- By Hamzakhan
- March 24, 2023
Recently, the term SEO is extensively used in the discussion. To get ranked on Google, the art SEO is used. However, one may wonder, how do the search engines work to present the most relevant high-quality results? There comes the term search engine spider, which is used to crawl through the webpages.
This article will give you a brief discern of these search engine spiders and a comparison of two SEO spider tools; SemRush and Screaming frog, to do an analogous, that will help you to choose the best one for you.
The Main Aim: People type their queries on the search engines. Among billions of pages, the exact answer appears on the screen. This is only possible with the help of search engine bots or spiders.
After the keywords have been typed, all the search pages that are thought to be relevant, are identified from the index and the search engine algorithm ranks the pages into the set of results.
The search engine directs the web through downloading web pages and follows the links on these pages to go to the other web pages. The algorithms used to rank the web pages have different grading criteria for different search engines. Other factors that search engines use to mark the most relevant results are: location, language sensed, previous search history, and type of device used.
The SEO spider is a crawler, which is used to improve the onsite SEO of your website, by pulling out data and checking for common SEO problems.
Before getting into the key differences between the two SEO spider tools.
The prime distinction between SEMrush Vs Screaming Frog is: Screaming Frog is a desktop-based app, that can be downloaded and run on the machine easily and will crawl 500 URLs, while SemRush Audit on the other hand is the cloud-based tool.
| Features | Screaming Frog | SEMrush |
| Size of website | Can easily crawl a website of sub-10,000 pages. However, a larger website depends on the specs of the machine. | Efficient to crawl a larger number. |
| Number of websites | No limit to audit the pages. Depends upon the machine. Can easily manage the small sites. | Limits to 100,000 pages on the basic plan. This means you can crawl 5 different websites per month. |
| Scheduling of crawlers | Easy crawling of the new site, ranging from daily to weekly, with version 10+. But the machine needs to be strange enough. | Easy scheduling with semRush. |
| Locating errors | Screaming frog tends to find more of some known issues. | SemRush breaks the issues into 3 categories: errors, warnings, and notices. Also finds some additional checks. |
| Reporting | No reporting dashboard. | Cloud-based with an attractive dashboard to highlight all the necessary issues. |
| Historical comparison | No progress tracking feature | Gives you the ability to track the progress by comparing various crawlers at the URL level |
| Crawl a list of URLs | Screaming frog had three modes: spider, list, or SERP | SemRush has released this feature |
| Cost | The license lasts for a year and can be used for two devices. A free version is also available that can be used for small sites. | SemRush is a cloud service, therefore much more expensive. With a 7-day trial version |
In the combat of SEMrush vs screaming frog, a combination of both will be a great deal to take in. For those who do weekly and monthly website auditing, screaming frog is a well-working tool for deep analysis. Whereas SEMrush on the other hand runs daily, although it does not give a deep dive analysis it shows view and score to check whether something is broken or not. You can try with SEMrush free trial but if your website is less than 500 pages then trying screaming frog isn’t a deal to lose.
Thanks For Reading
Also Read : SEMrush vs Similar Web | Best keyword Research Tool
Henry Faulkner Brittany is a content writer and Experienced Search Engine Optimization Specialist with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. He maintains a popular blog about writing and books.
