Category: Monitoring website changes

Track website changes to build a strategic competitive advantage

There are many “to do-s” on the list when creating a business, but there are also a couple of key points that are vital for brands in today’s digital marketplace, and the most important one is to position the brand online.

A website helps companies to build their online identity and credibility, allows them to reach their audience, and sets up the business on the online market. Moreover, from a company’s website, you can find out quickly who they are, what’s the company’s mission, what services they offer, at what prices, and more.

Before making a purchase or signing up for a service, consumers scroll the internet for their best fit option so that they might pop up on different websites. Your brand’s website, visual identity, and content say a lot about your company and your services – so it can encourage conversions and help consumers to go for your service/product.

Why monitoring competitors’ websites matters

Besides the typical info that a company’s website is proving at a glance distance, the website can be a valuable source of gathering insights into the brand’s business strategies – especially when you’re looking closely into your competitors’ websites.

Not only does your website give you advantages in front of your target public, but it also helps you to differentiate your brand’s identity from the competition. Keeping an eye on your competitors’ website changes and updates and being aware of each competitor’s move on their website will help you to spot new opportunities for your brand, it will uncover new directions on how you can set your business’ website apart from your competitors’ ones, and it will give you an idea of the website tactics that your competitors are using, and that might work for your case too.

Websites can highlight significant company changes as product and pricing updates, visual updates, messaging changes, and key updates that can help you to get deeper into their strategies and gather data so that you can build a strong competitive advantage for your website.

For example, if your top competitor announces a particular new feature that is requested by the customers, then you might want to think about it and try to implement it, too, especially if your target audience demands it.

Let’s get deeper into the topic and discover some examples of website changes and updates that can help companies to build a strategic competitive advantage while gathering competition updates.

Types of website changes to track on competitors’ websites

As already mentioned above, a website can be a source of valuable insights into a business’s strategy and can uncover the company’s values, product/services offer, price details, brand’s visual identity, and more. Tracking all competitors’ websites moves automatically, with an online monitoring tool, allows marketers to have a better overview of competitors’ website updates, saving time, and resources.

Plus, receiving notifications each time when a competitor makes a change on its website keeps companies aware of competitors’ actions in real-time, so they can focus on finding opportunities to overcome competition and improving their strategies.

  1. Changes to Call-To-Action (CTA) buttons

    Changes to CTA buttons/wording can have a significant impact on conversion and can influence the possible customer’s behavior on the website. “View a Demo” was changed to “Get Started” in the example below – attracting customer’s curiosity to click and see what’s behind the red button and how he can get more of what the company offers.

    In this case, “View a Demo” is a clear and effective CTA that no additional argument about it is necessary. But to spark customer’s curiosity and to make them part of the company’s services discovery.

    & New Call-To-Action Buttons

  2. Pricing changes

    Your competitor is changing its pricing strategy – I bet this is an important update for your business’ strategy, and you might want to keep up your competitor’s pricing updates and know each time when a new change appears. To not be caught in a risky position, opt to receive notifications each time when competitors change prices so you can quickly plan your future steps to maintain a competitive price for your service.

    In the end, price is one of the first things that a consumer is interested in when searching for a product/service, so keeping up with competitors’ pricing strategies is crucial for your business’ success.

  3. New features/integrations updates

    Staying up to date with your competitors’ new features and uncovering all their customers’ advantages and benefits helps you to plan how you can further develop your service/product by staying relevant to the competitive market.

    Each new change or update that your competitors are making for their services/products should be a piece of valuable information for your business strategy and product development, not only a curiosity. Being aware of what new integrations are your competitors launching for its users, for example, gives you insights about your latest opportunities on the market and show you what your customers might want too and what you should implement next.

  4. Company’s updates/Jobs Offers/ Team updates

    When automatically tracking competitors’ websites, you can get to know whenever a competitor makes a change on its website, from CTA buttons, as seen below, to Terms changes. Discovering your competition changes regarding their Privacy Policies, Data Protection, GDPR makes you aware of their activity and underlines what you might be missing out from your Policies and Terms.

    Many signs can uncover your competitors’ plans only by having a closer look at their website. Stay up to date with your competitors’ movements on their website, and you can quickly discover when a company launches job offers. Opening a job position means opening new paths for developing their service/product, so you should be aware of their plans. As seen above, IFTTT is currently looking for a “Customer Success Manager,” – which means they will start focusing and dedicating more resources on their customers’ experience – so you should be aware of that and be prepared.

    By keeping an eye on competitors’ website changes, you can be informed when a new member joins the team, and you can make an idea of your competitors’ team and roles – so you’ll get to know their resources focused on developing the service/product.

