Advanced Web Ranking is an online rank tracker suitable for both Digital Agencies and In-house SEOs. The tool boasts usrse among more than 18,000 companies worldwide, and provides ranking results.
If you want a reliable and accurate keyword rank tracking tool that can spit out beautiful monthly reports for your clients, then AWR is the tool for you. It is also cloud-based so you don't have to deal with the issues of proxies and VPNs like you would if running a similar program from your own server. It's not the cheapest option but it's probably the easiest to implement and most accurate option when it comes to cloud-based rank tracking software. Customer support has always been responsive and pleasant to deal with, I haven't had many issues, but have always had a good experience when I needed support.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is well suited to auditing brand new websites, when you need a quick, holistic view of the websites technical issues. Its great for providing a top line view of a websites architecture, perhaps for a new business approach where you need to assess the scale of work to maintain a website. Its also a useful tool in situations where you might need to see whether a large scale change in the website has taken place, you can see word counts, pages and their https response codes. Screaming Frog may be less useful if you need an idea of the customer experience on a website, it doesn't really provide information that helps assess how fast a website loads, what issues might come up when trying to convert or faults with the payment process. Screaming Frog is largely a technical SEO focused tool, it also can't assess the quality of a websites, layout or the quality of the content used on the website. As mentioned, its niche, but very useful within that niche.
The ability of the program to produce dashboards in web page format. While it can do this, it saves them out as HTML files on your hard drive or cloud server, which makes it super hard to share with others.
The cloud version is a bit more expensive, which offers the same tools as the desktop, which I found a little troublesome and it didn't make sense to me.
Their customer service was a little lacking. I had a couple of general questions and I was on hold for about 15 minutes...which isn't good when you're in the middle of a busy workday.
Requires Java. This isn't a huge deal as many computers already have it installed, but it's yet another 3rd party component.
The free version has a crawl limit of 500 pages per site. This is fine for smaller sites, but if you're running a big e-commerce site then you'll need to pay for Pro version.
The user interface isn't very pretty. This is an analytics tool so it doesn't really have to be, but it might be helpful for improving the overall user experience.
The tool has become integrated into our teams daily workings and I have yet to find a tool other than scremaing frog to replicate all of our use cases for it. It's a great tool and we're sticking with it
Easy for me to use because I have using the product for a long time and understand the ins and outs of it. If I was a newbie, I would be completely lost. It does take some prior knowledge to operate this software and understanding of what a crawl means
Screaming Frog is a relatively primitive system, and doesn't need to be supported by devs or other software. Screaming Frog does interface directly with some programs that are most needed (Google Analytics, Search Console, Page Speed Insights), so that's convenient. It isn't widely supported by other programs, but it also doesn't need to be.
BrightEdge is a lot more expensive, but we began using it when funds allowed us to, primarily for the online reporting and features not found in Advanced Web Ranking. But, as I mentioned earlier, we did not stop using Advanced Web Ranking when we introduced BrightEdge because it does have some plus points not found in BrightEdge.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is probably the best non-client facing SEO audit tool in terms of technical SEO. There are other tools on the market that do a more complete job of keyword tracking, competitive analysis, and backlink profiles...however, for analyzing the technical SEO health of any website, Screaming Frog is the best
Increased employee efficiency - We spend many less hours tracking down and reporting simple meta tags.
Better Client Servicing - We are able to ensure we have a total look at a client's site before we recommend anything.
True Pricing Structure - We are able to more accurately predict how much help a client may need based on factors such as size of site, number of redirects, proper use of meta tags, etc.
