Screaming Frog SEO Spider vs. Siteimprove

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.

Siteimprove works well for managing the health and performance of your customer-facing sites in terms of performance, digital experience, and accessibility. It also helps to define policies to proactively avoid experience breaks or issues for customers before they occur. It can improve by providing more options to configure policies for large sites with thousands of pages.

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

• User-friendly customisable dashboards, easy to make a dashboard from a template, or create your own, and add in whichever 'widgets' are relevant for what you are looking at
• Flagging words to review, allowing users to check and confirm if the word is 'accepted' or is a misspelling

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

• I don't like that there are different navigation paths to go from point A to point B. When I want to navigate to a specific place, I have more than one way to get there, which means I have to make a decision about how I want to there and I'd rather the designer make that design based on what would be most efficient for me.

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

Tool has undergone numerous changes, both to function and UX/CX. Makes it less than user friendly at times. But on the other hand, that does indicate a willingness to improve the product in a continual manner - which they've done nearly year after year - but it's always a case of who moved my cheese with each new iteration.

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.

Incentivized

I've used support often and it has been responsive, thorough and considerate of our needs. I can get a tech right away, they understand the issue, and work with us to resolve it. Often the problem is with the site we are trying to scan, sometimes it is with their product. I appreciate that they go beyond support into continually helping us implement SiteImprove in more places with 3rd party integration.

If the software was a little easier to use for beginners, there really wouldn't be an issue

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

We have used or tested other tools that get installed on a computer or that are hosted online, but none of them offer the features that come with Siteimprove. TotalValidator Pro will check your site for accessibility issues, but it is a manual check and there is no historical reporting. I can;t remember the names of the other online solutions, but even if they offered similar features as Siteimprove, they were all very expensive .

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

• Siteimprove has helped bring our accessibility scores up from middling to near-perfect.
• Siteimprove has helped reduce our broken links, style violations and misspellings.
• Siteimprove's heatmaps have helped us make the case for enforcing best practices on the website among key stakeholders.

Incentivized