Oncrawl is pleased to announce improvements to our crawl over crawl feature, which allows you to compare two different crawls and focus on changes between two crawls.
Why should you compare two crawls?
Comparing two crawls gives you a clear and measurable view of your website at two points in time.
This is invaluable for monitoring purposes: it’s easy to see what has changed, and by how much. Particularly on large websites, where the SEO team is not in charge of implementing development changes on the site, and does not publish new products or content, monitoring how new elements on the website affect its technical SEO is an important task for the SEO team.
It’s also important to compare two crawls when looking at a before and after version. Crawl over crawl comparisons can help answer questions such as: Did the site migration improve SEO on my site? Or even: Did my SEO projects improve organic traffic on my website?
With Oncrawl’s crawl over crawl analysis, comparing the snapshots of your site’s technical SEO at two different moments in time is easy!
What’s new in crawl comparisons?
Oncrawl’s crawl comparison feature has always included dashboards for:
- Structure
- Internal linking
- Content
- Status Codes
- Performance
These dashboards cover information such as number of links, page depth, word count, 404 and 500-level errors, page speed, and much more.
Compare titles, meta descriptions and headings
Crawl over Crawl analyses now include additional information on changes to titles, meta descriptions, and headings (Hn tags) of your pages.
Compare Core Web Vitals
We know that tracking Core Web Vitals, as one of the confirmed ranking factors for Google, is a priority for many SEO strategies. That’s why you can now find them included in the Crawl over Crawl analysis.
We’ve added an entirely new dashboard dedicated to changes in your Core Web Vitals scores across your site.
Compare custom fields
In Oncrawl, you can use scraping to obtain additional information from the web pages you crawl, such as authors, publication dates, in stock/out of stock status, pricing, or even the number of comments or reviews.
This custom data is now available in the Data Explorer as part of a crawl over crawl.
Can you use segmentations with crawl comparisons?
We’re also excited to share that segmentations are now supported in crawl over crawl comparisons!
Applying different segmentations
When viewing a crawl over crawl analysis, you can view the breakdown of a crawl over crawl metric across the different types of page in a segmentation. In the internal linking dashboard, for example, you can see how the average values for each page group in the segmentation have changed for the inrank, the page depth, the number of internal incoming links, and the number of internal outgoing links.
Focusing on a single page group
Within a given segmentation, you can now filter all of the graphs on a crawl over crawl dashboard to view the changes in a single page group within your segmentation.
This helps isolate changes that are concentrated in a single part of your website. Perhaps you’re only interested in a specific page template, or you only want to look at the 20% of your top performing pages, or you want to concentrate on pages in the “/news/” directory. Now you can.
Creating segmented reports in the Data Explorer
Segmentation for crawl over crawl data is also available in the Data Explorer when building a custom report.
How to access the new Crawl over Crawl features
The improvements to the crawl over crawl feature are available to all Oncrawl users.
These changes are available in new Crawl over Crawl analyses.
To access a Crawl over Crawl analysis, you’ll need to enable the “Crawl over Crawl” option in the crawl settings if you’re running a new crawl, or launch a separate crawl over crawl analysis. When the analysis is completed, you can find the dashboards under “Crawl over Crawl” in the left-hand navigation of any analysis screen.
You can find detailed instructions in our help.
