SEO: when your competitors help you

Whether you have a list of keywords or launching a new SEO project, it is always useful to have an open approach to your environment. As we've discussed before, keyword selection often relies on using an SEO approach (traffic, difficulty, potential) combined with the business aspect by leveraging the company's commercial positioning, using specific jargon tailored to your target audience to optimize content quality, and aligning with Google's E-E-A-T principles. This is already a good start, but sometimes analyzing the competition allows you to refine your strategy or even make critical decisions.

Understanding Your Competitors' Keyword Strategy

How does your main competitor proceed? Does it use the same keywords? Does it focus on generic terms or long-tail keywords? Does it position itself in direct competition with you or choose to stand out with niche synonyms? Today, it's entirely possible to compare your SEO approach with that of your competitors by using an SEO tool like Cocolyze, for example.

Identifying Business Opportunities

When discussing keyword selection, this actually goes much further. By observing a competitor's strategy, SEO can assist sales teams and product managers by identifying opportunities for expanding the catalog, etc.

From my experience, I’ve sometimes identified new product ranges where suppliers provided early information to the competitor, giving them the "first-mover advantage." Armed with a screenshot as proof, the brand manager filed a complaint with the supplier and was able to negotiate better terms for future product launches.

Observing competitors' keywords and jargon also helps to spot and react to new trends and emerging terminology.

Knowing the Norm, to Stand Out

Some of you may remember the days when Google wasn’t very “smart,” and we intentionally placed misspelled words or synonym indexes on our websites to enrich the semantic field and capture traffic from secondary queries.

For instance, sites would have phrases like "you won’t find by searching + a list of words" at the bottom of the page, or even glossaries. It's always useful to recall this era, as not everything from those secondary keyword strategies should be discarded. By extension, when choosing a keyword, you might work on phrases or wordings that your competitors don't use, making it easier to rank.

If your competitors are targeting the same keyword for a product or range, you could choose to focus on a synonym, a use case rather than a brand name, or another term close to the jargon that attracts people with a similar need but who may not have identified the product in question.

An example to illustrate this: suppose you offer a foreign product with a francized name, like turrón, the Spanish cousin of nougat, which becomes touron in French. If all your competitors are targeting the term touron, you could position yourself on the Spanish term, as searches with this spelling are almost as numerous as the French version. This strategy would allow you to target expatriates or people who discovered this product in Spain, for example.

Understanding What’s Missing to Perform

Without going into a full tutorial, Cocolyze is your ally for ‘spying on your competitors.’ To do this, you must enter your competitors into your SEO tool, which will then crawl the relevant sites.

Once done, you can compare yourself in almost all of Cocolyze’s reports. If you’ve been working on your keyword list for a while and want to make sure you’re on the right track, it can be useful to check if your competitors are also targeting them. If they are, you can compare your respective rankings in the SERPs and even discover the overall and detailed score of your competitors' referenced pages. This will help you understand why there’s still work to do to reach the top position or at least surpass your peers.

Observing Competitors While Freeing Yourself from Your Strategy

Checking the keywords your competitors rank for can be interesting for various reasons. Your competitors may have identified valuable keywords for them—and for you—that you missed. It’s also sometimes useful to notice a competitor's positioning on long-tail keywords.

In the Opportunities -> Competitors tab, you’ll find a list of keywords that your competitors are working on, which you haven’t yet included in your account. Sometimes—and this has happened to me in my career—you’ll be surprised by expressions you hadn’t thought of, as explained earlier.

In Conclusion

Even though it’s not the only or primary approach, analyzing your competitors is always useful and, depending on the context and your expertise, can provide tips or clues to help define your keyword or SEO strategy. Feel free to share your thoughts and feedback on this post or others. We’re always happy to add elements or exchange ideas with our clients or other SEO and e-commerce enthusiasts.