How to Spy on a Competitor Website?!

There are many ways to build a website in 2023. Gone are the days where websites were created from scratch through html coding. Now, businesses and enthusiasts alike, take advantage of software to accelerate their web designing, and create pages with advanced features that they could not have created on their own. There are hundreds of reputable website builders, such as WordPress, Wix, or SquareSpace, and with that, hundreds of thousands of individually crafted plug-ins made by tech businesses and the community. 

When comparing your own website to one that’s professionally made, it may seem overwhelming to replicate their visual design and features. This misconception is common as anyone can design a successful website. What you might not understand is, that the way websites are made now-a-days is by cramming as many premium and attractive plug-ins and templates into your pages, which doesn’t take too much web design knowledge as you would think

The plugins that give professional websites these impressive features are specifically made to be user friendly. So, when trying to emulate website you like, the question isn’t “How did they make this?”, the question should instead be “What Plug-ins do they use?”. If these are questions you have been wondering, then you have come to the right place because we are going over how to spy on a competitor website using software tools.

This process is very simple, once you know what you are doing. There are many free and paid tools on the web that can crawl any website you desire and provide you with a tech stack, which lists important information like the domain host, building platform, and any plugins used. One website we use that offers some useful free features is BuiltWith. 

BuiltWith is a web tool that allows you to identify which technologies a website is using. This includes everything from web hosting and content management systems to analytics and advertising tools. By using tools like this, you can get a comprehensive overview of the technology stack used by any website on the internet.

One of the most significant benefits of using these evaluating tools is that it enables you to evaluate your competition. By analyzing a competitor’s website, you can rework your own to have similar features. This way, you can stay up to date with the latest web design trends which you may not have known about or understood before!

BuiltWith will help you discover new tools that you may not have been aware of. For example, if you notice that many of your competitors are using a particular analytics platform or email marketing tool, like Mailchimp, you may want to consider adopting it as well. 

Additionally, you can find out what plugins they use for their SEO, or what they use to make their websites mobile compatible. Basically, you can find out everything that makes up the entire website, and I encourage you to try it for yourself to truly understand!

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to use Builtwith to find out which software websites are using:

• Go to BuiltWith.com and enter the URL of the website you want to analyze
• BuiltWith will generate a report that lists all of the tech the website is using.
  • This can include everything from web hosting, content management systems, advertising, and analytics tools.
• You can use the information provided in the report to evaluate your competition and make informed decisions about which tools and platforms to adopt for your own business.
• You can Spy on a Competitor Website using this tool to visually see their website tech stack and total amount of marketing costs they put into their website.

Keywords are the foundation of any website ranking and SEO. It’s important to learn what keywords your competitors focus on, because understanding this will allow you to spy on a competitor websites by seeing where their traffic is coming from and what’s driving their sales.

Where do you find these keywords?

A lot of companies include their targeted keywords within the metadata of their site, which is public. So you can instantly access these by looking at the source code of their website. On your browser, click View, Developer, and View Source. Then do a search (CTRL + F) for keywords. This should bring up any meta keywords they’ve included in their source code.

How to check the keywords driving their traffic:

• SEMRush – This is one of the best keyword research tools you can use to get a complete competitor analysis that includes information on organic keywords. It also allows you to see competitor website traffic, and how your competitors rank for organic keywords, as well as what keywords they may be using for their search ads to appear on Google and Bing. Although the free version offers some basic insights, upgrading to higher account levels will give you access to tools that let you compare competitor website traffic with your own site, as well as access to more advanced tool functions. Note: when you use tools like this to check competitor website traffic, it is only providing an estimate of traffic, so it’s best to check several sources to validate the findings.
• SpyFu – Find out what keywords your competitors are targeting with their organic searches and ads.
• TheSearchMonitor – Monitor results from Yahoo, Bing, Google, Baidu, and YouTube, along with websites, blogs, mobile, news, shopping, and forums.
• Hypeauditor – Influencers are becoming a bigger part of marketing strategy so it pays to identify and track which influencers the competition is using in a competitive analysis across influencer platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
• iSpionage – this is another keyword monitoring tool that will help build out a competitor analysis and provide you with instant access to competitor keywords, while also showing you their most effective advert copy, too.

*When it comes to how to check website traffic, in terms of sheer volume, use the Similar Web tool, with the caveat that unless the website is large enough, there might not be enough detectable traffic to generate a report.

These tools are some of the best SEO Software in the game that we highly suggest using for your Search Engine Optimization marketing.

Thanks for taking the time to learn how to Spy on a Competitor Website. This allows you to find out which software other websites are using! Using tools like BuiltWith can help you find the platforms and plugins your competitors are using and implement into your own site!

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