Insight, a French SEO tool for analyzing the competition (Interview)
In recent months, I’ve found the French SEO community to be very active, particularly when it comes to developing new quality tools. I must admit, it’s great to see. Today I wanted to introduce you to a ‘new’ SEO service developed by Yooda, Insight. Insight is an online competitor analysis service that allows you to track a website’s positioned keywords or get keyword suggestions. More and more of us at SEO.co.uk are using it, and it’s on the way to dethroning a well-known competitor that we use every day, SEMrush.
Insight vs. SEMrush
If I mention SEMrush, it’s not without reason, as the two services are quite similar. While SEMrush has been around longer and is therefore better known, Insight is positioned as a formidable national challenger.
SEMrush has a definite advantage when it comes to its international keyword database, its monitoring of Google Ads and the ability to see the history of keywords positioned for a site.
On the other hand, Insight is only a few months old and has already managed to make itself indispensable thanks to one main asset: its database of French keywords. Do you have a site that you want to position on Google France, or are you a French SEO agency? You’ll find it hard to do without Insight. The number of expressions found varies by a factor of two between SEMrush and Insight. Although the solution is less versatile in the end, it does what it was designed to do very well and, above all, this means that its subscription price remains derisory compared with SEMrush’s various offerings.
Examples of relationships with the French site SensCritique. The long tail is much better represented on Insight :
SEMrush report, 50,000 keywords found
Insight report, 87,000 keywords found
Inside Insight
To find out a little more about Insight, we went straight to the source. We put a few questions to Lionel, a familiar face at Yooda.
Can you introduce yourself?
Hello ! I’m webmarketing manager at YOODA, and I’m also in charge of user training. I’ve been involved in SEO in one way or another since 1999.
Can you tell us a bit about Insight?
INSIGHT is a search marketing market and competition analysis tool. INSIGHT is based on a database of 25 million keywords, which is growing rapidly to reach 80 million keywords in September. This will make it by far the most exhaustive and detailed market analysis tool on the planet. And that’s for us French SEOs 🙂
Why did you create Insight?
We had identified a need for knowledge of the SEO market. Mainly to: analyze search habits, quantify the potential of a theme and find market opportunities, estimate the strength of the competition. INSIGHT currently offers three tools. Analysis of a site’s visibility, keyword research and ranking of the competition in a given field.
Is Insight intended to specialize only in French searches / French sites?
Yes, at least for the time being. It’s a very large infrastructure to create and maintain. Consider that there are 7.5 billion positions stored in the search history. The volume of data is colossal, and it has to be constantly refreshed. This means ongoing work on the technical infrastructure for storage, processing and production, and of course on the crawlers.
What languages are taken into account for keywords today? And what about the future?
Only searches carried out on Google.fr are taken into account. Some of the searches are in English. But I can’t say how much of it is done by French people. In the field of SEO, for example, it’s easy to use Anglo-Saxon terms. Is this still English or technical French?
What criteria does the thematic search use?
The thematic search tool allows you to quickly obtain a ranking of competitors on a given theme. All the user has to do is enter a basic keyword. INSIGHT then creates a list of keywords around this basic keyword. It then determines which sites are most visible on Google for this extended list of keywords.
What process do you use to develop the service’s keyword database?
To offer users a database of 80 million keywords, we worked with big-data technologies. Each has its qualities. However, we have had to adapt some of the available tools, modify them and even improve some of their features. It’s a long and costly learning process.
When will automatic recognition of the protocol used by the site (http/https) be available?
INSIGHT currently considers an HTTPS URL to be different from its HTTP sibling. This is useful for visualizing the results of a migration. The downside is that some users can’t tell the difference. As a result, the next version will merge the results for both protocols.
Will it be possible to generate a .pdf report?
This functionality is not planned. The purpose of INSIGHT is not to be a reporting tool, but rather a workspace. A tool for exploring, discovering markets and evaluating opportunities.
What are the next developments?
We’re going to strengthen the functions that make INSIGHT a workspace. Particularly with the creation of a ‘basket’ of keywords, which will enable you to build up a list of interesting expressions as you explore competitors and themes.
Thank you for your answers! I’ll leave you with the last word 🙂
Thank you for highlighting INSIGHT. We’re already working on the next versions!
You can try Insight free of charge in a limited freemium version at the following address: https://insight.yooda.com/. This will allow you to see the features and results available. Don’t hesitate to send in your feedback to the Yooda team – all feedback is welcome!
You can also discover other software in our list of tools dedicated to SEO.
