How to Analyze a Competitor’s Website - Visualping

How to Analyze a Competitor’s Website (and What to Look For)

Understanding your competition is key to building a succesful marketing strategy. Assessing how your contemporaries are marketing their products and services allows you to develop a competitive intelligence strategy, to inform and adapt your own tactics. Analyzing your competition’s website(s) is the best way to start make sure you have a good understanding of your competitors.

When it comes to knowing your competition, you can never be too diligent. Having a clear plan for gathering market intelligence and knowing how to analyze your competitor’s website will allow you to make better decisions and respond quickly as your competitors pivot their own methods.

How to Conduct a Competitive Website Analysis: What to Look for and Why

A competitive website analysis is an incredibly valuable activity for gathering competitive intelligence. Knowing what to look for and why will allow you to avoid some of the pitfalls that businesses fall into when starting out in website analysis.

A few things to keep in mind when looking at your peer’s websites include the following:

Evaluate Their Brand Positioning

Once you’ve identified the brands that you’re most interested in, look at the most important aspects of their branding and determine how you might be able to use a similar approach for your own brand. You can gather research on your competitors' branding by tracking competitors websites for changes.

A few things to consider might be their brand tone, key value propositions. You can start your analysis by asking yourself how your competitors are presenting themselves, to whom, in an attempt to position their brands for success.

Competitive intelligence tools are the best way to keep track of updates online. They automate the process of gathering data from your competitors' activities, making it easier and more efficient for you to stay on top of what’s happening in your industry.

Visualping is one of the top competitive intelligence tools for automatically tracking your competition. You can monitor changes from any web pages you want online, so you can get alerts on the exact competitor content you care about.

Take a Look at Competitor Web Design and Visual Branding

Don’t just look at the content of your competitor’s website. Make sure to pay careful attention to its layout. Everything from text size to colors can give you some sense of how they’re approaching their potential clients. The type of vibe that their visual branding captures will further clue you in on their messaging strategy.

Analyze Competitor Website Content

Look through the core pages of your competitors site. What pages do they want visitors to land on? Why? Figure out how often they publish new content, and determine the topics that they cover.

Find Out What Website Tools and CMS They’re Using

It’s not enough to simply understand what your competitors are saying, either. You should also have a clear picture of the different tools and services they’re using to manage their projects. Free tools such as BuiltWith will show which web technologies your competitors are using, from their plugins to their CMS.

Take a Look at Their Pricing Page

Competitor price monitoring will show you how much consumers are paying for your competitor’s products and services. Knowing how they compare to your own will make it easier to be cost-effective. Don’t forget to consider how prices change over time to keep up with prominent market trends.

Snoop on Their SEO Strategy

Your competitors are most likely publishing content to improve their search engine rankings. Using software such as SEMRush, you can snoop on your competitors’ domains and look at how they’re optimizing their Google search rankings. You’ll also be able to see their highest-ranked pages and the keywords that have clearly improved their traffic.

How to Analyze a Competitor’s Website with Visualping

Competitor monitoring tools are an easy and effective way to stay up-to-date on changes to your competitors' brand, website content, pricing and SEO strategy, among other things.

Visualping is a great website tracking tool for keeping tabs on your competitors. To help explain how to monitor competitors’ sites, here’s a step-by-step guide for setting up Visualping to track changes to your competitors’ pricing.

Step 1: Copy the URL for the Pricing Page on Your Competitor’s Website, Then Paste It into the Search Field on Visualping’s Homepage

To have Visualping notify you every time your competitors’ web pages change, you can simply grab the URL for the page you’re interested in and paste it into the search field on Visualping’s website. You’ll see the page loaded inside of the tool, where you can select the area that you want to track for changes.

Step 2: Decide How Often You Want Visualping to Check the Page for Changes

Once you’ve set Visualping to track your product, you’ll be prompted to decide how often Visualping should check back on it. You can select frequencies as high as every five minutes or as low as once a month.

Step 3: Enter the Email Address Where You Want to Get Price Change Alerts

Next, provide your email address, so Visualping knows where to send its notifications. Once you’ve done that, you should receive a message from Visualping to complete the final step.

Step 4: Check Your Email to Finish Creating Your New Account and Start Tracking Your Competition!

Head to your inbox to find the email that was delivered in the last step. It should contain a link that will bring you back to the Visualping website to finish setting up your account. Create a strong password, and that’s it. You should start receiving notifications for your tracked products whenever Visualping detects a change.

Monitor Competitor Websites with Visualping

Monitoring competitor websites will give you a clear picture of who your competitors are marketing to, how, and why. Everything from your competitors' branding to target audiences can be easily overlooked if you don’t take the time to do competitive intelligence research, so you’ll need a partner that you can rely on to help stay on top of everything. Visualping has created a comprehensive website change detection and alerts system that’s both feature-rich and easy to use for competitor website analysis.

For businesses that need to track changes at scale, Visualping offers advanced reporting, bulk page tracking, and integrations with popular third-party applications. And with our support team at your side, you won’t miss a thing. Contact us to learn more.

Happy competitor website monitoring!