I just felt that despite all the information that CrawlScore presented me with, I didn’t know exactly what I was supposed to do to improve my site. Take for instance the Executive Summary page which said that 93.5% of my pages were not search engine friendly:
Now I know that this isn’t true as this site gets a lot of search engine traffic, so I think what CrawlScore mean is that my pages weren’t optimised. However, clicking through as advised to the Technical Summary didn’t tell me clearly enough what steps I could take to optimise my site:
Yes I could find all the pages that didn’t have meta keywords etc, but there were literally thousands of pages, and it would take me an eternity to edit all those pages. I don’t think that CrawlScore is a blogger friendly service, and is probably more suited to sites that don’t spawn as many unique pages. Blogging services like WordPress tend to be pretty search-engine friendly out of the box anyway, and this should be good enough for most bloggers.
If you’re not sure whether signing up for CrawlScore will benefit your site then I recommend checking out the various video tutorials that are available which will help you make up your mind:
- Introduction to CrawlScore
- How to generate sitemaps
- Difference between CrawlScore and Google Webmaster tools
- how to build a well constructed website
There’s also a good blog and some FAQs.
All in all I think CrawlScore could be a great service, if used by the right person. However, in order to appeal to bloggers it needs to provide more help information within pages e.g. what’s a 301, 302, etag etc rather than in separate FAQ pages. It probably needs to cost less, as at $99.99 it isn’t cheap, although this amount could be recupped through the additional google traffic that can be generated.
