Ahrefs vs. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Ahrefs is a must have in the SEO toolbox. It is one of the leading tools in the industry for serious SEO research. It can do almost everything you need on the non-technical side of SEO. In my opinion, it is not great if you need a detailed technical tool that identifies errors and helps with fix suggestions. In that instance, I think there are better tools on the market. But - for content and keyword related tasks, I think it's must have.

Incentivized

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.

• I have been using this platform in my organization to develop several SEO tools to help to grow our website much.
• It has all the main features which include competitor research, keyword research, website audit, content research, and rank tracking.
• I have been using all these functions in the organization for several purposes. It provides complete information and complete performance details of the SEO.
• It provides us the detailed keyword research with volume, CPC, and other information.

Incentivized

• Crawling client sites of up to thousands of pages. Gives you almost every tool that you need to do a proper SEO audit.
• Custom extractions using CSSpath, Xpath, or Regex. I'm not even a techy, but their support section here is a huge help with the provided examples.
• Customer service and support - Dan is ALWAYS very prompt to respond with helpful answers on Twitter if needed.

Incentivized

• Can't export graphs: some graphs within the tool would be useful as an export. Unfortunately, exporting them is not an option.
• No "blanket" reporting options: though Ahrefs is excellent for gathering and exporting intel/data, there are no blanket SEO reports provided. Exporting data is great, but simple report exporting would make it better.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

Their index is too vast to ignore when looking at a complete backlink profile. We find links in Ahrefs that do not appear in any other link detection tool. For this reason, it's a must for our agency to use for the foreseeable future. Plus, it's very affordable considering the data you get

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

Incentivized

Ahrefs is very easy to use - you can jump right in and understand most of the assets. Overall, the dashboard snapshots give a very good picture of inbound link activity. For deeper analysis of historical trends, the system can become cumbersome, making it hard to do full work without exporting and reformatting the data.

The main problem of Screaming Frog SEO Spider is it being an offline software which limits itself to a single pc and that creates problem when multi user agents want to get involved or even work on it, it’s a difficult task to collaborate on it and do research for keywords at one place

Incentivized

Ahrefs has always been responsive when there's been a technical issue with the site. There are usually very little problems, but if there are, they announce it on their social media accounts which keeps its customers informed. Email support is prompt and the customer service people are very helpful, knowledgable and friendly.

Incentivized

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.

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If the software was a little easier to use for beginners, there really wouldn't be an issue

Incentivized

Majestic and Ahrefs are really close in terms of tool. Ahrefs does offer competitive comparison and they do have a more up to date data base. Majestic however has a more comprehensive historical view of sites which is also extremely valuable. Majestic also offers a link velocity chart that is missing on Ahrefs. Ahrefs makes up for this with their links gained/lost calendar which Majestic is missing.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Ahrefs Site Explorer has helped with any comprehensive backlink analysis and backlink profile management we've had.
• Ahrefs Site Explorer has helped tremendously in getting manual penalties lifted for certain sites.
• Aherfs Site Explorer has been helpful in identifying 404 error pages.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized