TrustRadius Insights for Screaming Frog SEO Spider are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Business Problems Solved
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a versatile tool that has become indispensable for various user needs. Users appreciate its effectiveness in auditing client and internal websites, leading to business growth and improved site performance. It allows users to schedule automatic website crawls and receive the results via email, making it easier to identify regular technical issues without manual effort. The software offers a comprehensive solution for website audits and SEO analysis, streamlining operations and improving efficiency. It assists in identifying critical errors such as broken links, duplicate pages, and missing tags, facilitating website audits on a page level. Additionally, it helps users find pages that require attention and deep crawling for e-commerce sites. The software has garnered positive feedback from users who have found it easy to use, with a wide range of functionalities. It is highly recommended for digital marketing agencies and individuals conducting website audits.
Screaming Frog is used extensively for SEO projects where we use it for keyword identification and keyword optimization purposes. this tool plays a important role in keyword rank analysis and keyword rank tracker. we can even track our clients competition from it and understand the keywords they are ranking on.
Pros
Keyword research
Keyword rank tracker
Competition analysis
Cons
Can be online
Limited functionality due to software
Pricing
Likelihood to Recommend
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is well suited for small budget clients and clients who want us to track only a small number of keywords. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is also recommended when you are looking at clients who have basic website and mostly business websites where there are not a lot of pages on the websites
VU
Verified User
Vice-President in Product Management (11-50 employees)
We have a huge website with millions of pages. We are not always very sure about the errors and internal links that persist on our website. To make the that easier we use Screaming Frog crawlers. The crawler is very efficient and the reporting of the analysis done by the same is quiet insightful.
Pros
Detect errors like 4xx, 5xx, 3xx, missing alts, etc. on the website
Identify internal links gaps and over-optimization
SEO hygiene checks like missing and duplicated page title/description
Cons
Speed of crawling can be better
They should move to a website rather than being a software on a laptop
Restoring previous crawl data can be faster
Likelihood to Recommend
If you are doing advanced SEO then there is no alternative to Screaming Frog Spider in the market. All other tools have a restriction on the number of pages it can crawl. On the other hand, there is no limit when it comes to Screaming Frog web crawler.
As an SEO professional it's like a Swiss Army knife for crawling the sites I have to optimize. It allows me a lot of customization in what parts of the site I want to crawl and how I want to crawl it. For instance, I can install it on a server and have it run from there and not tie up one of my machines when I'm crawling a large site, say 100,000 urls
Pros
website crawling
showing me which sites have duplicate titles
showing me server codes for all the pages I'm scanning
Cons
It has a huge learning curve.
There are some hiccups to navigate if you are working with client-side JavaScript. Some tutorials would be nice. This took me days to sort out.
Likelihood to Recommend
I've had a few sites where there were a lot of duplicate page titles. Screaming Frog SEO Spider let me sort them in a way that let me determine which pages needed new titles and which I could ignore. If you are working on a very large site, maybe a million urls, or in that neighborhood, you need a more robust solution.
Screaming Frog simulates Google's crawling of a website, allowing us to see how search engines view our website. This includes what pages it can see, whether all the features of a pages are being considered and any pages that experience technical issues that would effect Googles view of those pages. We use this to gather intelligence of our websites pages, ensuring that we can quickly see if anything is missing from Google's point of view, or anything isn't working. It also allows us to see quickly whether changes made on our Content Management System have actually taken place and are being detected by Google. With this in mind we can also quickly see all of the websites meta data, this is used to tell Google what a page is used for. So rounding all of this up quickly, in one place can quickly indicate whether any of this is out of date. The tool is best used for SEO purposes, and while some of the technical information is useful for general website maintenance its most useful when concerned with how Google views a website and what technical issue might prevent is ranking better in search results. So it is a narrow use case in the grand scheme of website use, but very useful within its niche.
Pros
Screaming Frog is an excellent website crawler, creating accurate, up to date, assessments of all a websites pages
Screaming Frog is also a fantastic tool for looking at a websites architecture, so you can see which pages are taking priority and are the most well linked around the website.
Screaming Frog is also useful for creating an XML sitemap that can be submitted to Google to help highlight key URLs
Cons
Screaming Frog is a software based tool (rather than all online like a lot of competitors) so it does take up memory on your computer, an online alternative would be very useful
When crawling bigger websites, the stability of crawls is less assured and they need to be crawled slowly to accurately retrieve all data. This can make it time consuming to review big websites.
