Semrush vs Screaming Frog SEO Spider: Which is a better fit?

Sam: Hi, my name's Sam. I'm the director of a small digital marketing company based in the UK, and I give Semrush five out of five. Before we started using Semrush, we used a platform called Hike SEO. It was perfect for us at the time as we were quite new to SEO services, but we moved past our area of expertise and we outgrew this initial platform that we're using. So we're looking for new service provider to use, and we decided to use Semrush. Semrush offers a range of tools which are essential for SEO, such as the backlinks, analytics, and keyword analysis. So to offer decent good level SEO services to customers, Semrush offers everything that a white label agency such as ourselves would need to offer. The onboarding process is very easy to set up client projects. All you need is their domain, URL, and then you can set up a lot of the tools very simply, such as the audit tools and the backlink analytics. We haven't used all of the integration tools such as the search console integrations, but all of those look very useful should you decide to go down that route. Semrush is perfect if you have quite a few client accounts and client websites. So we currently have 15, and it offers great value for money when split across those 15 accounts. So if you are managing SEO services for a range of customers, a range of features and tools that they offer does offer good value for money across a large portfolio. Although it could be quite expensive if you are just monitoring one website.

Kevin: My name is Kevin and I am a senior SEO strategist with a larger agency, we are approximately 250 employees, and today I'm reviewing Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool, which I would give five stars. So prior to using Screaming Frog, we have used a number of different tools. The challenge with that is generally they're high level, they're not doing data and rendering diagnostics, which Screaming Frog allowed us to do. So it really gets into the depth of the types of technical issues that arise in SEO, and allows us to isolate specific issues. Screaming Frog was the obvious choice because of the technical nature of the work that we do. It allows us to render pages in a number of different formats, meaning we can actually simulate the way that a website is evaluated pretty much in the same manner that an algorithm like Google or Bing would do. The second piece that made Screaming Frog a clear decision was the ability to do data-based extractions from the crawl data, meaning we could isolate specific elements inside of the page results, and just isolate and extract those specific pieces of data, really speeding up the process of diagnosing web issues. And the final piece is when you're working with international websites that manage a lot of languages, Screaming Frog allowed us to isolate or simply crawl a language variant at a time. This is very challenging using more enterprise tools, so that for us was a huge win in choosing the Screaming Frog platform. Starting off with Screaming Frog has a bit of a learning curve just because there's a lot of functionality. What I would suggest though is that if you are familiar with, if you're experienced in doing SEO, particularly technical SEO, that learning curve will be relatively simple as you begin to explore all the different functions. There's a lot of menus, so you can start broad and then isolate very quickly specific tasks, and extracting just itemized data sets that ultimately are going to make your job a lot easier to do. So if you're considering Screaming Frog as an option, I would strongly suggest that you download an evaluation copy and get accustomed to the way that it is able to crawl, and then dissect or slice your different data sets in order to produce very specific results. For us, Screaming Frog has really become the all encompassing tools when we're trying to diagnose specific elements. And so I would say get your hands wet and pull some of those types of reports, understand the level of data definition that you can get, and it should be a pretty easy decision process at that point. We really consider it the Swiss Army Knife of SEO, and I'm sure you will too.