I am proud to officially announce that I have been chosen to as the OnCrawl Brand Ambassador for the United States. If you’re not aware of OnCrawl, OnCrawl is an SEO crawler and log file analyzer that helps you improve your SEO performance. I use OnCrawl as a critical part of the SEO audit services, Mini SEO Audits, and Technical SEO Audits I do for clients on a regular basis.
Here’s a recent video I did with Emma from OnCrawl, introducing me as a Brand Ambassador for the United States:
Honestly, I only endorse and help promote quality tools and services that I truly believe in and use as a part of my business. OnCrawl is one of those tools.
I was introduced a while back to OnCrawl, and was excited to try the tool out. I have been doing SEO since the 1990s, when we didn’t have web analytics tools such as Google Analytics. We used website log file analysis instead. We didn’t add JavaScript code to our websites.
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Website Log File Analysis Tool
Frankly speaking, if you’re relying on a JavaScript-based web analytics tool to show you the visits to your website, you’re NOT getting the full data, the real picture. There are many files, such as PDF files, that you cannot install Google Analytics on–so you won’t know the number of visits to those pages. And, Google Analytics doesn’t record bot visits (well, they do in many cases that’s really annoying but that’s another story altogether).
To see the real picture, you need to include log file analysis as well as Google Analytics. Log files also include web crawler (e.g., Googlebot, BingBot) visits, as well, and OnCrawl shows you that information, as well. Combine log file data, Google Analytics data, and web crawling by OnCrawl and you’ve got a lot of data that you can dig through when performing an SEO Audit.
OnCrawl Case Study: SEO Audit
I wrote an extensive case study about how I used OnCrawl during one my SEO Audits. The SEO audit was of NBRII.com, an employee and customer survey company. They have a lot of PDF files (case studies) of their own on their website, so it was imperative that I use a tool like OnCrawl to analyze the traffic and bot visits to those PDF files, as well as the traffic (organic real human traffic) to those files as well. Certainly other data I pulled from OnCrawl play a huge role in the completion of the SEO audit for NBRI. But there was no way to look at Google Analytics data in regards to the PDF files, so OnCrawl filled that need very well.
OnCrawl Brand Ambassador for the United States
With so many SEO tools out there (I have over 100 SEO tools in my list of SEO Audit Tools), it’s tough for anyone to figure out which tools are the best ones to use. There are website crawlers, analytics tools, social media tools, SEO Audit tools, server header checker tools, web page speed analysis tools, duplicate content checkers, and tools that you probably didn’t even know existed. In my personal toolset, there are a few select tools that I use first whenever I begin an SEO audit of website. OnCrawl is one of those tools, as it gives me a great picture of what’s going on with the website I’m auditing. In my process, I start with OnCrawl to get the data I need, then if I spot issues, I may use another very specific tool to help verify and diagnose the problem. But honestly, I just cannot do as good a job as I do with SEO audits without OnCrawl in my toolset.
Soon, I’ll be writing a lot more about OnCrawl and how I use it during my SEO audits. Certainly, if you have any questions or comments about OnCrawl and whether or not it’s the tool for you, feel free to get in touch with me via email, on Facebook, or on Twitter.
In the meantime, if you would like to try out OnCrawl, visit OnCrawl.com.