  5. Content Changes/Updates

    Being aware of what your competitors are posting on their website makes you aware of their content and marketing strategies – do they have a Case Studies page? How frequently are they posting new case-studies? Which are your competitors’ customers? From which domains? Uncovering your competition content strategy on the website gives you hints of what you should focus on, too – in the end, you’re sharing the same target audience, and your service/product is similar, right?


    Getting to know your competitors’ type of articles published on their blogs gives you valuable insights into their content strategies, but also their SEO efforts. On Competitors App, for each competitors’ marketing channel, you can analyze engagement details, frequency of posts, and get to know all competitors’ articles – so you can start planning your strategies and craft content that attract the audience and educate the public.

  6. SEO Changes

    Keep an eye on your competitors’ SEO efforts and spot whenever your competitors make some change that will affect their SEO – like changing blog post title or focusing another keyword. Activate notifications for this feature to be the first to know about it so that you can improve your SEO efforts too!

  7. New Web-Pages


    Companies create new pages for their website – dedicated pages for features, FAQ, and more. Scrolling on your competitors’ website to discover the new pages, from time to time, can be a challenge, so using competitive intelligence tools can facilitate your search. You’ll get notified each time a competitor creates a new web page for its website.

  8. Press Releases & Announcements

    Companies are using their official website to share the company’s news, press releases, and announcements. Tracking competitors’ websites help you to easily spot their new releases, annual reports, and the launching of new collaborations/partner programs.

  9. Customers Testimonials Updates

    Customer testimonials are one of the most powerful trust weapons, and each site has (or should have) a powerful testimonial or review page. Dedicating a testimonials page on your website guides potential customers, helps them to overcome objections, and builds instant credibility for the brand’s services/products.

  10. Sales and offers updates

    Get on your email all competitors’ offers and sales even before their customers! Understanding your competition sales and marketing strategies allows you to spot your strengths and weaknesses. What is their discount policy? Do they create more attractive offers? What can you do to overcome competitors’ sales strategies?

    You need to know what competitors are bringing to the market, and, especially when they create unique offerings that might attract your audience or even your customers.

In conclusion, monitoring competitors’ website changes and analyzing their updates will help you identify your competitive advantage. Maybe it’s the interactive design on the landing page that attract new customers –  may be the login process is easier than in your case – may be the new customers gets quicker from your competitor website what his tool does than on your website — the goal is identifying the competitive advantage that will help you to create the right websites’ messages, content, and image for your brand.

ℹ️Start your FREE TRIAL on Competitors App and track all competitors’ website changes to identify your websites’ strengths and weaknesses.

CEOs Playbook: Ultimate guide on how to beat your competition

The 13 minutes you will spend reading this will probably be the best investment you have made today! Why? Because you will learn how to compete and beat your competition, be better than them and scale your business!

A few weeks before I started writing this article, I had reached out to Gerard Compte from „FindThatLead“to make a better business relationship with him. In the first message I had written in the P.S. section, I said:

“Good Luck in slaying your mortal enemies Gerard! ;)”

When he responded, I learned a precious lesson from reading the first sentence of the message:

“There are no enemies; just good people called competitors who are helping us to understand our market and customers better. Competition is the best thing you will have in business.”

This sentence is mind-blowing!

(more…)

Competitive research. Why it’s so important and how to do it.

No matter are you starting a new business, or you already have established one. Competitive research is a must! Everyone has some “mortal enemies” and “desirable customers.” In this article, you will learn:

  • How to do your Competitive research
  • How to monitor your competitors on the Web
  • How to get the desired customers
  • How to beat your competition

So, come on, my dear Sherlock, let’s do some research! (At least, you can be a real detective for a few hours! 😉 ).

Competitive Research

How to do your competitive research

Carefully planned and executed competitive research may save your business. What also matters is what to do with that data after.

My mentors and advisors once said:

“If you do not do your homework, you can hit bottom. Do it, and you can build an enduring business.”

Competitive research is a must for your business for several reasons:

  • You will find all their data which you need to start a business
  • You will skip a “trial and error” for a lot of times
  • Based on the data you find, you can monitor them, and find the holes in their strategies, which can be essential for you.

Doing competitive research is not an easy thing to do. It can sometimes be very time-consuming. But, if you plan everything carefully, you can do it in a few hours.

If you already don’t know who your competitors are, try typing 10 – 20 main keywords for your industry in Google.

In the beginning, just wrote on the piece of paper the names of your competitors.

When you have done that, now it’s time for the hell spreadsheets!

Finding the names of your competitors isn’t the only thing you should do. But it’s the beginning.

Here’s the list of data of your competitors you should find out:

  • Founders – It’s essential to know who your competitor decision-makers are
  • Social Media Networks URLs – How are they, for God’s sake, communicating with their customers? What content are they creating?
  • Distribution channels – How are they finding new customers?
  • Core Value propositions – What’s the main differences between them and me? What are their Core Value propositions, and how my product/service can be more useful to my customers than theirs?
  • The number of employees, headquarters, stage, and the size of the investment –  This helps you to understand how big their resources are, and you can imagine what are they capable of.
  • Other information (Number of customers, website visitors, etc.)

