Search engine optimisation (SEO) is crucial for driving organic traffic to your website. With so much competition online, having an effective SEO strategy can make or break your site’s success. One of the key tools for analysing and improving your SEO is Deep Crawl.
Deep Crawl is an SEO crawler and website auditor developed by UK-based firm DeepCrawl Ltd. (Now Lumar) It provides comprehensive insights into your site’s technical SEO issues, on-page optimisation, content, and more.
Deep Crawl crawls your entire website to identify problems and opportunities related to:
Indexability – Check if search engines can access and index your pages. Identifies issues like broken links, duplicate content, etc.
On-page SEO – Analyses page titles, meta descriptions, headings, image alt text and other on-page elements. Gives optimisation recommendations.
Content – Checks for thin content, keyword usage, readability and areas to add more useful content.
Speed – Identifies performance bottlenecks affecting site speed and user experience.
Links – Finds broken internal and external links, and recommends link-building opportunities.
Accessibility – Check compliance with web accessibility standards to improve search ranking and usability.
Mobile-friendliness – Identifies mobile usability issues like small text, broken navigation, etc.
Deep Crawl uses an advanced crawler to spider your entire site like Google does. It audits technical elements as well as analyses your content in-depth using natural language processing and machine learning.
Key steps in Deep Crawl’s analysis process:
1. Site Crawl – Deep Crawl spiders all web pages on your site, even dynamically generated content. Crawls are customisable by URL, file type, crawl rate and more.
2. Technical Audit – Checks vital technical SEO elements like site speed, mobile friendliness, SSL setup, indexability issues and more.
3. Content Analysis – Assesses page content including word count, keyword usage, headings, media, structured data and readability. Compares against top-ranking competitors.
4. Link Analysis – Extracts all internal and external links across the site. Identifies broken links, new link building opportunities and toxic backlinks.
5. Issue Identification – Flags all errors, warnings and notices related to crawlability, on-page factors, links, content, speed and other aspects.
6. Recommendations – The audit report provides actionable recommendations and instructions to fix identified SEO issues.
7. Comparison to Competitors – Deep Crawl allows you to compare your site’s performance against the top 3 competitors for key elements like page speed, content, links and technical factors.
8. Historical Comparisons – You can compare consecutive crawls over time to track SEO improvements and regressions.
9. Customisable Reports – Audit results can be filtered and organised using flexible reports tailored to various departments and needs.
10. API Integrations – Deep Crawl provides API access to integrate with SEO tools like analytics, rank tracking, GSC, etc.
Here are some of the key advantages of using Deep Crawl for optimising your website:
Overall, Deep Crawl provides comprehensive technical and content auditing to form an objective snapshot of your current website health and SEO opportunities.
It’s an invaluable tool for both in-house SEO teams and digital agencies managing large-scale client websites.
Here are some tips to get started with Deep Crawl for analysing and improving your website’s SEO:
Crawl your site – Do an initial comprehensive crawl of your entire website to get a broad overview report.
Review key issues – Check the audit for critical issues related to indexability, page speed, broken links etc. and fix them.
Analyse page-level SEO – Assess optimisation opportunities in titles, metadata, content, and media for key landing pages.
Compare against competitors – See how you rank against top competitor sites side-by-side for links, content, speed, etc.
Set up link analysis – Configure internal links settings and add competitors for external link analysis.
Customise for stakeholders – Create filtered reports containing just the most relevant data for your dev team, content team, agencies etc.
Schedule recurring crawls – Set up monthly, quarterly or annual crawls to keep monitoring site health over time.
Leverage drill-down reports – Take advantage of Deep Crawl’s comprehensive filtering to get actionable, specific reports.
Integrate with your tech stack – Use Deep Crawl’s robust API capabilities and integrations with GSC, analytics, etc.
Follow through on recommendations – Actually, implement the fixes and optimisation tips highlighted in the audit reports.
By leveraging Deep Crawl’s comprehensive data and diagnostic capabilities, you can gain an invaluable understanding of your website’s current SEO health while identifying concrete steps to reach the next level. Consistent use over time provides the insights you need to unlock greater organic visibility and traffic.