Monitor Backlinks, as its name implies, allows users to be notified when websites gain or lose backlinks, and also to understand what links are good for SEO.
Monitor Backlinks is perfect for any small business that has a website. Every website gets hit with spammy backlinks, and being able to identify and remove them is critical to online success, and in preventing the Google penalty. In addition, it helps SEOs locate good backlinks they might not know about, which can then be posted on social networks and social bookmarking sites to generate more referral traffic. I would not recommend Monitor Backlinks for a business that does not have a website, or for a business that only has a blog.
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.
It is highly recommended if you have a high ranking website that is prone to competitors building spam. It makes the process if identifying, tracking and disavowing spam links fast and easy.
It is a good tool to track positive mentions of your site as well and does a good job monitoring the reputation of your site by picking up mentions of your website across the web.
It's affordable for what it does compared to its competitors and its also very easy to use. But their customer service is always there to help out in case you need it.
A great option would be to have the ability to create organic keyword ranks for keywords in specific categories, not just keywords for our entire website. Specifically, the ability to create custom lists for keyword groups. This would be a huge time-saver for SEOs whose websites have varied keyword groups.
Currently, I get email notifications from Monitor Backlinks once every week or so. These emails show new backlinks and any changes in existing backlink status. I log into the platform each morning to see what is going on, but a great addition would be real-time emails that alert you when a really low-quality backlink is uncovered.
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
They were fast, eager to help me out on my project and very knowledgeable on how to user their product and helping me to get up and running. This gave me the confidence to purchase the product and execute my projects knowing that I could ask for help whenever needed.
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.
I used Ahrefs Site Explorer for two years, and it is a really good platform with lots of backlink tools. Ahrefs stacks up well against Monitor Backlinks, and it has slightly more features. I opted for Monitor Backlinks because it has a simple and streamlined dashboard and just the right amount of tools and features I need.
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
It's hard to gauge the effect of negative SEO attacks but they have the power to bring your whole site down, so having a tool like this setup is really priceless.
Their cost is also very affordable when compared to similar tools that do not have the same functionality or level of detail that they offer on their analysis so from that perspective is a savings right from the start.
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.
