Screaming Frog SEO Spider vs. Yoast

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

For quick WordPress installations and configurations, Yoast is fast to set up and helps guide you through the common configuration options. It tries to be helpful whether you are coming at things from a technical or non-technical background. The emphasis on white hat SEO topics like improved content, keywords, descriptions, and titles is really appreciated by someone like me who doesn't utilize gray and black hat SEO tactics.

If you are an SEO expert, and you want finite control of each individual aspect of your site, Yoast, like most plugins, engines, tools, etc, hides a lot from you or gives you limited options. It really is meant for someone who wants to apply a general strategy to a whole site. That being said, you can manage Yoast per page on a WordPress site, but even then, I know some SEO experts prefer other tools that are meant for very specific purposes.

Overall, Yoast is the best plugin for SEO in WordPress when applied as a whole.

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

• Readability - makes it easy for you to assess the reading level of your piece to ensure it is correct for your intended audience.
• SEO tips - red/orange/green traffic light system to provide tips on what aspects need improving to be SEO-focussed.
• Redirect tool - easy, automated detection and setup.

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

• Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugin is really good at copy and link scanning and optimizing, however, I have not been able to find any assistance on image optimization on our pages and posts. That would be a good update!
• Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugin is good at ranking pages and posts individually. I would like to see an overall dashboard of your entire website/blog's SEO health according to the software.
• N/A

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

I see no reason to discontinue using Yoast as it has been very beneficial for my website and my business.

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

It's super easy to use. Really, it requires little-to-know tutorials or walkthroughs at all — it explains everything you need to know in the description and tooltips built straight into the tool. I've never had to google a how-to or tutorial to use Yoast — it just works, and it works well

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

I gave it a 4 just because it is helpful if you are just getting started with SEO, it guides you and shows you what you need to do in order for your website to be up and running properly. As a seasoned SEO analyst I wouldn't recommend it just because I can do things better my way.

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.

Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugins was a little easier to understand and offered a real-time guided plugin that helped me write throughout my drafting process. Semrush was much more helpful as a reporting tool, not so much in content creation. Both tools are useful in different ways, it is just a matter of knowing each one's strengths and weaknesses.

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

• Findability: I love few things more than hearing, "I just found you on Google!" and knowing that they found us on Google because our SEO is on point.
• Using the Yoast SEO Plugin over time has taught me to create better, more optimized content from the start, rather than having to edit that content after I realize it's not very SEO friendly. This saves a lot of time and lets me put my energy into other things.
• The plugin has helped us make our sometimes-dense content more readable and sharable, which absolutely improves stakeholder engagement.

Incentivized