For this process, you will need about 1 – 3 hours, based on the number of your competitors.

Here’s the list of websites which can be quite useful for you, and it can save you a lot of time:

  1. LinkedIn
  2. WellFound
  3. CrunchBase
  4. SimilarWeb

What also matters in competitive research is organization! We have prepared for you a complete Ultimate Competitor Analysis Spreadsheet! 

Everything you will need, you can find in one place – in one spreadsheet!

 

Here you can download for free your ULTIMATE COMPETITOR ANALYSIS SPREADSHEET!

 

Now, when you have done your competitive research, It’s time to see what we can do with that data

Like every founder, you want to be the best on the market. You want to hold a monopoly over some products or services. But, you’re always leading battles with your competitors.

What if I say to you that you can be, almost all the time, one step ahead of your competition? Don’t you believe me?

Well, yes, you can, and I will show you how!

Monitor competitors website changes

“Hell, what?”

Yes, you can do that. There is various software that allows you to do this.

But, before we dig into every step how you can do that, let’s first explain why it’s so important.

There are a lot of use cases, but, I will mention just a two of them:

    1. Your Competitor can change his homepage call to action button from “Register here” to “Start your free trial now, no credit card required.”
    2. He can also change his meta <title> and <h1> to target a different keyword.

This information is very valuable for you because you can easily find out what’s your competitor strategy.

Competitors App is a competition monitoring tool, which allows you to monitor competitors’ website changes every single day. The best part of it – it’s all automatic. Everything you will need to do (except to insert your competitor names at the beginning), is to read the data every day. That is not more than 3 minutes per day.

monitor competitors' website changes

After you create your competitors.app account and insert your competitors, the app will automatically start to inform you about their newest website changes. Also, competitors.app will monitor them every day, and whenever some new change becomes visible, you will be informed – both in your app dashboard and in your email inbox (So, sometimes, you even don’t need to log in to your account).

Monitor competitors’ Social Media

Monitoring your competitor’s social media is very important. Reason? That’s the place where we communicate with our customers, share content, and very often – that’s the place where we find new customers.

If you carefully monitor your competitor’s social media marketing and strategies, you can be one step ahead of them. You can see what content are they publishing, so you can see and write better, exciting, and trending articles.

How are they treating their customers, how are they rewarding them, and what’s their relationship with them.

If you monitor your competitors’ Social Media Pages very well, you can see what posts performed very well, and you can inform your team to work better with previous knowledge.

Monitoring competitors’ Social Media can be very hard and time-consuming. Sometimes, you will need to waste hours and hours, manually monitoring them.

But it doesn’t need to be so boring and exhausting. Here are some examples of how you can save your time:

  • Obligate someone from your team for daily monitoring and checking your competitors’ social media channels
  • Turn on post notifications
  • Use competitors.app for tracking your competitors’ social media channels.

Here you can learn more about tracking your competitors’ social media pages with Competitors App

Grab here your free 30-day trial Competitors App account, with no credit card required!

monitor competitors social media

How to recapture your competitor customers?

Once you have found out your biggest competitors’ data, and while you are monitoring them on every single step on the web, it’s time for you to beat them!

With monitoring, you can find out what your competitors’ strategies are. You can be one step ahead of them.  

The next step is: Interview your competitors’ customers.

Reach to them through your competitor’s social media pages. You can pick 15 – 20 people or you can scrape your competitor follower base and make a bulk email.

Ask them the following questions:

  • What are your biggest pains about [the problem]?
  • Do you have some solution?
  • Are you using [competitor product/service]?
  • What do you like best about it?
  • What would you change in [competitor product/service]?

(For more details about customer development, I suggest you read “The Mom Test” by Rob Fitzpatrick)

Once you have answers to the questions above, you can create more personalized content and marketing strategies with solutions to their biggest problems.

Read other competitive articles for your business

  • Competitive Intelligence Business – Competitive intelligence (CI) is a term you may have come across before. Like many industry buzzwords, it isn’t immediately apparent what CI is and how it can be useful to your business. But don’t worry, because we’re going to explain the ins, outs, pros, and cons of CI.

BEST COMPETITORS GUIDES

Monitor competitor website changes
You can get alerted when your competitors are making changes to their website.

Find competitor keywords
Finding your competitors’ keywords is essential for your business. It means that you focus your entire website on targeting high volume, quality keywords.

Track Social Media Pages
Social media competitive analysis is the constant monitoring and analyzing the moves of your competition on social media.

Competitor Email Monitoring
Tracking your competitors’ emails takes some time, but it’s well worth it!

How to do competitor analysis
One important step is to conduct an effective competitive analysis to evaluate your competitors’ brands.

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