23 ways to analyze competitor websites (Step-by-step Guide)

Monitoring competitors' websites is challenging due to the huge amount of time required.

But before going into details, let's learn why monitoring competitor websites is important.

Why do you need to monitor competitor websites?

Creating a solid competitive advantage requires a continuous data flow. Such data can be gathered from any website. But one of the best sources for competitive intelligence is your competitors' websites.

Competitors update their websites to show new features and talk to their customers. They run A/B tests and try new messaging and positioning on landing pages. You need to monitor them for updates and to analyze trends.

In a crowded market, every change matters.

In a crowded market, you lose customers to competitors due to the little details you miss.

Monitoring competitors' website changes lead to more competitive wins and better positioning. Ultimately leading to more revenue.

How to identify your competitors (Direct + Indirect)

First, you need to start identifying your competitors to track their websites.

We have published a comprehensive guide to identify all direct and indirect competitors. Including 17 free sources.

Here is the summary of methods to identify all competitors:

1. Use Compint: We automatically find competitors and new market entrants and notify you.
2. Use Google: Google is your best friend in market research.
3. Focus on how people search: It could be the market's name, some features, or use cases for specific teams...
4. Collect field intelligence: Sales and marketing teams hear about competitors every day. Ask them who they are.
5. Centralize information: Collect and sync all competitive intelligence in one place.

Which competitor pages do you need to monitor?

List of competitor pages you need to monitor:

1. Landing (Homepage)
2. Products
3. Solutions
4. Plans & Pricing
5. Resources
6. Case studies
7. Press releases
8. Release notes
9. Blog posts
10. Languages
11. Free tools
12. Developer documentation
13. Careers
14. Sign up & Sign in
15. Integrations
16. Partners
17. Call to action (CTA)
18. Forum
19. Investor Relations (IR)
20. Leadership
21. Terms and Conditions
22. Request demo
23. Website design

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1. Landing (Homepage)

Landing pages are the most updated pages. You need to monitor landing pages. This is to see competitors' A/B tests, branding, messages, and position changes.

You can also find about competitors' limited offers and promotions on their homepage.

Landing pages get the most visits, making it essential to check them regularly.

2. Products

Competitors talk about their existing and new features on the product pages. Product pages can also include some data about the capabilities of those products.

By the way, these pages are a great source for your competitive matrix.

3. Solutions

Solutions pages mention all the benefits of using their platform. Competitors mention the problems they solve. They also mention their target customer on the solutions pages.

Tracking solution pages helps spot changes in their customer focus, plans, and strategy.

4. Plans & Pricing

Obviously! Pricing pages show the different plans and features offered by competitors. In a competitive market, even a few dollars matter. So, just watch your competitor's pricing pages to catch even the tiniest details.

Although many tools focus on pricing changes only, you do not need them if you are not in the eCommerce market.

Our free competitor website monitor tool notifies you when something interesting happens on competitors' pricing pages. Just use it.

5. Resources

Marketing teams create content to improve search engine rankings and reach more prospects. They write about their potential customer's pain points and offerings. Those resources aim to convert users to paying customers.

Resource pages include many content types. They have blog posts, press releases, templates, and more. This is too huge to cover so that we will dig into each in detail. Continue reading!

6. Case studies

A case study shows how a product helped a company. If your competitors have public case studies, start monitoring them right now. Because they list all the actual impacts of your competitors' products on the case studies.

Case studies are reliable because they write them together with their customers.

7. Press releases

A press release is a company's public announcement. They share insights about the direction and critical changes in your competitors.

It isn't easy to monitor press releases as they are published in newspapers or on their websites. But no worries because Compint monitors both news mentions and website changes.

By the way, you can track competitor news mentions for free, with this tool.

8. Release notes

Some companies prefer a specific page for product updates and release notes. You are lucky if your competitors have a public page.

There can be some valuable insights about their feature capabilities and new features. Like product pages, release notes can be helpful for a competitive matrix.

9. Blog posts

Blog posts are a good source to educate potential buyers and promote products. Blog posts often highlight a feature. They also provide all the information a potential customer needs to know.

Sometimes, companies record videos and write detailed how-to's about the products. Monitoring and storing all these insights in one place is a good idea.

Compint monitors all these web page changes and stores them for further analysis.

10. Languages

When companies expand into other regions, they start localizing their content. They also create specific web pages.

Tracking these changes can show you who's operating in or aiming at what regions. That affects the competition significantly.

