Likelihood to Recommend 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 SEOquake is a great tool to use alongside
Semrush with the quick data that it provides on the search results page it's helpful to make quick decisions. The ability to change the SERP locale is also really nice as it helps us analyze the search results page from different locations.
Read full review Pros 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 Gives a ton of SEO info in one area. I usually have to use a few different Chrome extensions that show different areas to get the full picture that this tool gives you up front. It gives you info on ways to improve the infrastructure of your website. It's free for the first 100 pages of audit. Read full review Cons 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 The high-level parameters are nice to see, but for a new-to-the-tool person, they are confusing and don't provide a lot of explanation, unfortunately. The keyword density section is somewhat helpful but gives the density in a percentage without rationale as to what an average percentage is or what the website should aim for. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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 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 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 SEOquake provides more information regarding backlinks and traffic in general whereas other tools focus more on keywords and their search volume. The backlinks information it provides is also really useful in making quick decisions on which site we can focus on more when it comes to searching for backlink opportunities.
Read full review Return on Investment 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 It helps promote a positive return on organic results. I have seen a 5% increase since using the program of organic search results only. Read full review ScreenShots