The process of optimizing your website to help search engines like Google find, crawl, understand, and index your pages is known as Technical SEO. But it can be really difficult to monitor and implement. This is where a comprehensive technical SEO tool can be helpful. Through such tools, you can understand how your website is performing, and also provide you with quick wins when you are optimising your pages. There are many auditing tools that you can find and one such tool is Screaming Frog SEO Spider.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a tool that can bring deeper insights and analysis to your digital marketing campaign. With this tool, you can extract data and audit your website for common SEO and technical issues that might be holding back performance. It is one of the most popular tools among SEO experts to crawl a website and gain useful insights. Here we have discussed Screaming Frog in detail and all the ways you can use this tool to improve the user experience of the website.

What Is Screaming Frog SEO Spider?

Screaming Frog SEO Spider, which is also known as Screaming Frog, is a website crawling tool. This tool is versatile and user-friendly and helps SEO professionals analyze and audit the technical and on-site SEO elements of the website. Just like search engine bots, this tool is also designed to crawl websites and gather crucial information about the site’s structure, links, and content. Broken links, duplicate content or missing meta tags are all such examples of issues that can negatively affect the search engine ranking and with Screaming Frog you can easily identify such issues. 

Install And Get Started With Screaming Frog On Your Computers

Screaming Frog is a desktop-based application that means you can easily install it into your computer to use it.  Screaming Frog software is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. But before installing, choose the version which you want to install. When you visit the Screaming Frog website you will notice that they offer both free and paid versions, so choose the one that suits your needs. 

After downloading the Screaming Frog software on your computer, you can run the installer and follow the instructions to install it. You can also configure the Screaming Frog tool according to your preferences. With this tool, you can analyze the results and identify the issue with the website’s SEO. You can export the collected data in various formats such as CSV and Excel. This is very useful for creating detailed reports or sharing information with clients or team members.

How To Conduct A Website Audit With Screaming Frog SEO Spider?

After installation of Screaming Frog, you can enter the URL of the website that you want to audit in the input field of Screaming Frog software. It will collect URLs, meta tags, headers, and more. Once the data is collected you can review it. You have to identify and prioritize the issues that need improvement. Then based on your findings, you can make all the necessary changes to your website. This may involve optimizing meta tags, fixing broken links, or improving page load times.

What Issues You Can Identify And Resolve Using Screaming Frog?

Now that you are aware of how to audit the website, here we have discussed how you can analyze your site, improve SEO, and even carry out keyword research using Screaming Frog.

• Resolve Technical SEO Issues With Screaming Frog: A website crawling tool, Screaming Frog is very helpful in fixing a wide range of technical SEO issues on your website.
• Find The Broken Links: Broken links not only annoy the visitors but also affect your SEO very badly. You can easily locate these broken links using Screaming Frog. Through this tool, you will get to know which page has the broken link, so that you can visit the page and remove or update it.
• Review The Page Titles And Meta Descriptions: Screaming Frog is also used in reviewing the page titles and meta descriptions. This will help you make sure that descriptions and titles are unique, relevant, and have a detailed search engine presence.
• Identify The Missing Alt Text: Alt Text is very important for accessibility. Using Screaming Frog you can check the images on the website to see if they have any suitable alt text.
• Analyzing Backlinks: With Screaming Frog, you can review your internal and external links. Both types of links are important for the strong performance of search engines. Linking the external website enhances the credibility and also provides additional value to the visitors. Solid internal linking keeps the visitors on your site for a longer duration. It also makes it very easy for search engines to index your entire website. The screaming Frog tool is very useful to get data about all your internal and external backlinks.
• Keyword Research And Analysis With Screaming Frog: Other than resolving technical SEO issues, Screaming Frog is also used as a part of your keyword research strategy.
• Competitive Analysis: Screaming Frog can be used for checking the websites of the competitors as well as your own.
• Custom Extraction: You can also use the custom extraction feature of Screaming Frog. This feature is useful to scrape the website pages for any additional information. You can also use this feature to identify a wide range of data about your site. 
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider For Duplicate Content: Screaming Frog can also be used to find the exact and nearly exact content on your website. Duplicate content does not affect the SEO ranking but it can confuse the search engine. You can identify duplicate content and review the pages. Then you can add new keywords to offer unique content to your visitors.

What Are The Advanced Features Of Screaming Frog That You Can Explore?

With the Screaming Frog tool, you can tell a lot about your website. You can also use its additional benefits to enhance your experience.

• You can use Screaming Frog to schedule audits at selected intervals. 
• Other tools can also be integrated into Screaming Frog to provide additional functionality. For instance, you can use PageSpeed Insights or Google Analytics with Screaming Frog.
• With Screaming Frog, you can crawl JavaScript elements on your website. You can see which pages depend on JavaScript and if some elements are blocked.
• You can also compare two sites on Screaming Frog. It is very helpful if you have made technical changes to your website and want to see the improvements.  
• This tool can also be used to create visualizations so that you can easily see the relationship between pages and files on your site.

Pricing Structure Of Screaming Frog

As we said before, Screaming Frog is free to use. But there is some kind of limit on the free use.  You can crawl over 500 URLs for free and have access to some functionality and reporting of Screaming Frog, like Meta robots, page titles, and more. You can get all this information on the Screaming Frog website.  Also, remember that any link on your website is considered a URL, so it can contribute towards your 500 URL limit. 

You can also pay for a license and unlock the additional functionality and reporting like unlimited crawls. These licenses are per person rather than per device, so you can pay for the license once and use it on different devices. 

What Are The Alternatives To Screaming Frog?

No doubt, Screaming Frog is one of the best tools for a technical SEO audit, but if you are new to technical SEO and have a slow computer then it can take time to crawl large sites.  The following are some alternatives to Screaming Frog if you want to explore other options. 

• Sitebulb
• Visual SEO
• Spotibo
• Scrutiny

FAQs

• What is Screaming Frog SEO Spider?
  Screaming Frog SEO Spider is also known as Screaming Frog. It collects data from your website and displays this information in an easy-to-understand format.

• Why Screaming Frog is beneficial?
  With Screaming Frog, you can identify the technical issues. You can easily resolve the issues of broken links, missing alt text, and more and boost your site ranking. Both of these are beneficial to your search engine ranking.

• Is there any other alternative to Screaming Frog?
  Yes, you can find many other auditing tools in the market. Some of the other auditing tools are Sitebulb, Botify, and Oncrawl.

Wrapping Up

You can get the technical SEO right and improve your search engine presence using the Screaming Frog auditing tool. You should definitely download it and give it a try. This tool is fast, free, and also provides valuable insights to make your website better.

Readmore: How To Get Started With Our Digital Marketing Course: The Compressive Guide

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