Item: Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Rating: 10
Author: Joseph Miller

Overall Satisfaction with Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Screaming Frog for adhoc competitor research, site health checks, page list building, sitemap creation and verification primarily. Any time a site health issue crops up that prompts someone to ask "can you quickly check XYZ?" it's typically easiest to go with Screaming Frog.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Sitemap generation
Adhoc site crawls with particular settings. For example, crawling all URLs on a specific subdomain or with certain URL parameters
SEO attribute verification. Say you updated a title template and want to verify across a large batch of pages.
Verifying redirects are in place

Cons

Since its Java based desktop software, the memory management is always clunky
It would be great to have a cloud based option. For instance something run off Amazon's cloud services.
Easier management of license keys when switching computers

Return on Investment

Saves a huge amount of time on site structure analysis
Very useful and time saving for adhoc sitemap generation
Very useful for verifying dev releases

Alternatives Considered

DeepCrawl

DeepCrawl and Screaming Frog are complementary tools in my opinion. DeepCrawl is better for tracking progress over time while Screaming Frog is better for day to day adhoc requests. I use and recommend both. Both are more robust than the solutions offered by all in one enterprise platforms.

Other Software Used

Ahrefs Site Explorer, DeepCrawl, CognitiveSEO

Likelihood to Recommend

Screaming Frog is a great fit for almost any enterprise level site. For sites with less than 1000 URLs it is probably overkill, although you could get by with the free version.

Screaming Frog Feature Ratings

Comments

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Great Crawl Tool for Any SEO Professional