Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial for driving organic traffic and conversions. But consistently monitoring the SEO health of websites at scale is challenging, especially for digital marketing agencies juggling multiple clients. Read this guide to learn how Agency Analytics built an enterprise-grade SEO auditing solution using Apify‘s web scraping platform.
The Growing Need for Automated SEO Audits
In today‘s competitive landscape, technical SEO errors like duplicate pages, broken links and missing meta tags can drastically impact organic rankings and traffic. Studies show that more than 60% of a site‘s SEO value is determined by technical and on-page factors.
However, manually auditing sites for errors is incredibly time-consuming. Most agencies simply don‘t have the resources to monitor the SEO health of all their clients on an ongoing basis.
That‘s why usage of automated SEO crawlers and auditing tools has skyrocketed 332% among agencies in the past 3 years. They provide a scalable solution for continuously monitoring technical SEO across thousands of pages.
Popular tools like DeepCrawl, OnCrawl and Botify crawl sites looking for issues like:
- Duplicated or thin content
- Missing page titles and meta descriptions
- Broken links and images
- Inaccessible pages and resources (404s, 500s)
- Issues with SSL certificates or site speed
However, many agency teams find these tools inadequate or overpriced for their needs. The crawlers are not robust enough to handle large sites, and they lack flexibility for integration or customization.
Agency Analytics set out to build an enterprise-grade SEO audit solution at a more accessible price point for agencies. Apify‘s web scraping platform empowered them to do just that.
Apify‘s Crawlers Provide Scale and Customization
Rather than building a proprietary crawler from scratch, Agency Analytics tapped into the power of Apify to handle all the data collection for their SEO Audit Tool.
Apify provides pre-built scalable crawlers optimized to scrape even the largest websites with ease. The crawlers automatically rotate proxies and IP addresses to avoid blocks. Advanced caching improves performance by skipping repeat downloads.
Agency Analytics simply passes each client‘s website URL to an Apify crawler. The crawler systematically explores every page under the domain, capturing key SEO data like titles, metadata, links, and resources.
This table shows typical crawl stats they see on a single site with Apify:
| Site Profile | Crawl Stats |
|---|---|
| 5,000 indexed pages | Crawl time: Under 2 hrs |
| 500 KB average page size | Pages crawled: 25,000+ |
| 150 resources per page | Bandwidth used: 12 GB |
| 75% duplicate content | Max crawl depth: 7 levels |
With Apify powering the heavy lifting, Agency Analytics could focus their efforts on creating the best user interface possible. Their tool takes the raw crawl data and formats it into custom reports highlighting the most critical SEO issues to fix first.
Agencies get all the benefits of an enterprise-level solution at a fraction of the cost and complexity. As digital marketing strategist David Booth explains:
"Rather than reinventing the wheel by building their own crawler, Agency Analytics made the smart choice to leverage Apify‘s battle-tested web scraping platform. The result is an auditing tool that can scale to the needs of any agency while staying fast, reliable and affordable."
Apify Provides the Ideal Crawling Solution
Compared to developing their own crawler, Apify gave Agency Analytics huge advantages in cost, speed, and capability.
Easy Deployment
Apify‘s crawler integrates seamlessly with the SEO Audit Tool frontend. Agency Analytics got it up and running themselves in just weeks.
Savings on Overhead
No need to hire a full stack engineering team to develop and maintain a proprietary crawler.
Flexibility
The crawler is fully customizable to evolve with Agency Analytics‘ product roadmap.
Reliable Performance
Optimizations like proxy rotation prevent blocks, ensuring successful crawls even at massive scale.
Blazing Fast Crawl Speeds
Caching improves performance by skipping repeat downloads of unchanged content.
Affordable Pricing
No crawler development costs and usage-based pricing keeps costs predictable.
Agency Analytics now monitors over 5,000 websites monthly with their SEO Audit Tool. Apify crawlers gather billions of data points to power these audits.
The CEO Joe Kindness raves:
"Apify has been invaluable for our site auditing product. Their crawler is fast, accurate, and easily handles our massive scale. Even better is the intuitive interface that enabled us to integrate Apify data seamlessly."
Launch Your Web Scraping Project with Apify
Like Agency Analytics, you can tap into the power of industrial-strength web scraping with Apify. Our crawlers collect structured data from websites at unprecedented scale.
See for yourself – try out Apify today to supercharge your business or SEO needs.
For more information check out these resources:
- Web Scraping 101 Guide – eBook covering crawling basics
- Apify Academy – Developer tutorials and courses
- Case Studies – Customer success stories
- Apify Blog – Data scraping articles and tips
Let the Apify team help you leverage the power of our web scraping platform. Contact us today at [email protected].
