Monitoring Competitors Websites Made Easy
Your business website faces many online competitors, keeping track of what they are doing can be a time consuming, difficult and expensive task.
The Website Checker has built in support to track changes on their websites in an effective and easy to use way.
It’s hard enough as it is to run a business, but it is important to keep informed as to what your competition is up to online, it’s particularly important to know when they change their content. They could be introducing a new product or starting a new online marketing campaign that you need to respond to quickly – yet, you cannot spend all your time watching your competitors websites to see when they change something, you have a business to run! So what can you do? Well, with the Website Checker, it can do the watching for you, while you get on with running your business.
Below we explain how to do this, its easy.
Track your competitors websites with ease
Monitoring your competitors with the Website Checker is easy, you just need to follow the simple 8 step process below:
- Sign up to the Website Checker, this will give you access to the website monitoring functionality. We suggest you use your website home page to generate the first report (in case there is anything that needs fixing on your own website that is stopping it reaching is top potential).
- Then, using the form at the bottom of your Account home page, run a report for each of your competitors websites, we suggest starting with tracking just their homepage. Remember you can run reports across a number of websites. This will give you set of website entries which you can manage.
- Now per website you want to monitor open the website reports page (click on the website domain in your account home page). Then click on the Advanced Settings tab, you will see something like:
- Set the % Change Trigger to 5% to begin with and set all the Score related triggers to 0, also set the Alert Email to the email address where you want the alerts to be sent.
- Now that you have set the trigger up you need to set up the schedule you want to run the report at. Above the Advanced Settings you will see something like this:
- Set the Report Schedule to period you want to run the reports at, we suggest you start with every 7 days. Then Tick the Auto Run Reports flag, this enables the ability for reports to Auto Run for the websites.
- Finally, next to the report you want to run automatically you will see a tick box in the AutoRun column, tick that to indicate which specific report you want to run automatically (this way you could have multiple pages monitored).
- You’re done! Now when the webpage you are monitoring changes it content more than the threshold you set, you will get an email alert.
The great thing with the reports so run is that all the other aspects of your competitors website are tracked as well, i.e. what they are doing for SEO, Performance, Branding and SEM – so you get an instant ‘heads up’ on not just what they have done, but why they have done it and what the outcomes are. Plus the reports highlight exactly what has changed.
Try the Website Checker Now and take control.
Other ways to use the Competitor Tracking
- Include your marketing agency in the Alert Emails (use a comma to separate multiple emails) – this way you don’t even have to waste time forwarding on the alert to them and they can then respond quicker.
- Set up another report, but this time use it to just monitor SEO and Performance changes by setting just the threshold on them and zero for the rest – this way you will know as soon as they do any work to improve the technical and SEO aspects of their website – could be a precursor to a major online push!
Keith
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