Screaming Frog SEO Spider vs. SpyFu

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.

If you have a Google ads PPC campaign and then I would say this is more or less essential if you want to know what your competitors are doing. You can get very useful data out of it even if you subscribe for one month. And the pricing is very reasonable. Even if you don't use Google ads, I would say this is still useful for your SEO/SMO team since it gives you a great idea of what keywords and traffic your competitors are working on.

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

• Keeping a tab on competitors organic and inorganic activities
• Helps identify where the competitor is getting the backlinks from.
• Identify competitors top content and the keywords that's bringing them traffic
• Get proper information of their current and past ADS run on Google.

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

• As with any database, their keyword database has limits, so the data returned is relative to their database, not necessarily the full picture.
• When SpyFu database or scoring chances, the data provided can spike, thus causing confusion among stakeholders, we're reporting to.

Incentivized

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

Love this tool but would like insights from all 3 major search engines not just Google. I would also like deeper understanding of the placement for local businesses on Google Places/Maps. Insight into mobile search rankings and best landing pages per industry would also help :) Overall, SpyFu is a necessity for serious search marketers.

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

Incentivized

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

SpyFu comes with a link to tutorial videos. I recommend you watch them. The software is capable of so much you really need to watch the videos and learn how to get the most out of it. When I have a question 90% of the time it's there. When it isn't, and I reach out to them, support is always quick and concise.

Incentivized

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

I was surprised to find I preferred Semrush when it comes to keyword research. SpyFu is great (and less expensive than Semrush), but I felt the data Semrush provided was vaster than SpyFu. I was able to get more competitors spending insights in Semrush than SpyFu. Overall, I liked the ability to use both in our keyword research for both paid and organic marketing.

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

• Helping us track our ranking.
• It helps solve the problem of ambiguity when it comes to Google Ads. It makes the strategy more clear.
• You can sift through lots of different online analytics to find the information, but it takes way too long. SpyFu has it all in one place!

Incentivized