11. Free tools

Free tools exist for marketing reasons. They help companies convert people having a specific problem to paying customers. They provide immediate value to users. Your competitors probably have some free tools for that reason.

Free tools show which problems are worth solving. Monitoring competitors' free tools can help you understand customer pain points better.

By the way, we have some free tools that can help for competitive analysis.

12. Developer documentation

For SaaS businesses focusing on APIs, developer docs changes can reveal valuable competitive insights.

For example, adding a new API call to their core product, depreciation of some parameters, etc.

13. Careers

Careers pages show you how the competitor is doing internally. For example, are they growing, hiring from a specific location or laying off people?

Salary ranges on job postings can also help you estimate a competitor's revenue.

Tracking the careers page is challenging as they could use some platforms, but Compint is here to help.

Monitor competitors' careers pages. See if they are entering new markets, targeting a specific background to hire, or shrinking.

14. Sign up & Sign in

Seeing sign up and sign in pages in that blog post may be a surprise. But they are one of the most critical pages for conversion rates.

Such changes as a new login method like "Login with Github" or a new input on the signup process might be insightful.

Just monitor them, like once in a month.

15. Integrations

Integrations are essential for B2B SaaS companies to have. Integrations with other products usually increase product usage and path dependency.

Tracking competitors' integrations can be valuable for:

• Understanding their ideal customer profile
• How they fit themselves into user's daily routine

For example,

• Salesforce integration for Sales teams
• HubSpot integration for Marketing teams
• WebHook integration for Developers

16. Partners

Some companies choose to go with partner-led growth. Not all companies are suitable for this type of business model. But if your competitors go this route, you should monitor their activities continuously.

It is also a good idea to monitor marketplaces for new market entrants.

17. Call to action (CTA)

CTA is one of the most important elements of a website. It tells users what to do. A strong CTA increases the conversion rates, and your competitors know about this.

Tracking changes in the CTA is insightful. It helps to understand what competitors want visitors to do.

18. Forum

Some big companies have a forum for their users to ask questions. This is where their users and customers talk, and you should monitor trends there.

For example, if people have increasing questions about specific products. Or if there are new complaints about pricing.

19. Investor Relations (IR)

Some market leaders have an investor relations page. They include financial information and their roadmap on these pages.

If you are just a new market entrant, ignore this. Monitoring IR pages is only helpful for the biggest companies in the world.

20. Leadership

There are a few reasons you need to monitor competitors' leadership pages. The main reason is that leadership changes affect the whole organization. They also affect the competition.

For example, why did they hire an ex-VP from Google?

21. Terms and Conditions

Legal policies are excellent sources of competitive intelligence. Such policies include insights about pricing, shipping and return conditions.

You should monitor such policies and official documents. See how they respond to regulations and how they use customer data.

Privacy policies are also helpful. They can show if some third party companies are mentioned.

For example, think about why there is a change related to data usage in their privacy policy.

22. Request demo

Companies either have a pricing or request a demo page. Monitor both of them because there are always insights ready.

Request demo pages are important for another reason: what they request from the user to do a demo. Consider the reasons for the input fields on request demo pages.

For example, a company can ask for the number of employees in a request demo form.

23. Website design

Website design can affect the conversion rates a lot. Companies usually run A/B tests to try new website designs.

Although it is relatively easy to spot design changes, using a tool saves you time.

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How to monitor competitor websites for free

You can monitor critical pages and competitor sites with Compint for free.

Free competitor monitoring tool

It is super easy to start monitoring your competitors' websites.

Use Free competitor monitoring tool

Here is how to do it.

1. Identify which pages to monitor

2. Choose how often to check for changes

   Although Compint monitors websites against changes all the time, you should be in control of some situations. With Check Frequency, you decide how often to check competitor websites.

3. Choose how often to receive alerts

   Compint can detect even the tiniest changes on the websites. That could lead to an unnecessary amount of alerts and may be time-consuming. That's why we have the Alert Threshold feature. It lets you set a limit to get an alert for important changes.

4. Check your emails for alerts

   Compint sends you alerts if an interesting change happens on websites. You do not need to do anything else!

5. That's it!

If you need to do some trend analysis, create a Compint account. We store all changes on our platform so that you can compare changes easily.

Conclusion

Now, you know why you need to monitor competitor websites. You know which pages to monitor and how to monitor them for free.

You are wasting your time if you are still taking screenshots or comparing websites yourself. Just use an automated and free approach.

Compint helps you store and compare website changes side by side. It's super easy.

Create a Compint account now and monitor competitors' every move automatically.