ObservePoint’s Web Governance platform automates website scans, from the highest traffic pages and user paths to the dark corners of a company’s web presence. The software provides the ability to see what’s performing below acceptable standards, trace it back to the source, and quickly see a path to improvement.
ObservePoint is a great tool for automating page testing and standardizing campaigns to observe accurate customer insights. You can identify customer mapping journey. They also help in data protection and insights which are very important and essential these days. They should work more on easy interface designs. Overall, it is the best.
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.
Page details, although interesting, are not very useful as the data is too granular and not possible to integrate with other analytics data for insights.
Some of the custom tagging may be a little complicated, so sometimes we need an engineer or an ObservePoint tech to help us out.
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
The Screaming Frog crawler can do a very exhaustive SEO page audit. It is able to detect errors like 4xx, 5xx, 3xx, etc on page. It is also able to check basic SEO hygiene on the page like missing page title, lengthy page title, etc. It can also check advanced SEO stuff like missing canonical or hreflang.
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 have not used any other product other than ObservePoint for my requirements. there are a number of features for which it has proved helpful. Technology Governance ensures our data collection tools and processes are executing as planned, so our organization can make better decisions based on better data and so on
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
ObservePoint has helped us quickly (within minutes) catch when a process or pathing on the website breaks, which allows us to fix it quickly. Whether technical/dev or analytics issues, without ObservePoint, they could have been undetected for weeks.
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.