How Sitebulb helped Charlie Whitworth grow his SEO consultancy

The Client

Charlie Whitworth is an experienced technical SEO, content marketer and digital marketing consultant with 14 years of experience in the industry. He worked at agencies such as Rippleffect, Banc Digital and TrunkBBI before heading up the SEO department at fast fashion brand, Missguided, and then setting up his own consultancy in 2021.

As well as being a renowned SEO consultant and seasoned industry speaker, Charlie is also a long-time customer of Sitebulb. We asked him to share how Sitebulb has made a difference to his work.

The Challenge

Around the time that Sitebulb launched, a colleague of mine asked if I’d heard of it. I was working in a big agency at that time and we were using Screaming Frog and also DeepCrawl (now Lumar) for enterprise clients that had sufficient budget to cover the cost. 

It was around the time that websites were starting to use more and more JavaScript. Google had said they were getting better at rendering it, but our testing indicated that this wasn’t really the case. We didn’t have a decent solution for auditing the response HTML vs the rendered, and we really wanted one.

The Solution

When my colleague suggested I try Sitebulb, I instantly loved it. There are a few features I want to highlight here as being particularly helpful for me.

JavaScript crawling

When I first started using Sitebulb at the agency, we quickly found out how powerful it was in new business audits because of its JavaScript auditing capabilities. 

I still recommend to SEOs today that they delve into what Sitebulb’s JavaScript crawler shows in the Response vs Render report. I’ve seen some big issues with crucial tags, such as title and canonical, on household-name enterprise-level domains, whereby these are only present in the rendered HTML.

Sitebulb allows me to diagnose JavaScript SEO issues quickly and efficiently without needing to spend ages in source code, the DOM, and Google Search Console to ascertain exactly what’s going on. It also gives me the offending URLs for easy sharing with the relevant team for resolution.

User interface 

In an agency, but also most crucially as a solo consultant, efficiency is essential. In comparison to other crawlers, Sitebulb’s user interface presents data in a way that’s super easy to consume. Clients are paying consultants to work efficiently, so why wouldn’t you use tools that are going to enable you to save time? Sitebulb makes it effortless to investigate and diagnose technical issues. 

“If I want to get topline insight for a domain quickly, Sitebulb is the best crawler for me.” 

Cloud crawler

As my consultancy grew, thanks to the efficiencies Sitebulb brought to my operations, I landed bigger clients and needed to crawl much bigger sites. So when Sitebulb Cloud came along, the higher monthly cost wasn’t really a barrier for me. Yes, it was a consideration, but the benefits of using Cloud were definitely worth it for me; the ability to shut your computer off and go to bed, or use your computer to work on something else at the same time, and knowing that it’s all going on in the Cloud. Running concurrent crawls too, without slowing down your computer; these are all game-changing for my business. 

Single page analysis

The Single Page Analysis tool is one that I find myself using more and more, especially if I am doing a new business audit or some competitor analysis, because I can quickly see a whole host of SEO issues and insights without having to run a full crawl.

There are too many features I love about Sitebulb to mention here! If you want to know my top 10, I suggest you read this article I wrote: Awesome Sitebulb Tricks: 10 Advanced Techniques To Enhance Your Audits

The Results

The impact Sitebulb has had on my own consultancy is huge. It allows me to be super efficient, and in the early days, when I was starting the business, this was critical because it allowed me to focus on new business and growth. 

For solo consultants, Sitebulb is a no-brainer. If you’re an agency, you’ve got more team members, you can delegate a bit more and spread the workload. But if you’re starting your own company, that efficiency factor is crucial so that you can concentrate on those other aspects of making your business successful.

To be honest, I was doing perfectly ok with Sitebulb’s desktop crawler; but things changed as I grew. 

“The pricing for Sitebulb Cloud is more than fair; if it works for you commercially, for the extra 100 quid or so a month, it’s a no-brainer.” 

Sitebulb Cloud frees up your machine and gives you peace of mind that it’s all going on in the background, plus it’s a much more affordable price point than other cloud crawlers.