After three weeks of competitive cycling, the Tour de France 2022 has come to an end on Sunday 24 July. Danish cyclist Jonas Vingegaard emerged as the competition’s overall winner and thus dethroned the previous champion Tadej Pogačar.

Overall it was a highly exciting tour with many ups and downs (not only in the mountain stages), that brought along a lot of material for news publishers. In this article, you will find a summary of everything that has happened concerning the Tour de France within its running-time (1 July – 24 July) for French publishers and a direct comparison with German and U.K. publishers and their mobile visibility overall (meaning the News Boxes, the video-, publisher- and other carousels, the web stories and the organic searches).

France

Let’s start with the home country of the Tour. For this analysis, we used a custom keyword cluster on the topic, which was updated in the course of the competition with keywords for every important development. If you want to read our detailed Twitter thread on important SEO-developments, simply click here, or read a summary of what we learned below.

L’Équipe dominated the overall ranking in the Tour de France news coverage in France. Especially towards the end of the competition, they had great success in that field. The first week belonged to Eurosport though. Here the reader could find more general articles on the Tour, which is why it makes sense that those articles were more successful in the early stages, where people first had to refresh their knowledge on the sport and check out when which stage would be happening. Also in the race are Ouest-France, who show a great consistency in their measured rankings, Le Tour, the official website of the Tour de France, and France Info, who seemed to have slightly struggled at the beginning but they caught themselves eventually.

Top five publishers with their most successful article: 

1. L’Équipe (Résultat et résumé : Tour de France, 1ère étape, 13,2km, Copenhague)
2. Eurosport (Tour de France – 4e étape – Wout Van Aert : “On s’est dit qu’on allait y aller à fond jusqu’au sommet”)
3. Ouest-France (Tour de France 2022)
4. Le Tour (Site officiel du Tour de France 2022)
5. France Info (Revivez la dernière étape de montagne, marquée par la Victoire de Vingegaard et le festival de Van Aert)

What we learned from our live-thread: 

(Since the live-thread focussed on the individual days and what was happening just then, the keywords might not be the same as the ones with the most rankings for the overall time course of the competiton)

• On 5 July, sports publishers were more successful in the Mobile News Box than general news publishers. We can observe this by looking at Eurosport’s graph, which has its peak around that time.
• On 7 July, the keyword “tadej pogacar” was dethroned on the mobile SERP. In its place moved “wout van aert” or “primoz roglic”. This chance can be explained by the fact that Pogacar was considered the main competitor to beat at the beginning of the competition, due to him having won the two previous Tours. A week into this year’s Tour tough, van Aert was able to shine. His teammate Roglic suffered a fall on 6 July and injured his shoulder, which led to him having to finish the competition early.
• On 11 July, publishers who reported on Covid-19 in connection to the Tour de France performed better in Google News than on the days before. 11 July was a rest day for the athletes, which meant they had to do Covid-tests, some of which were unfortunately positive and forced those cyclists to leave the competition.
• On 14 July, articles with the keywords “jonas vingegaard”, “julian alaphilippe” , “primoz roglic” and “roman bardet” were most successful in the mobile news box.

For comparison: Germany and the U.K.

Since our live-analysis focused on French publishers only, we did not create and update a custom keyword cluster on the Tour de France for German or U.K. publishers. The keywords used for the analysis below are therefore the 15 keywords from the general keyword set that had the most rankings over the course of the Tour. Take a look and compare it to the courses of the French publishers!

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