What is crawler SEO?
In the context of SEO, "crawler" and "crawl" can mean several different things, depending on the context. When discussed, search engines (such as Google) and website crawler tools refer to programs that navigate the web, following links from page to page. Crawling refers to search engine bots that find and read the page you land on.
After a page is crawled, in a step called "indexing", search engines store a copy and some information about it on their servers. The ultimate goal of technical SEO is to make your pages more accessible and easier to index for search engine crawlers.
However, there are other crawlers than Google (or Bing, Baidu, Yandex...). Search engine optimization (SEO) crawlers work the same way search engine crawlers do. They follow links around a website collecting information about the pages they encounter. The difference is that these crawlers do not index pages.
Instead, they output the data they collect for marketers to use when optimizing their technical SEO.
Essentially, a website crawler is used by search marketers to look at a website through Googlebot's eyes.
What will a site crawl reveal?
So, as we mentioned above, using an SEO crawler for your website is like putting on a pair of Googlevision glasses when you look at your website. A good SEO crawler is a powerful tool for detecting all kinds of problems related to technical SEO and your site's content.