Its a very technical tool and the interface and metrics referenced are not easy to understand at first. As such some indications in the tool itself of what each function does would be useful
Likelihood to Recommend
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is well suited to auditing brand new websites, when you need a quick, holistic view of the websites technical issues. Its great for providing a top line view of a websites architecture, perhaps for a new business approach where you need to assess the scale of work to maintain a website. Its also a useful tool in situations where you might need to see whether a large scale change in the website has taken place, you can see word counts, pages and their https response codes. Screaming Frog may be less useful if you need an idea of the customer experience on a website, it doesn't really provide information that helps assess how fast a website loads, what issues might come up when trying to convert or faults with the payment process. Screaming Frog is largely a technical SEO focused tool, it also can't assess the quality of a websites, layout or the quality of the content used on the website. As mentioned, its niche, but very useful within that niche.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider allows me to easily review and scan the Gflenv.com website (as well as other company websites), for all of its technical elements. This allows me to review it from an SEO perspective and to find any potential technical holes in the website, that need to be fixed.
Pros
Review Technical Elements of a Website
Review number of URLs on a website.
Review Pictures of a website.
Cons
No Training is provided w/ download of tool.
Not everyone likes the excel like format.
The number of tabs on the top can be a bit overwhelming for first time users.
Likelihood to Recommend
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a tool that is well suited, for scanning websites and for providing analysis of it. However, it is limited, to 100 URLs on the free version and it will not do the job or fix anything for you. It's simply a tool that helps you analyze data, you have to put the effort in to fix things.
The main use of this software is in tracking down broken links within a given website. Screaming Frog is able to crawl an entire site based on the home page, then look at external links on each page and find out where they are no longer working - returning a specific HTTP head error (such as 404). The crawl results can be saved, so it's easy to return to a previous project. The software also offers a lot of SEO insight including anchor texts, indexability, meta titles, H1 and H2 usage, word count, file size and more.
Pros
Scans all pages on a website.
Quickly extracts valuable insight about each page.
Clearly presents actionable SEO data.
Cons
Interface layout is dense and a little intimidating to a new user.
Slight learning curve to make the most of all the features.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you're an experienced SEO consultant and know what to look for - you'll find a lot of actionable insights in this software. A single site scan can result in days worth of actionable work in improving site structure, content, HTML tags, outbound links and more.
A beginner in the field of SEO may struggle a bit as they don't know the implications of many pieces of data (such as H1 tag use). It is assumed that the user understands these concepts.
I use Screaming Frog to perform site audits on both our own corporate sites and competitor sites. It’s a handy way to surface issues like error pages, redirect chains, and a host of other concerns. It’s also a good way to find a list of all the URLs available on our sites.
Pros
You can easily scan any site.
With the paid version, there is no page limit for scans.
It provides a wide variety of information about the URL that you scan.
Cons
Reduce the amount of system resources each scan requires.
Create an easy way to compare multiple URLs to make competitive analysis easier.
Improve the backlink capabilities.
Likelihood to Recommend
It works well for any sized business, thanks to the variety of information that it uncovers for whatever URL you research. I like how it’s industry-agnostic and how it lets you research both your own site(s) as easily as competitor sites. I do wish there was an easy way to research multiple URLs (or at least two) to do some real competitive analysis.
We use it to check technical SEO factors of various company websites. It helps us to recognize any issues, errors, or opportunities with our sites to be able to better optimize them. Screaming Frog gives us all the technical information we need to be able to make our websites better, basically!
Pros
Very fast to crawl a site.
Tons of features.
Not flashy: Everything is data driven which is great.
Fast
Likelihood to Recommend
The screaming frog would be suited to anyone looking to improve the SEO of their website.nI think it is more geared toward the technical side of SEO
VU
Verified User
Director in Information Technology (1-10 employees)
We use Screaming Frog SEO Spider to analyze clients' websites prior to us building them a new site. With Screaming Frog SEO Spider I can look at the sitemap of a site very easily and discover any hidden pages that may exist on that website. Overall it is a pretty useful tool that our Implementation department utilizes quite frequently.
Pros
Finding sitemaps
Seeing what pages are classified as
Easy to use
Cons
Old look and feel
Can be overwhelming amount of information
Have a guide or tutorial
Likelihood to Recommend
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is especially helpful when analyzing the SEO of a particular website. We need to do this because when we are building clients new websites we don't want to miss any pages that could be hidden. Those pages could be important and this helps us streamline the website building process.
VU
Verified User
Project Manager in Customer Service (51-200 employees)
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is [the] one-stop solution for website audit. It is Quick, reliable, and user-friendly. It provides all the technical and on-page details. Helps in quickly optimizing the website. Shows most of the required data [that] any SEO would need.
Pros
User Friendly
Quick
Provides Detailed Data
Cons
Providing more suggestions [on] how things can be improved
Likelihood to Recommend
If you a looking for a quick and detailed audit the best tool to use is Screaming Frog SEO Spider!
