When running technical SEO audits for your website, there are many different SEO tools out there, whether you’re looking to invest in DeepCrawl, Botify, or Screaming Frog.
However, we discovered a new desktop-based crawler called Sitebulb that deserves a mention among these industry standards.
Read our latest review on Sitebulb, where we’ll cover all the different options the tool offers and if it’s worth investing in.
Instead of a browser-based crawler like DeepCrawl, Sitebulb is a desktop website crawler, meaning it is a standalone application that you run on your computer.
Sitebulb can crawl your website and offer actionable insights on what needs to be changed to help you enhance organic ranking positions and traffic.
While a number of crawling tools are available, thanks to its elegant dashboard and highly actionable insights, Sitebulb stands out.
Sitebulb aims to illustrate how your website is "crawler-friendly" and tells you just how search engines view your website.
Making sure the search engines crawl and index content is vital for best practices pertaining to search engine optimization.
The Crawl Report from Sitebulb helps you to develop an overview of how easily you can crawl the site and what sorts of data crawlers are seeking.
For instance, any broken redirects or internal and external connections will be flagged by Sitebulb.
The 'crawl depth' as well as status codes and server answer codes are also shown by Sitebulb, so you get a detailed view of your site layout and an in-depth glance at your crawl effectiveness.
Here are several features that Sitebulb offers that most other tools don’t include in their subscription services:
Sitebulb does offer a free 14-day trial, which you can find here.
After your initial trial period is up, Sitebulb requires you to pay for its service.
The Lite package costs 10 Euros + VAT /month and includes:
The Pro package costs 25 Euros + VAT /month and includes:
You can find a full spread of different package features on their website.
Here’s a quick rundown of the different features Sitebulb offers in its tool:
When starting a new project, you’ll have the option to name it and include the website URL you want to crawl.
You’ll have several different options when running your audit, or just run with the default settings and start the crawl.
When setting up your audit, you can add more data and check for:
Sitebulb will provide a live capture of the URLs as they’re being crawled, how long the audit will take to fully conduct, and the types of URLs that are being crawled.
The crawl rate is rather speedy, averaging 7 URLs per second depending on the settings you chose when setting up the initial audit.
You can leave Sitebulb running in the background and it’ll notify you as it finishes its crawl.
Once the audit is completed, Sitebulb will provide several different scores and hints, including:
With the data visualization, Sitebulb will show you different Content Types (CSS, HTML, Image, Javascript); crawl depth of the URLs that Sitebulb discovered; and different status codes (2xx, 3xx, 4xx, 5xx, forbidden, or disallowed URLs).
Under the URLs Tab, Sitebulb will break down the SEO basics for each page, showing the following information:
Sitebulb will also provide several “hints” or optimization opportunities to help improve your website, which is very helpful and easily digestible.
Hints could include updating meta descriptions/meta titles because they’re missing or duplicated, or more technical work to either improve your website’s security/page speed.
The tool will also outline which issues should be tackled based on priority, whether they’re critical, high, medium, or low.
Beyond initial recommendations, Sitebulb offers other functionality, whether you’re looking to view a crawl tree for organizational structure; create a XML sitemap for your website; test your structured data for errors; view anchor text of internal links/where they’re linked from in your site;
Sitebulb is available on both Windows and Mac. Here are the system requirements for each:
Windows System Requirements
Machines must have at least 4GB of usable RAM and run a 64-bit version of Windows 7/8/10.
Mac System Requirements
Machines must have at least 4GB of usable RAM and run a 64-bit version of MacOS Sierra or newer.
Sitebulb is a robust crawling tool that any SEO should check out. While it offers a lot of similar functionality as Deepcrawl, Screaming Frog, or Botify, Sitebulb excels in presenting data in a meaningful way that allows for webmasters to act upon in their efforts to make their websites more SEO friendly.
It’s also relatively cheap, only costing 120 Euros per year when opting into the Lite package, giving other crawling tools a run for their money in regards to its price-to-functionality ratio.
Our rating: 5/5
