How to Monitor Competitor Website Changes?

When developing his online business, every entrepreneur wants to see how his site gets into the Top 10 of search results, squeezes out competitors, takes first place, and is firmly established there. However, this task is quite difficult given the high competition, constantly improving technologies and changes in search algorithms.

No company can operate successfully if it does not have sufficient information about the state of the market and other representatives of its niche. Monitoring competitors makes it possible to conduct a healthy business, and set realistic goals and practically solvable tasks, which helps to increase sales and improve the well-being of the company. In this article, we will tell you why you need competitor tracking and how to do it.

Why Need to Monitor Changes on Competitor Sites?

Monitoring of competitors allows the company to successfully exist and develop in any, even the most difficult conditions of competition. Competitive analysis helps to quickly make the right decisions and build the right marketing strategy. Companies that have all the important information about competitors will always lead the market.

Monitoring of competitors’ websites is important for the development of your project:

• To understand precisely how competitors work;
• To see what results in their actions bring;
• To perform the same task beyond their level of performance.

Competition in the market is by no means increasing, and time is not working in your favor here. The content on the site, its uniqueness, and informativeness, the speed of the resource, usability, and optimization in general, all this should be better than others. It is simply impossible to understand exactly how to improve each indicator and achieve good growth dynamics without analyzing the main competitors. By analyzing the additional functionality of each competitor, you will identify several common elements and several individual unique capabilities.

Methods and tools for tracking changes on the competitor’s website:

Previously, to monitor competitors’ sites, it was necessary to visit them daily and see if something new appeared. This is a routine and tedious job that required a lot of time. It is accompanied by the probability of error due to the human factor. Now it can be pushed into services that will do everything for you.

The essence of their work is to automatically go through the specified sites and compare the current version with the one that was after the previous check. In addition, in them, you can configure additional analysis of certain parameters and allow you to set tracking rules.

We highlighted three popular services on the market:

1. Wachete: This service allows you to track changes on websites using modern web technologies. It features a wide range of functions and a user-friendly control panel. It allows you to track dynamic, password-protected pages. You can also specify a specific part of the page to be tracked (for example, the price of a product).

   

2. Visualping: Visualping provides intuitive monitoring of changes on websites. Despite being completely minimalist, it offers many features that the competition lacks. The functionality of this service:
   • Alerts;
   • Free API access;
   • Scanning websites for job offers;
   • Tracking Latest Reviews.

   Such functions will help you effectively track everything on your competitors’ sites.

   

3. ChangeTower: ChangeTower is an extremely powerful cloud tool. It’s not just limited to monitoring content on websites: you can also monitor visual changes. In addition, ChangeTower provides its users with filtering functions and so-called string conditions to create specific tracking rules.Many convenient and useful tools will help you in the difficult task of monitoring competitors and analyzing the collected data. Certain aspects of this work require exclusively manual work, but it is advisable to use special services to track competitor’s positions in search results, select keywords and their clustering, analyze the link profile, and other similar aspects.

   

Conclusion:

Website change monitoring is the process of gathering information about news and updates. From year to year, it attracts more and more interest from Internet users. Above, we have analyzed why you need to carefully monitor the changes and what tools you can use.

Study your competitors, copy their strengths, find their weaknesses and offer your target audience more than the rest of the players in the market. Collect data and experiment boldly based on it.