If there is something very common in the SEO world is that we love tools, software, spreadsheets, crawler programs, SAAS, plugins, etc.
Let’s face it, we’re a little “freaked out” about these technological things.
In addition, a good tool allows you to be more productive with your time, something essential in today’s times in order to make projects more profitable.
I admit that I cannot be entirely objective about the tool we will be analyzing today, because I know one of its founders virtually: David Kaufmann.
Leader and founder of an SEO agency that I know and admire very much: SEO Alive. I liked their clear, transparent proposal, that they worked by example, and also gave us excellent articles in their blog.
I was lucky enough to interview David over a year ago on my neglected podcast. And their projects and methodologies, I loved them.
I already knew back then that one of their goals was to create an SEO software they called: SEO Crawl.
When David told me about it, I figured it would be a great tool for a simple logical reason: his team is made up of SEOs.
They have years of experience working with clients, so they know perfectly well the needs of working with projects for companies and professionals.
It took me a while to try their tool, and they launched a super cool contest, to which I want to do my bit by participating, giving my personal and professional vision of this interesting software.
Let’s get down to business!
Spoiler. My idea is not just to do a software review. I will use the feedback icon if I consider things to improve, which I hope will help the development team for future versions.
Value proposition
Let’s be honest, we use Google Search Console, but I don’t know of any SEO consultants or consultants that use the default SC charts because they are raw data, not designed to be very “usable” in reports.
For this reason, we usually export our reports to solutions such as Data Studio that allow us to perform analysis and draw more interesting conclusions.
On that need, I believe SEO Crawl has based its value proposition:
A way of working with search console (SC) data in a more efficient way and unifying functions such as project management and organization with work teams, something that is very useful as you will see below. 😉
Let’s take a step-by-step look at the entire tool:
Panel and user account
Once you open your free account and sign up, you can analyze the tool’s desktop.
It is clean, minimalist and shows you the main data of the website you put in your data.
Something useful to have the main KPIs in a dashboard: Clicks, impressions, CTR and average position.
Like any software it allows you to edit your image and profile:
And it has security options such as double verification (2-FA) and customize the frequency of email reports.
Weekly, monthly, and the notifications you receive from the tool when you work in a team:
Differential factor
After analyzing the tool for a while, I believe it has 4 features that make it very valuable and I will go into each point in more detail before analyzing the reports:
- SC historical data storage
- A curious SEO forecasting function anticipating the month’s performance
- Your own visibility index
- The color maps of the reports
(1) Historical data: We have to remember that SC has a time limit. It only stores historical information for up to 16 months.
With SEO Crawl we overcome this limitation without any problem and without worrying about downloads.
For that alone, the tool is worth a lot.
(2) The subject of the forecast caught my attention.
I find it very useful to anticipate the SEO performance that a website will have in clicks or impressions with a very visual “dotted column” that appears to you, independent of the day of the month that you review the reports:
The truth is that I don’t know how accurate it will be and it is not data that I would use in my monthly reports with clients, but it gives me some “peace of mind” to see the report and anticipate the behavior of the month.
So this functionality is very good.
(3) The proprietary visibility index allows you to analyze impressions and searches in an easy-to-understand visual dashboard with timestamps of search engine updates.
Visual aspects when transmitting data are essential to be able to draw conclusions.
Moreover, if you want to review trends, “try” to infer correlations between different SEO actions and increases or decreases in visibility indexes.
This is why it is one of the most used captures in reports, talks, etc. Conveys clear, brief, and concise information at a glance.
The data can also be conveniently exported to PNG, JPEG, PDF and even a vector image (SVG):
(4) Finally, the color maps, was one of the things I liked most about the tool.
I love them because these simple color keys allow us to visualize the data much better.
For example, in the following screenshot we can see the main searches of a website with the heat map active in the impressions:
Whoever hasn’t used a color map in SEO spreadsheets, cast the first stone!
SEO Reports
Reports menu
First suggestion of the day: The side menu from my point of view is confusing. I have a hard time understanding how they group reports together and not having a breadcrumb trail, I tend to get lost, locating which report I am on at any given time.
There are 3 icons that seem to me to be report oriented and 4 workflow oriented:
- The control panel with 3 options: General, visibility and keyword map that I will explain in the next sections.
- The target icon where we will find: Keywords, changes, countries, pages and folders. In this group is another of my favorite reports, the page metrics report.
- The trend icon with reports on new and lost KW, devices, opportunities and questions.
