No matter what your website’s about, I’m sure you’re well aware of your primary competitors. You bump into them all the time, fighting over rankings in the SERPS and in bidding wars over juicy pay-per-click keywords. Have you ever wondered what keywords your competitors are using that you’re not? How much would you be willing to pay to find out?

In my case, it’s $19.00. That’s the price of a one-day trial for KeyCompete, a keyword selection tool that can research which keywords your competitors are bidding on and download them to a spreadsheet. And it’s quite an eye-opener.

If you’ve ever had to build up a keyword list (and I assume anyone reading this probably has), you know it can be a tedious process when you’re chasing the long tail. Even with the right tools, it takes diligence and a creative frame of mind to think of every possible keyword your customers could be searching for. And you’ll still miss some.

But armed with huge lists of my competitors keywords — in many cases 25 or even 40 pages worth — I can easily add tons of new long tail keywords with only minimal research. I also learned more about their products, just by reading what they bid on, which helps me expand my own product catalog.

As an added bonus, my boss was totally impressed.

I have to admit, it does feel a little strange to be privy to that much information, because I know how much that information is worth, in terms of my time and my paycheck. A few years ago, one of our sales reps naively explained pay-per-click to one of our vendors … and gee, look who’s bidding against us now for some very lucrative keywords. If I found out someone was handing over our keyword lists, I might just pop an embolism on the spot.

But hey, all’s fair in love, war and e-commerce, right? (Okay, not all, but it sounded cool.)

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