Great free tool for small SEO budgets
January 18, 2020

Great free tool for small SEO budgets

Scott Walker | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Screaming Frog SEO Spider

When doing SEO for any of our websites, I like to start by using Screaming Frog to crawl the site. This gives me a starting point to examine meta data, see how discoverable the pages are on the website, and build the sitemap for submission. This is especially useful on web platforms that don't have their own sitemap generator.
  • Sitemap building.
  • Site crawling.
  • The UI is a bi confusing, especially for the uninitiated.
  • Though very customizable, default settings can cause server issues due to high traffic.
  • Using the free system keeps costs low for small shops or companies with a small SEO budget.
  • When the system is free, your only cost is labor, which means you can have some pretty great ROI.
Screaming Frog has a free version, so it competes with the paid programs (like Moz) solely in the fact that it can be used without incurring a budget line item. Compared to many other programs that also offer free scans, Screaming Frog is fast and much more customizable. Since it lives on your hard drive, you don't need to worry about site/server outages for a SaaS.
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.

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?

Yes

Did implementation of Screaming Frog SEO Spider go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Screaming Frog SEO Spider again?

Yes

Screaming Frog is a go-to tool for SEOs. If you're in charge of your company's SEO strategy and you aren't buying into one of the larger SaaS systems like Moz, then Screaming Frog is almost a necessary tool. Not only does it build your sitemap for you to host on the website and submit to the search engines, but it also allows you to find all the metadata like page titles and descriptions, discover broken links or non-navigable pages, and find all your current redirects.

Screaming Frog Feature Ratings

4.2
Keyword analysis
4
Backlink management
1
SERP ranking tracking
Not Rated
Page grader
3
Competitive analysis
Not Rated
Site audit / diagnostics
10
Site recommendations
1
Task management
6
Local SEO
Not Rated
Social SEO
Not Rated
Mobile SEO
Not Rated
Global SEO
8
Multi-domain support
10
Integration with web analytics tools
10