmiton". This index is of particular interest to you, as it allows you to see which pages "marmiton" can use to integrate advertising (Search Engine Advertising /SEA).

Key words to work on

In this example, moving from position 3 to 1 on the keyword "crêpe recipe" will give 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 of increasing 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 showing you the main websites in your field.

What keywords does your competitor use?

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

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

Analyse one of your competitor's keywords

You can analyse the keyword "blanquette de veau" to see that "Marmiton" is ranked in second position. Is it possible for "Marmiton" to move into first place?

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

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

The following results are displayed 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 get the best out of them!

Find ideas for keywords and content themes

Keywords related to a theme

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

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 suggestion gives 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 that there is sufficient monthly search volume to justify the content, and that the competition is not too strong 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 first 3 search results. This is a strong position, so there's no need to create any specific content.

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

What questions do web users ask on search engines?

As you can see, for this keyword there is no question of high traffic potential. Although the search volumes are very low, taken together they represent much greater potential traffic: according to the principle of the long tail, you can attract as many visitors as search volumes to a single web page, in other words, recover the sum of all these queries.