Clearscope vs. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Clearscope shines if you're using freelance writers or even just need a way to easily keyword optimize long-form content. While it can be used for marketing pages, I've found it does best with longer-form blog content in the hands of writers. So, if you have inexperienced writers or those less savvy/comfortable about SEO optimization, I'd recommend only using it for blogs. articles or other long-form content. Have some SEO experience under your belt? Use it for EVERYTHING that needs keyword optimization and is over 300 words. It'll help give you ideas and give you a better idea of how to work in that semantic SEO.

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.

• Helps produce relevant and engaging content.
• Integration with WordPress through an easy to use plugin.
• Deliver data-driven results.
• The content rating system makes it easy to understand how your content is performing now based on your specific keywords.

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

• Cost is a little prohibitive for small teams/businesses.
• Running reports could be more intuitive. Some users have run them incorrectly, costing credits (which Clearscope has been kind enough to refund).

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

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

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

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

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They're all similar but different. We use Frase and MarketMuse during other parts of our content creation process. I have used Surfer when clients supply reports and think it's also a solid tool. But nothing beats Clearscope when it comes to content optimization as you finish drafting.

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

• It's made it easier to create content that is ready to rank with little effort.
• Articles updated with Clearscope have started ranking.
• Articles created with Clearscope rank better out the gate than ones written without it.

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