The 9 Absolute Best SEO Website Crawling and Auditing Tools

As a business owner, it’s important to understand the massive benefits of using SEO website crawling and auditing tools.

With these SEO tools, you can identify where your largest areas of improvement lie, how the search engines are accessing your site, or identify gaps in your content by crawling a competitor’s site.

While crawling and auditing your log files is just one of many tactics used by businesses and professional SEOs to understand their sites, it’s an important one that should be part of any marketing strategy worth its salt.

For an idea of just how important this is to your business, Baastian Grimm, an instructor atSemrush Academy and online marketing consultant, explains:

To that end, we’ve compiled the best website crawling and auditing tools that you should investigate using to improve your website’s organic traffic from SEO.

Semrush

Semrush is a leading SEO website crawler and digital marketing tool.

To be honest, Semrush is our tool of choice here at Credo, which is specifically why we list them at the top here.

Semrush’s Site Audit tool is powerful with filters, scheduled crawls, and more that keep you on top of your site’s health and help you identify and fix problems on the go.

They also have a wide array of other SEO and digital marketing tools within their toolkit, including:

• Keyword research tools (including their magical Keyword Magic tool)
• Backlink Analytics
• Competitor research tools
• Link building tool
• Keyword and Backlink Gap tools
• And more

Visit: https://www.semrush.com/partner/credo/

ScreamingFrog

Screaming Frog is most likely the most popular SEO website crawling and auditing tool available online.

Built by the team at Screaming Frog, an agency based in the UK, this SEO spider runs off your own machine and can be very powerful when used with custom filters.

You can crawl as different user agents, exclude or include robots.txt, and so much more.

With the free tier, you can crawl up to 500 URLs. On the paid tier (just £149 per year) you can crawl unlimited URLs, schedule crawls, crawl as different user agents, crawl Google AMP URLs, and so much more.

Plus they’ve updated the interface and it’s now more beautiful and functional than ever.

In fact, SEER Interactive wrote a phenomenal guide to it.

Other great write-ups on Screaming Frog also exist such as How To Run Screaming Frog on AWS by iPullRank and Screaming Frog Indexing Tips and Tricks over on Authority Labs.

Visit: https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

Botify

Botify is a relatively new tool on the market.

Different from ScreamingFrog, it is a subscription-based model that gets you to access to their SaaS (Software As A Service) tool that crawls your site from the cloud (aka not on your personal machine, so you can do other things as your crawl happens) and gives you in-depth reports with clear actions to take next on your site.

Botify markets itself as “a leading enterprise SEO platform”, which means that it is built specifically for enterprise in-house SEO teams (and their agencies) to track changes over time and help drive reporting and actions to improve organic traffic.

Their Intelligence tool also helps you “prioritize your SEO tasks by greatest impact,” which means you’ll work more often on the right things that will move the needle on organic traffic.

Visit: https://www.botify.com/

DeepCrawl

DeepCrawl is our enterprise crawling tool of choice.

This tool is more expensive than the above two mentioned SEO crawling tools. DeepCrawl goes deep into your site and provides you with recommendations to help you prioritize your technical SEO.

Pricing is based on the number of pages you crawl each month. You can adjusted as needed, as you go.

We’ve used this on sites with 10 million+ pages and it worked a charm. It takes our site’s SEO to the next level. Highly recommended.

Visit: https://www.deepcrawl.com/

Splunk

Splunk is actually an IT and server admin tool, but it can be very powerful when applied to your log files for SEO.

Using Splunk, you can identify how the search engines are actually crawling your website and make optimizations from that data. It’s not a cheap tool when used for full power, though there is a free version that can get you started.

If you are working on any level of enterprise website, though, it could be worth your money.

A great post was written here on Moz about using Splunk for Technical SEO.

Visit: http://www.splunk.com/

Moz

If you’re in the SEO world, you know Moz.

They have the popular Moz blog and put it on their annual Mozcon conference.

Their Pro subscription allows you to set up not only rank tracking and other diagnostics for your site and some competitors, but it also gives you a weekly crawl of your site, delivered to your inbox, that shows you the issues they found on your site so you can prioritize the fixes.

Visit: https://moz.com/products/pro

OnCrawl

Another key feature is the ability to perform URL segmentation. With a list of non-indexed URLs, you can use to segment the list to see only blog or product pages.

Crawl scheduling is a huge time-saver as well. You can set the tool to run at specified times so you can gather reports from specific time sets provided.

The hreflang reporting is excellent. You can easily integrate with Google Analytics to streamline your SEO strategy and management even further.

Creating custom dashboards. You can easily add or remove charts to a custom-built dashboard.

OnCrawl provides a library of charts to choose from where you can create custom dashboards, key metrics, and reporting guidelines with graphs for easy-to-digest data.

Visit: https://www.oncrawl.com/suites-insights/oncrawl-seo-crawler/

Audisto

What sets Audisto apart from the other SEO crawlers on this list? You can create URL clusters based on filters and see ready-made reports and graphics related only to those clusters specifically.

Within these clusters, you can define patterns in the same way you define typical filters. There are also collaborative tools that let you add comments when adding a cluster.

This is a huge time-saver in the future when many people work on the same crawl or review the data.

Audisto also provides intuitive SEO hints, and uses pattern definition recognition to group pages by type and create targeted tests. You can do this for specific sections of your website.

You can also configure instant alerts while crawling, defines thresholds for data, and maintain SEO reviews on all pages.

Visit: https://audisto.com/crawler

Ahrefs

Ahrefs has the most robust backlink index of any SEO crawler on this list. Using this SEO crawler and marketing tool, you can check on and monitor your competitor’s SEO — as well as improve your SEO strategies.

Key features include industry-leading backlink research, rank tracking, competitive search report analysis, web monitoring, site auditing, broken link checker, Intensive Keyword research, complete SERP analysis reports, and more.

This SEO crawler and general tool are easy to use and can make an impactful difference to your SEO results.

Here’s a quick peek of Ahrefs by the numbers:

• 6 billion web pages are crawled every day
• 12 trillion Internet known links
• 200 million domains tracked
• 5.9 billion keywords

Visit: https://ahrefs.com/content-explorer

Want help wrapping your arms around your SEO strategy with SEO crawlers? The digital agencies on this list specialize in just that–and are ready to hit the ground running.