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.
To get a quick handle on keyword metrics and ideas, this tool really is idea. It is sooooooo much easier to work with than Semrush, which does a lot and is organized, on the whole, rather poorly.
Over the years I have learned that WordTracker's KEI is particularly good at revealing a keyword's relative value.
WordTracker finds related search terms which helps us develop a more comprehensive keyword strategy.
WordTracker also enables practical sorting across columns which helps us select competitive keywords quickly.
We use WordTracker frequently in our first phases of keyword research and have found it to be very solid.
This tool provides us with data to support our recommendations for changes that may need to be made to be successful in the SERPs and is also helpful in explaining our overall strategy to our clients.
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.
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
I only use WordTracker, rather than the old Google keyword research tool. In my experience, WordTracker is the best keyword analysis tool because it's easy to understand, use, and find the information for which you are looking. I also think WordTracker is the most well known and trusted amongst its competitors
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.