- Team members
- Tasks, backlogs and files (workflow)
- SEO Insights: I really liked this one, it reminds me of the Google Analytics dashboards where (in the future) you will be able to create KPIs tabs with data on improvements or decreases in metrics. Currently it only shows you downgrades and upgrades of KW and pages in the top 3 search engine positions.
- Sitemaps (in beta). I understand that so you can add from the panel, the sitemap without having to go to SC.
Let’s review the main reports.
The main panel of the project brings you the key Search Console metrics divided into:
- Clics
- Prints
- Top changes
- Outstanding results (top performers)
Both clicks and impressions have their time comparison metrics:
- MoM = The comparison of the same days of the month with the previous period.
- YoY = Yearly comparison
The temporal comparison is key.
I use it a lot with my reports, especially analyzing historical trends of one year compared to the previous year.
The top changes and top results report allows you to visualize the words and URLs that have gained the most clicks, impressions, CTR and average position in a period of time (7 days).
As we can see in the screenshot, it can be analyzed quickly and effectively.
Visibility report
As I mentioned in the summary, it is one of my favorites for analyzing historical trends. If we can also “correlate” it with different Google updates, a great tip.
As you can see in the GIF, navigating with the cursor over the data shows you the number of impressions / searches but if you put the cursor over the Google annotations icon, it only shows you the annotations:
I would improve that detail: when you hover the cursor it shows you the typical help text. It would be very useful to understand what the update is about without leaving the chart.
Keyword map
The keyword ranks or keyword map is a great tip. The fact that you can tag keywords is an incredible advantage, especially when it comes to analysis and comparison.
I usually differentiate in the projects between the KW of categories of an online store, to the informative ones of a blog, to the ones of services, etc.
Segmentation allows us to produce more interesting analyses.
If we also have a heat map, the visualization of the data is simple and fast:
You can create filters by:
- Country
- Tags
- Devices
Page metrics
As I said in the introduction, one of my favorites. We tend to focus a lot on keywords.
However, being able to analyze the behavior of a specific URL, the increase or decrease of its clicks, impressions, CTR, and see its trends in heat maps, is a considerable time saver when analyzing data.
By far, this would be one of the reports that I would personally review the most and one of the ones that make me the happiest 😉
You can efficiently visualize growth or decline percentages and, like the other reports, filter by tags, countries, devices.
However, to export this data you must have the elite subscription. But it has a small bug that does not allow to close the warning without pressing Upgrade. Is it a mistake or on purpose? 😉
SEO workflows
As I said at the beginning, the success I see for this tool is based on two keys: (1) data visualization and retention and (2) being able to unify team workflows.
“Every man for himself” goes the saying, but I don’t know of any consulting firm or consultant, or agency, that can get by without organizing workflows.
To do this, we use external tools that will depend on the tastes and needs of each one: Notion, Todoist, Trello, Asana, Evernote, Calendar, a spreadsheet, etc. There are thousands of options.
I personally tend to be a minimalist, less tools. SEO Crawl’s proposal is to centralize even these workflows in a tool that is transparent to the end customer.
While it is true that I usually document everything for my clients, they do not usually have access to work files such as Notion, where I organize the tasks of each project.
This software, created by SEOs for SEOs, demonstrates this care with this functionality.
A powerful canva-like list where we can work as a team and assign the status to each of them: Things to do, in progress and things done.
If you have worked with any task management tool it will sound very familiar to you:
Status of the task, responsible, impact, complexity. Possibility to add dates, descriptions, files, followers.
I often collaborate with other SEO professionals and we use Notion to track things very similarly.
But here we would have everything centralized and working with Search Console data, which is the SEO tool par excellence.
Conclusions
I have tried to analyze (almost) all aspects of the tool and do a rigorous review.
I’m sure I’m missing some aspects, but it is undoubtedly one of the most complete tools currently available to streamline our SEO workflows and improve SC analysis and indicators.
It is not an SEO software that extracts data from other sources, and I imagine that in the future being able to incorporate other metrics, for example from Google Analytics would be a future possibility for growth.
I think they are on the right track. They have a clean, complete version that could improve your workflows, especially if you work in teams and/or collaborations with other people.
I admire David, his work, his agency and I wish them the best of luck in the promotion of this software, which is born on the right foot and based on their own needs as a team dedicated to SEO projects.
So I imagine that each of the features developed so far, has been the product of a good reflection and a lot of love ❤️
I hope my constructive criticism will help them to improve future versions of it and I say goodbye wishing them a long life and prosperity! and of course with my “chachi piruli” gif:
