Complete DeepCrawl Review – Great Tool For SEO

Looking for an all-in-one SEO tool?

DeepCrawl may be the tool for you.

In this post, I’ll do a deep dive into DeepCrawl’s features, its pro’s and con’s, and how to determine if it’s right for you.

Alexey Turbanov faced a challenge. As the SEO strategist responsible for migrating the foodpanda website in Singapore, he wanted to avoid the usual migration pitfalls that would cause the site to lose rank. Even though his team had carefully planned the migration, he knew he’d find problems during and after the process. Murphy’s Law operates on steroids in high-tech. But how would he identify those issues? The foodpanda.sg platform included too many pages to go through manually. That’s why he turned to DeepCrawl. According to Turbanov: “DeepCrawl immediately found our on-site errors and SEO issues at first glance. One of them was pagination. DeepCrawl’s pagination report showed an excess in crawling budget for content that was unreachable and useless for users.” He says that the tool also helped him identify problems with service pages in addition to pages that bring conversions. The end result: a smooth site migration that was “hugely beneficial” to his business. That little anecdote describes just one of the DeepCrawl’s many features. In this review, I’ll go over all of its capabilities and share some feedback from current users.

An All-In-One Solution

DeepCrawl bills itself as a comprehensive SEO solution. It’s not designed to fix just one problem or address a single need. It’s meant to help you with a variety of search-related issues. If you’re looking to migrate a site, perform automated audits, learn more about your website architecture, recover from a penalty, improve the user experience, or learn more about your competitors, DeepCrawl has you covered. The only thing it doesn’t do is windows. As someone has well said: “DeepCrawl is Screaming Frog on steroids.” I can’t think of a better description. In the next several sections, I’ll go over each of the tool’s features individually.

DeepCrawl Review: Monitoring Site Health

DeepCrawl will, as its name implies, crawl all over your website and identify SEO problems. Where it excels, though, is that it enables you to schedule crawls so you can just wait for the reports to show up in your inbox. You don’t have to initiate crawl after crawl. You can schedule crawls on an hourly, daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis. That’s useful if you’re an SEO professional. Whenever one of your clients calls and wants an instant update on his or her website, you can turn to your latest crawl report and share the data. DeepCrawl will also show you what’s changed since its last report. Use that info to look for warning signs. In addition, the tool provides you with trend graphs so you can check out site performance over time. If you find some issues you’d like to address in your site health report, DeepCrawl offers a Project Manager that enables you to assign tasks to team members. You can also use the platform to prioritize assignments, leave notes for team members, view the age of specific tasks, and complete projects. All on one screen.

According to the company website, DeepCrawl enabled Sears to reverse engineer a 15% year-over-year decline in organic traffic. However, Sears recently filed for bankruptcy so maybe that’s not the best case study to use at this time.

Migrating a Site

There are countless horror stories about website migrations that went bad. Tearful SEOs recount tales of lost revenue and large percentage drops in organic traffic. If you’re part of a team that will soon migrate a website, DeepCrawl can mitigate some of the risk. The tool includes a staging vs. live comparison feature that will show you before and after differences. Use that info to bring the two versions in sync. Then, run another crawl to uncover other issues that need resolution. Additionally, DeepCrawl will also test your sitemaps. It will tell you if any important URLs are missing so you can take corrective action. Finally, you can even crawl your site with modified URLs and test the impact of removing parameters from URLs.

DeepCrawl Review: Structuring a Website

DeepCrawl enables you to visualize your site from different angles. That will help you identify opportunities for improvement. The tool also provides a complete view of your site architecture. Use that info to optimize your sitemap and find orphaned pages that aren’t linked internally even if they’re getting traffic from search results. DeepCrawl also lives up to its name by showing you how deeply bots have to get into your site before they access certain pages. It will let you know if visitors need to click several links before they get to some of your “money” pages. If that’s the case, you’ll want to surface those pages so that visitors don’t have to click more than a few times to access them. That kind of feedback will  help you optimize your crawl budget. DeepCrawl will also show you metrics related to the performance of your site, including:

• Site speed
• Linking
• Crawl efficiency

In fact, the tool provides more than 190 metrics for each of your URLs.

DeepCrawl Review: Going International

As I’m so fond of saying: it’s a global economy. The Internet has made it easy for us to create new markets overseas. Of course, that means we need websites that are region-specific. That presents a whole new set of challenges. Let’s say you have a website in Japan. How do you know that people in Japan who visit your site are seeing the correct version? DeepCrawl can help you make sure that your international marketing is successful. For starters, the tool will find broken hreflang links. That alone will solve a lot of problems. DeepCrawl will also identify pages that are missing hreflang tags. Finally, the tool will ensure that your site is tagged for each location. That way, search engines in different countries will serve the right versions of your pages.

Recovering From a Penalty

It happens to the best of us. Sometimes, despite our noblest intentions, we get slapped with a penalty. Fortunately, there’s always a path for redemption with Google. DeepCrawl will help you find your way on that path. If you’re hit with Panda penalty, DeepCrawl will use analytics data to determine the reason that your pages have low engagement. It might be due to thin or empty content. The tool goes deeper than that, though. It uses advanced duplicate content detection algorithms to highlight not only duplicate body content, but also duplicate title tags and descriptions. DeepCrawl also offers a dashboard to showcase all the Panda-related challenges on your site. If you’re concerned about a Penguin penalty, DeepCrawl includes a backlink analysis feature. Here’s what the website says about it: “Backlink data sources such as Majestic or ahrefs all have their own sample and are not always up to date. Hence, in order to get a complete overview you need to aggregate your backlink data from every backlink source. Establish if they are live or not and see if they have a nofollow directive or not. This allows you to remove any bad backlinks.” You can even use the tool to compare your backlink profile with a competitor’s.

DeepCrawl Review: Improving UX

A poor user interface won’t just turn away human visitors. It might lower your rank as well. Fortunately, DeepCrawl helps you optimize your site so that search engine bots can navigate through it with ease. First, the tool will help you find broken pages. Then, you can fix them with 301 redirects or by removing the links. You can also use DeepCrawl to optimize how quickly humans and bots get to your most valuable content. This is the crawl depth graph feature that I covered in a previous section. Additionally, the tool will tell you what’s slowing down your site. That’s important now that page speed is a mobile ranking factor. Finally, DeepCrawl will identify all pages with thin content (3kb or less). Those kinds of pages could subject your site to a Panda penalty.

Analyzing Competitors

DeepCrawl can also help you stay ahead of the competition. For starters, the tool will evaluate a competitor’s site so you can see how that competitor is beating you in terms of internal linking. Next, DeepCrawl will show you which words or phrases that a competitor isn’t using in its optimization strategies. Use those words in your own SEO efforts to gain an edge. The tool will also perform a backlink analysis on a competitor. That might highlight some opportunities where you can earn backlinks and improve your rank in the SERPs. Perhaps best of all, though, DeepCrawl will perform a “stealth crawl.” That means your competitors won’t even know that you’re spying on them. How does the tool do that? It randomizes the IP address, user agent, and time period between requests. That’s pretty slick.

DeepCrawl Review: Who Uses DeepCrawl?

There are a variety of companies from different industries that use DeepCrawl to help with SEO. Take Made.com, for example. Back in 2016, that company noticed a decrease in traffic and revenue from organic search. So SEO Manager Sam Hurley enlisted the aid of DeepCrawl. Here’s what the tool uncovered:

• Diluted Authority – Subpar internal linking was throwing off mixed signals to Google.
• Inefficient Navigation – Filtering and navigation wasn’t optimized for common queries.
• Security Issues – The site was still using HTTP instead of HTTPS.
• International Issues – The site lacked proper hreflang configuration.

After making the necessary changes, Made.com saw noticeable improvements in search visibility, organic traffic, and revenue growth. DeepCrawl also delivered significant benefits to Hotter, the UK’s largest shoe manufacturer. Hotter’s SEO and CRO eCommerce Specialist, Niall Brooke, wanted to move the site from HTTP to HTTPS. That way, customers could trust the site when it came time to enter sensitive info. Brooke used DeepCrawl to ensure a smooth migration. DeepCrawl helped by uncovering a variety of issues before the official cutover. The tool found that some HTTP pages weren’t redirecting to HTTPS. Additionally, DeepCrawl identified mixed (non-secure and secure) content on several pages. Brooke tasked the team developer to take care of those problems before the site went live. The end result was a spectacular success:

• 39% growth in revenue
• 37% increase in transactions
• 30% uplift in sessions

DeepCrawl Review: Pricing

The Starter pricing plan for DeepCrawl will cost you $89 per month. That will enable you to crawl up to 100,000 URLs, and monitor five projects. The Basic plan costs $139 per month and doubles the number of URLs you can crawl to 200,000. There’s a corporate plan that’s listed on the site but doesn’t include prices. As is usually the case with digital marketing services, you can save money if you opt to subscribe to the service on an annual instead of a month-to-month basis. All plans include API support. That’s pretty generous.

The DeepCrawl Reviews Are In

So what are DeepCrawl users saying about the product online? Let’s look at the reviews. First, the positive:

• Can crawl a million pages
• Able to get information for SEO benchmarks that other tools don’t provide
• Can schedule automatic crawls
• Comprehensive solution so you don’t need to buy other tools

Now, the negative:

• Too slow
• Overwhelming amounts of info in reports
• Sometimes have difficulty setting up subdomains
• Too expensive
• Lack of explanation about what each crawl report is showing

Wrapping Up This DeepCrawl Review

Yes, if you can afford DeepCrawl, you should go for it. It’s a tool worth having in your arsenal if you’re serious about optimizing a website for search. As with many other tools, you can get started with a free trial. I’d recommend you do that just to make sure that DeepCrawl is right for you. Happy crawling!