Screaming Frog SEO Spider vs. Searchmetrics Suite

Screaming Frog tracks the crawl level, internal links, outbound links, title tags, and meta descriptions of the pages it crawls. It also adds HTTP status codes, title tag length, meta description length, H1, H2 tags and lengths, and canonical tags. Many of these elements are also broken into their own tabs at the top so that you can easily focus in on problem areas. You can right-click on any URL for many more options. The program is definitely valuable to anyone who is looking to gauge factors regarding SEO. However, if you are not a web designer/admin, you're going to lack an understanding of the information it provides.

Incentivized

Searchmetrics does a great job when doing optimization of your content and keywords. It is less appropriate when doing off page optimization like backlinks.

Incentivized

• Collects all indexed HTML pages of the site. This helps for when we are redirecting old URLs to the URLs of a clients new site.
• Finds all page titles that are too long or too short and allows us to address them more quickly than waiting for a program such as Moz. It's more immediate.
• If we have duplicate meta data on pages, this program allows us to find them, sort them, export them and take care of them in a timely manner. In our business (as for many) time is money.

Incentivized

• Content optimization, give one or more keywords to Searchmetrics and the webpage you want to rank for those keywords. Searchmetrics will check your page and compare it with other web pages that rank for your given keywords.
• Competitor research, find out what keywords your competitors are ranking for.
• Keyword research, what keywords are you using and which keywords could be new opportunities for your project.

Incentivized

• Customizing the crawler - It takes a little bit of playing around with the settings to understand what each of them controls and what options need to be checked or unchecked to get the right amount of information.
• Cannot Crawl a large site - Screaming Frog runs out of memory when asked to crawl a large site, even after playing around with memory settings and allocating additional memory.

Incentivized

• A lot of competitor SEO research sites offer suggestions on how to improve SEO ranking or changes that could be made to page title or descriptions, but Searchmetrics is a research only product and does not offer suggestions.
• Not sure if all of their contracts have an auto-renew, but ours did and we missed the 30-day notice to opt out and are now stuck in a new full year contract...
• Adding mobile tracking requires a new contract and is an additional add-on

Incentivized

The tool has become integrated into our teams daily workings and I have yet to find a tool other than scremaing frog to replicate all of our use cases for it. It's a great tool and we're sticking with it

Incentivized

We are currently using an agency and do not need Searchmetrics services at this time. If we do need research metrics in the future, we will probably go with them. The only deterrent is that we got suckered into an additional year with them because we were a few days late on opting out of the auto-renew. Although I was very upset about getting stuck an extra year paying for services I do not need, that is probably the only issue I have with the company, so if you can avoid that, it's a pretty good product.

Incentivized

The main problem of Screaming Frog SEO Spider is it being an offline software which limits itself to a single pc and that creates problem when multi user agents want to get involved or even work on it, it’s a difficult task to collaborate on it and do research for keywords at one place

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

If the software was a little easier to use for beginners, there really wouldn't be an issue

Incentivized

The biggest difference between DeepCrawl and Screaming Frog is cost. Screaming Frog is significantly cheaper, and fits within a budget much easier. For most websites that aren't huge it crawls quicker to. DeepCrawl is the better tool for analysing larger websites and is easier to use in some ways, with a very friendly interface and some extras features that are useful. Ultimately price was the deciding factor though.

We originally selected Searchmetrics because we got more bang for our buck. On the research end, we could do unlimited searches without the cost of the service going up. As for the historical data, we could store more trending data and do deeper research than we could with the competitor. The monthly fee was almost half (if i remember correctly, but it's been a few years) of what what we were paying before with a competitor.

Incentivized

• 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!

Incentivized

• It had a positive impact on the ROI. As the websites rank better the revenue raised.
• Searchmetrics Suite is an expensive product, it is too expensive for small websites.

Incentivized