Deep analysis, easy to use, flexible reports
April 25, 2018
Deep analysis, easy to use, flexible reports
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Screaming Frog SEO Spider
I bought Screaming Frog to help review current and potential client onboarded websites. It helps me realize where bloat is, if there are any redirection errors, and generally be able to see the architecture and cross-linking of a site quickly. My primary use is to scan pages if I'm doing a rebuild and be able to accurately "see" any page that may not immediately be visible from front-end navigation.
- The ability to pare down any item on a site by "type"- HTML, image, scripts, etc
- A quick SEO response shows you pages with titles, without, with and without meta data so instead of combing through a site page-by-page (which is ridiculously time intensive) you can make an immediate actionable list
- It's fast. Even with ridiculously bloated sites it spiders rapidly and gives me a visual almost instantly. The various methods of reporting and exporting data are also useful. I use them all, but when reporting back to clients it can be helpful to have the charts and graphs vs just an export of cell data
- No real learning curve, all you have to do is input the URL you're looking for then the clearly labeled buttons and tabs help you start sorting what you're looking at
- I feel the top tabbing could be handled a little differently, though I'm not immediately sure how. Maybe two rows of tabs? There's so many that even on my 27" monitor it cuts off and the arrow down is almost lost beside the search arrow. I sometimes forget the other items off-screen exist
- Consider flattening the colors. While on the whole the muted color palette is fantastic and lets the data show, I feel the soft grey gradients behind bold text could honestly just become flat even color. That would allow things like buttons to pop more, with simple strokes and maybe a light color difference indicating buttons
- Make the bottom horizontal scroll bar on the main window more obvious. Almost always data is going to stretch further to the left and the bar blends in pretty closely with the stretching window beneath, and the arrows are too faint a grey. This sometimes obscures the fact there's deeper data to be seen if cut off at just the perfect point.
- I can scope rebuilds on sites much faster
- With easy at-hand data I can better help sell the content marketing side of my department
- I can quickly ensure certain integrations are firing
- Nibbler, MySiteAuditor.com and Neil Patel SEO Analyzer
The above are web-based and mostly free, and I found them to be mostly slow. What some *did* offer over ScreamingFrog was actionable suggestions on SEO improvement (though honestly some of it remains a gambit as Google continues to change and obscure their algorithms) while Screaming Frog gave me much deeper technical data, which as a web developer I really needed. I think it pairs well with some of the above just in that they offer different things. Use ScreamingFrog to see where you are missing information, titles, meta tags, and then use another application to get suggestions on word count and keyword insertion.