Likelihood to Recommend It is helpful if you are trying to understand where a site stands in terms of the links coming to it from different websites. It is less helpful in terms of providing specific actions or steps to take to get more links. However, it is a part of a larger Moz package so other areas provide information that can help there.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Moz Link Explorer has a straightforward and easy to use interface. It’s very simple to navigate and understand the data. The anchor text tool gives you an idea of the most widely used anchor texts other websites use when linking to your site. It can raise a red flag when too many sites are linking to you using exact match keyword anchor texts. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons You need to subscribe to Moz Pro to get all features, which is pricey if you aren’t using the tool regularly. I’ve found that competitor tools give larger lists of inbound links. You’ll need some understanding of how SEO works to maximize the tool. Would non-SEO specialists understand the difference between domain authority and page authority, or the difference between follow back, and non-follow backlinks? Moz offers lots of training resources, but it takes time to learn what you need. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew No renewal is necessary with the free version!
Read full review 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
Read full review Usability 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
Read full review Support Rating I put a middling score here because of the difference in support between the free and premium uses. The Free tool was a great service, but there wasn't much support. It was tool that was intended to have a skilled SEO utilize it and save time. The Premium version has great support, but also offered more information so that skilled SEOs and novices alike could benefit from the tool.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating If the software was a little easier to use for beginners, there really wouldn't be an issue
Read full review Alternatives Considered Ahrefs is much more comprehensive than Open Site Explorer. If you are in need of a deep backlink analysis there are better options out there for your money. If you need a quick look at the state of a client's backlink profile than OSE is for you. It will give you the top metrics you are looking for and then some. I find OSE to be more user-friendly than competitors
Read full review 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
Read full review Return on Investment This has allowed me to bring more traffic to our website. This has increased our clients. This has increased our Domain Authority over 10. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots