Recently I wrote a blog post about on-page and off-page SEO and listed different factors that you should look at when optimizing your site.

What I’d like to show you today is that there’s an easier and quicker way to check all of the important SEO things on your blog or a website.

Interested?

Well, then let me show you how you can conduct an Seo Audit on your site!

Let’s start with checking what SEO Audit actually is, shall we?

What Is An SEO Site Audit?

So, the first question we’ll need to answer is what is an SEO audit?

Well, according to the ThreeDeepMarketing it’s a process of analyzing how well your web presence relates to best practices – it is the first step to creating an implementation plan that will have measurable results.

So, in other words, what webmasters are trying to achieve when doing the audits is checking their sites for errors, bugs, and mistakes that may lead to decreasing their online presence.

Sounds serious, doesn’t it?

It kinda is.

Why?

Check the next paragraph!

Why Is An SEO Audit Important And What Does It Check?

Why are SEO audits important?

Mostly because Google isn’t as intelligent as we’d like it to be.

It’s still just an algorithm.

It doesn’t only check the content of the site. It judges your site by checking lots of other – more technical and sometimes invisible – things and that’s why we have to make sure they’re in their place as well.

What are those important factors I mentioned above?

Well some of them you can find in this post of mine about on-page and off-page SEO here.

But there are some others like accessibility, redirects, indexation, duplication, canonical tags, time on page, and bounce rate.

And you know what, this isn’t all but if you’re more advanced you could check this post here.

So, now we know what are the factors we should check when auditing our site but the question is how we can do that?

Are there any FREE tools that could check all of these factors?

Well, there’s one that’s quite popular and it’s called Screaming Frog.

It can help us with most of these problems.

Let’s talk about it in the next paragraph, shall we?

What Is Screaming Frog And How Does It Work?

So, what is Screaming Frog?

According to their official site, Screaming Frog is a website crawler, that allows you to crawl websites’ URLs and fetch key elements to analyze and audit technical and onsite SEO.

It’s quite simple, isn’t it? Maybe except for one thing: website crawling.

Let’s clarify what’s that.

It’s simply a process of obtaining the data of a website by programs like crawlers, spiders and bots.

So, the next important question is this: is Screaming Frog a Free Tool?

The answer is: it’s FREE unless you need to crawl more than 500 pages.

So, not that bad, right?

Small websites don’t have that many pages so they don’t need to spend money and bigger sites statistically earn more so they’re more able to buy a premium version.

You can check the pricing here.

I believe I explained the basics and we should move to the actual audit.

Let me show you how you can conduct a technical SEO audit using Screaming Frog!

How To Conduct An SEO Website Audit Using Screaming Frog Crawler

Firstly, we have to download the tool.

We can do that here.

Then we need to install it.

After we’ve installed it we can open the tool and it will look like this:

Now, we’re ready to start the crawl and audit our site.

We need to begin by putting the domain name in the top bar and pressing start.

As soon as you click start you’ll see the progress of the crawl.

When the tool finishes the crawl you’ll see all the results below. You can start the analysis then.

So, what SEO factors can we check using Screaming Frog?

Let’s find out!

What To Do After Screaming Frog Crawled Your Sites

So, Screaming Frog acquired the data and put it into these columns below.

There are the crawl results for things like response codes, page titles, meta descriptions, headings, images and many more. Each of these has its own bookmark.

Fine, how to get into more details now?

Simple.

Just click the bookmark you’re interested in.

For the purpose of this guide let’s try with meta description.

What we see now are all of our pages that were checked by the SEO spider.

What we also see is which pages have meta descriptions and which don’t have it.

The other columns show things like the text of meta description, its length and the number of pixels it consists of.

Fine, we got the data we were looking for. What do we have to do now?

Well, now we need to check if they need improving.

How do we know if they need improving?

We need to know what are the best practices when it comes to optimizing meta descriptions.

The simplest way to find that out is simply to Google it.

I found this article that shows how to optimize meta descriptions.

All you need to do as soon as you know the standards is apply it.

We need to change meta descriptions on every page where it is necessary.

We repeat the same process for every piece of data that Screaming Frog has acquired and showed in the columns.

I’d like you to remember two things that are necessary to conduct a successful SEO audit. These are:

• crawling the data
• knowing good practices and knowing how to apply them

Let’s move to a conclusion now, shall we?

Can A Beginner Do An SEO Audit Using Screaming Frog?

I used a meta description as an example and to be honest it wasn’t the hardest thing to optimize.

There are many more technical factors that need more advanced knowledge.

However, I believe that there’s a big chunk of errors you can fix yourself using the method I showed above.

There are many guides out there that show you step-by-step how to fix those errors and improve your overall SEO score.

Every SEO person should constantly improve his knowledge and skills.

Maybe eventually even learn how to conduct a full advanced SEO audit.

But if that’s not the case you can always hire someone who will do that for you.

It’s actually not that expensive.

Thanks for reading!

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