Candour's Journey to Streamlined SEO Audits with Sitebulb Cloud

The Client

Candour is a digital agency based in Norwich, UK. With 20-25 staff members in total, around half of those are in the SEO team, which is led in conjunction with SEO Director Mark Williams-Cook by Principal SEO Consultant, Brendan Bennett. We caught up with Brendan, who has been using Sitebulb’s desktop crawler “religiously” for the past 4-5 years since joining Candour. He explains why they’d never go back to a desktop-only solution now that they’re using Sitebulb Cloud.

The Challenge 

For years, the team had relied on a combination of Sitebulb Desktop and Screaming Frog to crawl and audit client websites. However, as Candour's client roster grew to include larger, more complex sites, the team faced increasing logistical challenges. Crawling million-plus page websites became a time-consuming and unreliable process, with crawls occasionally failing or taking too long to complete. 

Additionally, the process of sharing audit data across the team and ensuring consistency in the findings was a constant hassle, involving multiple steps to locate and share files. Brendan says: “Everyone was spending 5-30 minutes finding, labelling and locating files, and reconfiguring crawls… It might seem like a small time-saving, but what you might think of as minor inconveniences, they do add up.”

The Solution 

Brendan and the Candour team were lucky enough to take advantage of a rare Sitebulb Cloud trial offer. Once they started to use it, they realized the benefits were worth a paid subscription. 

Brendan recalls: “We had no objections to Cloud. It’s just that we hadn't necessarily encountered it yet and Desktop was kind of ‘doing the job’. But when we started using it, we were like, ‘yes, we need this in retrospect.’"

Desktop crawling does have a number of drawbacks in terms of team collaboration, consistency of data, and efficiency of auditing. Using a cloud solution “means we’re all singing from the exact same hymn sheet,” explains Brendan. “It can be a real pain having to leave a machine crawling all night long, not knowing if it’s going to finish or not. It’s been a life-saver knowing that Cloud is handling that side of things.” 

The Results 

The move to Sitebulb Cloud has delivered significant benefits for Candour, both in terms of efficiency and quality of work. The centralized nature of the platform has eliminated the logistical headaches associated with managing crawl data, allowing the team to easily access and share audit information from a single, reliable source of truth. 

This has resulted in significant time savings, with Brendan estimating that the cumulative effect of no longer needing to locate and share files has added up to a substantial productivity boost. “We can share audits without having to go through a 5-step process now.”

The training and learning features within Sitebulb have also been a valuable asset, helping to upskill both new and experienced members of the Candour team. Brendan highlights the platform's comprehensive database of Hints and issues as a particularly useful resource for onboarding and developing technical SEO skills.

“This is speaking as someone who does hiring, training and mentoring: I think Sitebulb is a brilliant platform for upskilling. If you're trying to learn technical SEO, if you want to know what a technical issue means, how to fix it, I can't think of a better way to do that than through Sitebulb’s Hints.”

Overall, the switch to Sitebulb Cloud has been super-positive for Candour. “There’s no chance we’d go back to a desktop-only solution now. Centralization is not just a logistical benefit; it’s great for training, it’s great for introducing new team members to client accounts… And any agency working with a very large site has experienced the pain of a crawl failing, or stressing over whether you paused your crawl at the right time.”

Interested in seeing what Sitebulb Cloud could do for you? Book a demo today.