My favorite SEO Tool
Updated August 25, 2023

My favorite SEO Tool

Joe Preston | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

2.55

Overall Satisfaction with Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog is used as a tool for primary analysis of site behavior by our Search and Analytics Team. We use it to crawl sites, debug indexing issues on our sites, to vet site tagging, and to assess the SEO health of every part of the web site. We increasingly use it to identify specific content for text extraction. We recently studied outgoing links with it, we recently foxed some microcopy we couldn't find with other reporting processes.

Pros

  • Effectively and quickly assesses the scale of any problem that can be determined in the HTML source of a web site. Most sites of any age or of sufficient scale have numerous systems interacting to generate the source code. Screaming Frog's filters let you figure out where issues lie, and where they don't -- which can be key to solving for the issue.
  • Screaming Frog lets you crawl your site (and others - SHHHH) as Googlebot. If Googlebot can't get everywhere you want it to go, you can fix that.
  • Screaming Frog can effectively find duplicate content.
  • Screaming Frog can filter for HTML, Javascript, Images, I use custom filters all the time to find little bits of code. Great for Wordpress Plugin Issues.
  • It's a true SEO crawler. Reliable site-wide analytics on Metadata. You can find your canonicalization issues with this tag.
  • It will build XML sitemaps for you. Good ones!
  • The integrations with Lighthouse, Google Search Console, and Ahrefs!

Cons

  • It's slow on slow machines.
  • It's a bit of a resource hog.
  • It could go even further and add some intelligence and direction to it's wonderful analytics. No reason it couldn't provide recommendations.
  • I am still finding features I love on this application. You could say thats a good thing, but isn't kind of a bad thing -- i have used it so much!
  • Quicker understanding of the characteristics of a site.
  • Instant diagnosis of indexing and crawling issues.
  • Strengthens understanding of technical side of SEO.
  • integrates structural page information with data from many other sources - YOU CANT BEAT THIS FEATURE
  • Moz and scraoebox
I like that it's a desktop client actually. I like it that I can stop something myself, rather than have some bot out of my control tear into a web site, consuming all it's content.

Do you think Screaming Frog SEO Spider delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Screaming Frog SEO Spider's feature set?

Yes

Did Screaming Frog SEO Spider live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Screaming Frog SEO Spider go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Screaming Frog SEO Spider again?

Yes

There are a lot of SEO's who won't be helped meaningfully by this tool, until they understand the technical aspect of SEO. It can actually help you write better SEO copy, but it is more likely to be of use to someone who makes $ diagnosing canoicalization and duplicate content issues. There are better solutions available if you are limited to slow machines or connections.

There are a lot of false positives for 400 and 500 errors, basically don't go nuts over a few empty title fields, check carefully.

Screaming Frog Feature Ratings

SEO
10.0
Keyword analysis
Not Rated
Backlink management
Not Rated
SERP ranking tracking
Not Rated
Page grader
Not Rated
Competitive analysis
10
Site audit / diagnostics
10
Site recommendations
Not Rated
Task management
Not Rated
SEO Channels
8.0
Local SEO
Not Rated
Social SEO
Not Rated
Mobile SEO
6
Global SEO
10
SEO Platform & Account Management
10.0
Multi-domain support
10
Integration with web analytics tools
10

Using Screaming Frog SEO Spider

2 - SEO Team
1 - Support proper configuration for every crawl.
  • SEO Troubleshooting
  • Analytics QA
  • Competitive research
  • Finding unlinked content
  • Resolving Wordpress PLugin Conflicts
  • We are about to use it as a major tool in a content metrics and scoring project.
Screaming Frog for life. In all seriousness, Screaming Frog has reshaped the way I deliver SEO services. It's an extraordinary time savings for solving the most difficult SEO problems.

Evaluating Screaming Frog and Competitors

Yes - It replaced Moz's Crawl test. The Moz product which is a cloud-based, mutli-user product was understandably, way too polite. Often did not crawl sites.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Reputation
  • Prior Experience with the Product
It's power within my grasp, that I used to have to outsource as a programming project.
There are some cloud-based services I find intersting, but you can't beat the price.

Comments

  • Ken Fox | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Ken Fox
    commented 9 years ago
    Screaming frog is undeniably useful for multiple reasons. I don't think there is a more useful, insightful, and faster tool for overall site analysis and/or competitor insights. It can help you develop a very sound and focused blueprint to drastically improve any site not delivering the results you want. You just have to know how to use it. Some of these comments that talk about how it's lacking are from people who have a skill set that may be lacking more than this tool. And no - I don't work for Screaming Frog - I'm just impressed with it.

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