What Is Screaming Frog? And Why Should Be Using It For SEO

In this article, you will learn about Screaming Frog and why you should use it for SEO.

Screaming Frog is a valuable tool for search engine optimisation, because it can help you analyse a site’s structure and find technical issues that could be holding it back in search engine rankings.

What Is Screaming Frog?

Screaming Frog is a desktop program that you can use to crawl websites and collect data about them.

Here are a few more things that you should know about Screaming Frog:

1. It’s available for both Windows and Mac.

2. It has a free version that allows you to crawl up to 500 URLs, and a paid version that gives you unlimited crawling.

3. It’s not just for SEO purposes – it can also be used for things like website audits and competitor analysis.

Why You Should Use Screaming Frog

It is a quick and advanced SEO Audit tool. Successful businesses such as Amazon, Disney, Google, and Apple, all use Screaming Frog.

Without a tool, you will manually check every page on your website, where there is a high chance you might miss a redirect, duplicate content, meta refresh, and so on.

Screaming Frog can crawl small and large websites for you.

The SEO Spider lets you to export essential on-page SEO elements (URL, page title, meta description, headings and more) to a spread sheet, so it can easily be used as a foundation for SEO recommendations.

Amazing Benefits of Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog Can Find Broken Links

Since 2016, links are one of the top ranking factors in Google ranking.

Broken links can affect your SEO by affecting time on page, bounce rates, passing link equity, and by suggesting that your website is old and outdated.

Screaming Frog Can Find Duplicate Content

These are content within or across domains that match other contents in the same language, or are similar. It can lead to poor user experience.

Other things Screaming Frog can do are:

Identify Missing Title Tags

Title tags are important to help users know what content they will find on the page.

Missing title tags can affect search engine rankings and click through rate from search engine result pages.

Generate XML Sitemaps

Having a sitemap is important because it helps search engine find pages in your website, crawl them, and understand your website structure.

Audit Redirects

Redirects should be used when you make changes to any of your URLs, so that you can pass indexing and link signals from the old URLs to the new URLs.

Schedule Audits

An audit helps you determine the main issues that are affecting your organic search performance. Paid version only.

Crawl JavaScript Websites

JavaScript crawling takes longer because all of its resources needs to be collected to render each web pages.

Screaming Frog can render these web pages for you.

Visualise Site Architecture

Site architecture is the way you categorise, structure and inter-link contents on your site.

It is a major principle in technical SEO.

Having an SEO-friendly architecture will help guide users to your content, easily find what they are seeking, and help Google index it.

Analyse Page Titles and Meta Data

Page titles and meta description helps users know what to expect from your page.

Meta descriptions help search engines know what your page will contain, and increase click through rates from organic search.

By doing an analysis, you can find out any issues that helps you optimise your titles and meta descriptions.

Compare Crawls and Staging

This helps monitor opportunities and issues regarding your SEO progress, which saves you time.

Extract Data From HTML of a Website Through CSS and XPath

Data scraping is very useful in competitive analysis.

You can find out what keywords drive traffic to a website, what content categories encourage links and user engagement, resources needed to rank on your site, and more.

Connect With Google Analytics, Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights

Google Analytics and Google Search Console are SEO lead generation tools.

Google Analytics helps you understand your customers, while Google Search Console helps measure site traffic and performance.

Slow pages takes longer for search engines to crawl, fast pages will be faster to crawl and improve user experience.

PageSpeed Insights provides you with speed data.

The paid version of Screaming Frog might be better because it contains more available features than the free version.

How to Use Screaming Frog

If you’ve never used Screaming Frog before, then check out their Getting Started Guide.

And if you’re already using it, then make sure you’re taking full advantage of its features by reading through the documentation.

They have a wide range of learning materials to support you, found in the tutorial section of Screaming Frog’s official website.

Conclusion

If you’re serious about improving your website’s SEO, then Screaming Frog is a tool that you need in your collection.

Crawling websites and collecting data about them is a complicated task. But, this tool arranges the information in a more organized manner to make it easier for you.

It’s not always easy to use, but it’s worth the effort to learn how to get the most out of it.

You are able to fix issues that negatively impact your search engine rankings.