The backbone of my SEO auditing toolset!
August 21, 2018
The backbone of my SEO auditing toolset!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog is used primarily by the account management department, however it is also used occasionally by members of the business development and/or research teams. All who use it do so as part of technical SEO audits for clients. It can specifically help us identify crawling issues, indexation issues, necessary meta data changes, etc.
- 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.
- I sometimes feel that it takes a lot of CPU power to do more basic audits. I've heard that others use tools like DeepCrawl for very large sites for this reason.
- Lately, I've been having some small issues with the search function, though in the past this has worked great so it could just be a bug. Dan and the team seem to be great at addressing these quickly!
- I'd like the ability to identify URLs which exist in an XML sitemap but are not linked to within a site's taxonomy. Currently the comparison between these two lists has to be done manually, as far as I know.
- It has allowed me to make impactful and intelligent recommendations to clients. This has in turned deepened the client relationships and led to steady ongoing ROI.
- It has also allowed me to diagnose interesting technical issues for non-client sites (like Forbes) which formed the basis for very cool company blog posts.
- The investment is very low - this tool does 99% of what I need for a fraction of what other industry crawlers costs. Kudos to the Screaming Frog team!
Moz's crawler is part of a larger, more expensive suite of proprietary tools. Screaming Frog is more affordable and does the job for those who don't need the other products offered by Moz.
DeepCrawl makes some of the recommendations for you and is typically better for enterprise-level sites with hundred of thousands or even millions of pages.
DeepCrawl makes some of the recommendations for you and is typically better for enterprise-level sites with hundred of thousands or even millions of pages.