Screaming Frog vs Ahrefs: Which One is Right?

When It comes to a website analysis, SEO audits, and performance tracking, Screaming Frog and Ahrefs are two of the most talked about tools. However, both solutions are highly respected on the SEO market but which one should you choose, and why? In this post, we are going to explore Screaming Frog vs Ahrefs, sharing the notable features, pros, and cons of both so that you can find what fits as per your need.

What is Screaming Frog? How Does It Work?

Screaming Frog is a desktop-based website crawler that is best for SEO professionals and website owners who want to identify potential problems with their website. This tool gives you deep technical insights so you can crawl your pages to examine broken links, redirects, page titles, meta descriptions, and beyond, allowing you to conduct a comprehensive audit of your website.

Screaming Frog is renowned for its use in fast, real-world audits. One of my clients once faced a substantial decrease in organic traffic. After using Screaming Frog to run a crawl, we found hundreds of broken internal links and broken or missing meta descriptions. 

These findings were critical in identifying the cause of the traffic drop. The tool quickly facilitated the diagnosis of these problems and allowed us to address them, which in turn improved the site’s performance in search results.

What is Ahrefs and How Does it Work?

Whereas Ahrefs is a cloud-based SEO toolset that helps in backlink analysis, keyword research, and entire website health audits. This versatile software can be used to monitor your website’s performance, analyze your competitors, and perform deep backlink audits.

Although Screaming Frog is hugely useful for site audit purposes, Ahrefs excels at features such as keyword research, competitor analysis, and backlink tracking. I’ve used Ahrefs a fair bit in competitor analysis; it’s a tool I’ve often recommended to clients looking to outrun their competition. 

While working with a tech client, I used Ahrefs to analyze keywords related to their competition that were bringing traffic to their sites. Not only did this strategy help us identify new opportunities, but it also helped us plan great content for those high-value keywords.

Core Features of Ahrefs

Backlink Analysis

The Ahrefs tool offers you a complete backlink database which you can use to track your own backlinks along with your competitors. Provides metrics such as domain rating, URL rating and anchor text distribution.

Keyword Research

Ahrefs enables users to find keywords with great traffic potential for SEO and PPC with its advanced keyword research tools. This tool shows search volume, keyword difficulty and suggestions for related keywords.

Site Explorer

The Site Explorer Tool lets you assess any website’s organic traffic, backlinks, and most successful pages. This is perfect for competitor analysis.

Content Explorer

Ahrefs allows you to explore trending content in your niche by analyzing articles that were the most shared or linked to. This is useful for deciding on content marketing strategies.

Rank Tracking

The Rank Tracker keeps track of your website’s keyword rankings over time. This gives you graphic reports and insight into your ranking in the competition.

Site Audit

Ahrefs conducts an in-depth technical audit of your site and flags things like broken links, slow-loading pages, and missing metadata that could damage your SEO performance.

Competitor Analysis

Ahrefs allows you to scrutinize competing websites, uncovering their best keywords, sources of backlinks, and content strategies. This enables you to keep up with your competition.

Ahrefs Crawl

Almost similar to crawling, but it covers the factor when Google crawls the website effectively. It can be a useful tool for uncovering things like orphan pages and crawl depth restrictions.

Keyword Gap Analysis

Ahrefs offers keyword opportunities by comparing your site to competitors, helping you identify gaps you might target to improve your ranks.

Comprehensive Reporting

Ahrefs offers in-depth and customizable reports with its user-friendly console, which helps in tracking progress and sharing insights with teams or clients with ease.

Screaming Frog Core Functionality

Website Crawling

Screaming Frog crawls your entire site and extracts URLs, helping you find technical issues such as broken links, duplicate pages, and redirects. This ensures that your site is optimized for search engine crawlers.

SEO Audit

It offers in-depth information about your metadata, headings, and on-page elements, making it easier for you to detect and address problems such as missing or duplicate meta descriptions and title tags.

Redirect Analysis

It finds temporary and permanent redirects and flags redirect chains or loops that can hurt SEO performance.

Broken Link Checker

If your links don’t work it harms user experience, so Screaming Frog will crawl your site to locate broken internal and external links, maintaining this seamless UX and optimizing your link equity.

Integration with Google Analytics & Search Console

You can also connect Screaming Frog to Google Analytics and Search Console to make your findings richer with traffic data and search performance.

XML Sitemap Generation

It helps in generating and validating XML sitemaps, making sure that your site structure is being properly conveyed to the search engines.

Page Speed Insights

This tool integrates with Google PageSpeed Insights to provide data about your site speed as well as suggestions for improvement.

Custom Crawl Settings

You can adjust crawl settings to target certain portions of your website, such as segmenting by URL structure or confining crawls to particular subdomains.

Duplicate Content Detection

This tool detects duplicate content problems throughout your website and helps create unique pages that benefit both users and search engines.

Affordable Pricing

It is available at a cost-effective pricing model, with a free version for small websites and a premium version with a good price that makes it affordable for everyone.

Differences between Screaming Frog and Ahrefs

Both tools have advantages and disadvantages when discussing Screaming Frog vs Ahrefs.It’s better suited for more technical audits on the on-page factors. You can use it to spot problems like broken links, duplicate content, and missing meta information. 

However, it’s only limited to providing on-site analysis alone and doesn’t share the same backlink profiler or keyword research tools as Ahrefs. If your main interest is in optimizing the technical SEO of your site, then Screaming Frog may well be the better choice.

On the other hand, Ahrefs covers a wide range of features that are well beyond technical SEO. You can monitor backlinks, track keyword rankings, and analyze competitors in great detail. Ahrefs’ “Ahrefs Crawl” helps monitor the crawling of your site from search engines and find crawl issues that impact your rankings. So if you are looking for an all-in-one SEO tool where you need on-page and off-page SEO, Ahrefs might suit you the best.

Here’s a comparison table for Screaming Frog and Ahrefs:

So, Which One Is Right For Your SEO Strategy?

You may have to choose between Screaming Frog vs Ahrefs as per your SEO needs. Screaming Frog is a great starting point if you are a newbie, or just when you have to concentrate on technical problems. With its intuitive interface and powerful crawl features, it’s a widely adopted tool among SEO professionals needing a health check for their sites.

However, if you are looking for an SEO tool capable of performing competitive analysis, backlink audits and comprehensive keyword research, then the best tool would be Ahrefs. One field where Ahrefs shines is helping you to spy on your competitors and find new opportunities based on what they’re up to.

In my own case, I’ve frequently been using both tools together. I would conduct a technical audit with Screaming Frog and fix any issues, and then I would turn to Ahrefs for keyword research and backlink analysis, for example. This unique blend enabled me to provide clients with in-depth SEO audits including technical and off-page elements.

How Much Does Screaming Frog Cost? Is It Worth It?

Screaming Frog’s pricing model is simple. There’s a free version that lets you crawl up to 500 pages. There is a paid version available if you need advanced features and larger crawls. On its own, the full version is priced at £149 for 12 months, making it an affordable choice for an SEO utility with in-depth technical power.

If you are serious about technical SEO, I highly recommend investing in the Screaming Frog. Small businesses or individual websites will find that the free version includes plenty of features for conducting basic audits. 

If you’re on the fence about whether or not to invest in Screaming Frog, you can run a free crawl and check out what insights it includes. This will provide a taste of what the tool can do to help you decide if the paid version is worth the investment for your site’s SEO needs.