John Lincoln

OnCrawl Review – Is It Worth The Money? Is There A Better Option?

Need an SEO tool that helps you develop a solid SEO strategy?

OnCrawl could be the tool for you. Find out in this review.

Complete OnCrawl Review - Should You Use It? Valentin Klein Di Giacomo faced a challenge. As the IT manager at EasyCash, he noticed his website’s performance had faltered after a redesign. That’s when he enlisted the aid of OnCrawl, an SEO crawler and log analyzer. OnCrawl identified several SEO blocking points. Di Giacomo used that info to:
  • Improve page speed
  • De-index 50,000 duplicate pages
  • Identify pages with thin content
  • Resolve 404 errors
  • Increase sessions by 25%
Those are the kinds of improvements that the tool might bring to your website as well.

What Is OnCrawl?

“Unleash your SEO potential.” That’s the promise of OnCrawl, a tool that analyzes and monitors your site so you can develop a solid SEO strategy. OnCrawl offers three distinct solutions:
  • SEO Crawler
  • SEO Log Analyzer
  • SEO Impact Report
In this review, I’ll cover the OnCrawl solutions in detail so you can make informed decision about whether the tool is right for you.

SEO Crawler

OnCrawl lives up to its name. It’s a crawler. That means it uses a bot to traverse the pages on your website. Along the way, it will identify and log any SEO issues it discovers. Then, OnCrawl produces a report telling you what it found. What, specifically, is the tool looking for when it bounces around from page to page on your site? It’s searching for anything that limits your organic reach. First, OnCrawl monitors indexability. It evaluates your sitemaps, canonicals, pagination, and hreflang tags. The tool also searches for bad status codes, such as 404 errors.
OnCrawl Review: SEO Crawler
OnCrawl Review: SEO Crawler. Image courtesy of OnCrawl
Next, OnCrawl checks out your content quality. If you have thin or duplicate content, the tool will let you know. OnCrawl is even smart enough to tell you if your duplicate content is caused by an integration issue. The tool also allows you to filter near duplicates by similarity ratio. Use that info to address the closest duplicates first. Additionally, OnCrawl highlights the so-called similarity threshold. That metric identifies the similarity level between two pages that might adversely affect your rankings. The crawler analyzes your website speed as well. That’s important because if your site is running slow, your rank will suffer. Even better: the tool tells you where you should focus your page speed optimization efforts to maximize your visibility in search results. OnCrawl also shows you how page load time is influencing user behavior. Even better: the tool identifies what’s considered a “good” loading time for your website. Give that number to your developers and tell them to optimize the site so that it loads that quickly (or faster). OnCrawl also checks your HTML quality by analyzing titles, descriptions, and headings throughout your site. It will even check for duplicate content within individual pages. Next, the tool analyzes your website architecture. Specifically, it lets you know if you have room to improve when it comes to internal linking. OnCrawl also identifies the reachability of each of your pages. That’s important from a usability perspective. For example, if users have to click several links just to get to a specific page, that page isn’t very reachable. You should bring it closer to the top. The tool also identifies infinite pagination problems and redirect loops. When it comes to evaluating internal links, OnCrawl uses its own metric: InRank. InRank stands for “Internal Pagerank.” It’s a score from 0 to 10 that measures the ability of a web page to pass link juice. Use that metric to get a better picture of your internal linking strategy. OnCrawl also shows you how InRank influences your rankings and crawl ratio. Additionally, the web crawler gives you the ability to apply filters to your website analysis. That’s helpful if you just want to evaluate a portion of your site and not the whole thing. In fact, the tool allows you to analyze just a single URL if that’s all you’re interested in doing. Next, OnCrawl helps you prepare your site for a mobile audience with support for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology. AMP, if you’re unfamiliar with it, loads web pages in lightning-fast time on mobile platforms. It’s a great way to improve user experience for people on a smartphone, tablet, or phablet. Also, OnCrawl lets you compare crawl reports. That’s handy if you want to demonstrate a definite improvement in your optimization efforts over time. The tool is even capable of rendering JavaScript websites. So, if you’re using Angular or a similar framework to produce your site, you can still use OnCrawl. Finally, OnCrawl allows you to export your reports to CSV, PNG, or PDF formats.

