Sitebulb – A Crawling Tool Worth Adding To Your SEO Arsenal
Sitebulb is still in its relative infancy compared to other more established web crawlers such as Deepcrawl and Screaming Frog, however, don’t let this fool you into believing that it doesn’t stand up to its competitors.
Sitebulb costs a very affordable £25 a month, and for only £2.50 a month more, you can purchase additional licences to keep your entire team happy. It also comes with a free two-week trial so you can test it out to your heart’s content for a decent amount of time.
At the time that I first tried Sitebulb, I had only been in the SEO industry a few years and I had fairly limited technical SEO knowledge; concentrating more on link-building and on-site optimisation back then.
What Sitebulb does to help people who may be relatively new to Tech SEO, in particular, is not only identify issues but also provide an explanation into why a particular issue is detrimental to a website’s SEO efforts alongside a link to a supplementary guide on how to fix it the issue in question.
This was extremely helpful for me at the time as I was not only diagnosing technical issues for a client but in the process I was also gaining an understanding of why something was an issue.
Here is an example of an issue, a few sentences describing the issue, and a link to a guide that tells me even more about the issue and how I can fix it:
Screaming frog is fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but for an SEO, especially with limited technical experience, it can be a bit tricky in terms of lacking an intuitive user-friendly experience. This is where Sitebulb shines.
Sitebulb Features that I love:
Content Analysis
In terms of content analysis, Sitebulb gives you an overview of the current state of all your pages, including really useful features such as word counts and duplicate content indicators.
Google specifically states that thin content with little or no added value can potentially result in manual action penalty, so to be able to identify pages with thin and duplicate content is great.
Other crawlers will provide you with a word count based on the whole page; including templated elements such as footers. Sitebulb conveniently only looks at the main content to give you a true representation of the word count.
Google Analytics + Search Console Integration
Sitebulb offers you the option to link up your associated Google analytics and Search Console account which provides you with even more data to analyse. The main benefit here is that you can make more informed decisions because you will now be able to see if a URL is generating organic sessions or impressions for instance.
Link Equity Scores
Internal links are an important ranking factor; highlighting to Google what you consider to be your most important pages. Unlike external backlinks, you have full control over your internal links, which makes optimising your internal links one of the more actionable SEO tasks.
How Sitebulb helps here is that it scores each of your URLs with a link equity score; this score is generated by counting the number of internal links pointing to a URL compared to the rest of your websites URLs.
So it’s great for making sure that what you consider to be your most important pages (more often than not, commercial pages that generate leads) have a good amount of internal links pointing to them.
Features that are missing compared to other crawlers:
Custom Extraction
One feature that Sitebulb is missing, that competitors such as Screaming Frog have, is a custom extraction feature. Custom extraction allows you to scrape additional data points, so as well as the likes of H1’s and meta titles, you can also analyse data points such as published dates on articles and product stock levels.
It can especially be difficult to manually track the likes of stock levels on large e-commerce websites, that’s where custom extraction is at its most useful.
However, Sitebulb have said that they are planning to add a custom extraction feature in a future release, so watch this space!
To wrap things up, I definitely recommend Sitebulb to budding SEOs in particular. The intuitive nature of the software makes for a great user experience where you can analyse and fix important issues for a client’s website while also gaining an understanding of the reasons behind what you are proposing.
For any more information on how we use Sitebulb at Minty Digital, amongst a range of other fantastic SEO tools, to improve the organic search visibility for our clients, get in touch with our SEO team.