OnCrawl Review: Log Analyzer

Next, OnCrawl offers a Log Analyzer. It shows you how search bots crawl your website. Specifically, Log Analyzer identifies crawl frequency by page. Then, the tool organizes its analysis by date so you have a daily monitor that you can reference later on. Here are some of the metrics you’ll find in the Log Analyzer report:
  • Unique crawled pages
  • Bot hits
  • Crawl frequency
  • Newly crawled pages
  • Resources crawl frequency
  • Bot hits by status codes
  • Crawled resources
Additionally, OnCrawl analyzes visits from users. It shows you which pages are bringing in the most traffic.
OnCrawl Review: Log analyzer. Image courtesy of OnCrawl
OnCrawl Review: Log analyzer. Image courtesy of OnCrawl
The tool also evaluates your website from a technical perspective and produces a report of status codes returned by pages and resources. Additionally, Log Analyzer shows you how organic visits are distributed to your website. You can get that breakdown with just a single click. The tool also enables you to aggregate all the important metrics of your active pages. Also, Log Analyzer shows you how redirects and errors affect crawlability. How does the tool get all that info? As the name implies, it analyzes your website logs. Fortunately, Log Analyzer supports the most common log formats, whether they’re stored in files, as a data stream, or in a database. Here’s a list of the platforms that use log formats supported by OnCrawl:
  • Apache
  • IIS
  • Nginx
  • Amazon S3
  • Splunk

SEO Impact Report

The next solution is the SEO Impact Report. It combines the crawl and log files to identify SEO issues on your website. First, the report gives you the “big picture.” It displays on overview of your page structure and shows you the proportion of each type of page on your site. The report also shows you how your site architecture, page speed, and content quality influence search bot crawling. Additionally, the SEO Impact Report will show you orphan pages. If you’re unfamiliar with orphan pages, they’re pages that the search bots can find, but aren’t linked to from anywhere in your site. That’s a problem because those pages can’t rank and they’re consuming your crawl budget. In other words, orphan pages can hurt your optimization efforts. Fortunately, the SEO Impact Report not only identifies orphan pages, but it also shows you how many backlinks they’re receiving and how much of your crawl budget they consume. Even better: the tool will help you identify the best way to deal with orphans. That may include adding a “Disallow” rule in robots.txt or creating an internal link. The report also enables you to anticipate ranking changes by monitoring your crawl frequency. OnCrawl also allows you to produce cross-data reports. They’re useful if you’re using third-party integrations, such as:
  • Google Analytics
  • Majestic
  • AT Internet
  • Adobe Analytics
  • Google Search Console
OnCrawl Review: SEO Impact Report
OnCrawl Review: SEO Impact Report

OnCrawl Review: Pricing

OnCrawl is based in the UK, so pricing is in euros rather than dollars. The company currently offers four plans: Pro, Business, Ultimate, and Premium. Pro is the least expensive option. It costs just €39 per month. For that, you get to crawl 100,000 URLs every month. Premium is the most expensive plan. It costs €1900 per month and allows you to crawl 10 million URLs every month. You also get to perform up to 20 simultaneous crawls. The Business and Ultimate plans are offered at €199 per month and €299 per month, respectively. They offer levels of service between the Pro and Premium plans. OnCrawl only offers API access and integration support with the Business plan or higher. If you’re really strapped for cash, you can try the Starter Plan. That’s promoted as a Screaming Frog alternative that costs only €9,90 per month. The company also offers an “Infinite & Beyond” plan. But you’ll have to contact the company to learn more about that.

OnCrawl Review: Final Verdict

If you’re looking for a very comprehensive website crawler, OnCrawl should absolutely land on your shortlist. Remember, though: the company offers a free, 14-day trial. Be sure to take advantage of that so you can determine if the tool is right for you before you spend any money.

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Welcome to John Lincoln’s personal website. You can learn about John Lincoln’s books, films, book him to speak and contact him. John is directly associated with many of the businesses mentioned on this website and freely discloses this information. 

About the Author

John Lincoln is CEO of Ignite Visibility, one of the top digital marketing agencies in the nation. Ignite Visibility is a 6x  Inc. 5,000 company. Ignite Visibility offers a unique digital marketing program tied directly to ROI with a focus on using SEO, social media, paid media, CRO, email and PR to achieve results. Outside of Ignite Visibility, Lincoln is a frequent speaker and author of the books Advolution, Digital Influencer and The Forecaster Method. Lincoln is consistently named one of the top digital marketers in the industry and was the recipient of the coveted Search Engine Land “Search Marketer of The Year” award. Lincoln has taught digital marketing and Web Analytics at the University of California San Diego since 2010, has been named as one of San Diego’s most admired CEO’s and a top business leader under 40. Lincoln has also made “SEO: The Movie” and “Social Media Marketing: The Movie.” His business mission is to help others through digital marketing.

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