How to Use Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Digital Marketing
Screaming frog

How to Use Screaming Frog SEO Spider: A Complete Guide

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a powerful website crawler designed to help you analyze and audit your website’s SEO performance. It allows you to identify SEO issues, gather data about your site’s pages, and optimize it for better rankings. This guide will take you step-by-step through how to use Screaming Frog SEO Spider effectively.

Table of Contents

  1. What is Screaming Frog SEO Spider?
  2. Why Use Screaming Frog for SEO?
  3. How to Install and Set Up Screaming Frog
  4. How to Use Screaming Frog SEO Spider
  1. Common SEO Issues Detected by Screaming Frog
  2. Best Practices for Using Screaming Frog
  3. FAQs

What is Screaming Frog SEO Spider?

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop-based website crawler that helps you analyze and audit on-page SEO elements for websites. The tool is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and it enables you to find SEO issues such as broken links, duplicate content, missing meta tags, and more. It’s particularly useful for conducting in-depth site audits.

Why Use Screaming Frog for SEO?

Screaming Frog is used by SEO professionals for several reasons:

  • Comprehensive SEO Audits: It helps you find and fix issues that could harm your site’s SEO performance, such as broken links, duplicate content, and thin content.
  • Large Data Collection: Screaming Frog crawls large websites and gathers data on URLs, titles, meta descriptions, H1 tags, images, and more.
  • Technical SEO Insights: It provides insights into technical SEO aspects like page speed, canonical URLs, and XML sitemaps.
  • Customizable Filters: You can tailor the crawl to specific parts of your site or set filters to focus on particular SEO elements.

How to Install and Set Up Screaming Frog

1. Download and Install Screaming Frog

  • Visit the official Screaming Frog website and download the software for your operating system.
  • Install the software following the provided instructions.

Screaming Frog offers both a free version and a paid version (with more features and higher limits). The free version allows you to crawl up to 500 URLs, which is suitable for smaller websites.

2. Configure Basic Settings

Before running your first crawl, you may want to adjust a few settings:

  • Storage: Go to Configuration → System → Storage to choose whether Screaming Frog should store data in memory (RAM) or on your hard drive.
  • Crawl Limits: In the free version, the crawl is limited to 500 URLs. You can adjust the maximum number of URLs to crawl by navigating to Configuration → Spider → Limits.
  • User-Agent: Screaming Frog allows you to choose the user-agent (browser identity) for your crawl. By default, it crawls as Googlebot, but you can change this in Configuration → User Agent.

How to Use Screaming Frog SEO Spider

1. Crawling Your Website

To start crawling your website:

  • Open Screaming Frog and enter your website’s URL in the URL bar.
  • Click the Start button. Screaming Frog will begin crawling the website, gathering data from each page.

During the crawl, Screaming Frog will collect a wide range of data, such as titles, meta descriptions, headers, response codes, and more. The time it takes to crawl a site depends on the site’s size and complexity.

2. Understanding the Interface

Once the crawl is complete, you’ll see a comprehensive dashboard with various tabs and filters:

  • Internal: Shows all internal URLs and their associated data.
  • External: Lists external URLs linked from your site.
  • Images: Displays all images found on your website and their metadata (like alt text).
  • Response Codes: Shows the HTTP response codes for each URL, allowing you to detect 404 errors, redirects, and server issues.
  • Meta Data: Provides information on meta titles and descriptions, helping you spot missing or duplicate content.

3. Analyzing Key SEO Elements

Here’s how to analyze some key SEO elements using Screaming Frog:

Titles and Meta Descriptions

  • Go to the Page Titles or Meta Descriptions tab to find missing, duplicate, or too-long titles and descriptions.
  • Review this data to ensure all titles and descriptions are optimized for SEO, include relevant keywords, and are within the recommended length.

Header Tags (H1, H2)

  • Screaming Frog highlights missing or duplicate H1 and H2 tags. These tags are crucial for SEO as they define the structure of your content.
  • Ensure each page has an H1 tag that accurately describes the content and uses appropriate keywords.

Broken Links (404 Errors)

  • Under the Response Codes tab, filter for Client Error (4xx) to identify any broken links (404 errors).
  • Fix these by either redirecting the broken URLs or updating internal links to point to valid pages.

Duplicate Content

  • Screaming Frog detects duplicate content by comparing page titles, meta descriptions, and body content.
  • You can resolve duplicate content issues by consolidating pages or implementing canonical tags.

Redirects

  • Screaming Frog shows all URLs with redirects (3xx response codes). Ensure that your redirects are working correctly and there are no unnecessary redirect chains.

Images

  • The Images tab lists all images and provides insights on missing alt text or images that are too large.
  • Compress large images to improve page speed and add descriptive alt text for better SEO.

4. Exporting and Reporting

You can export the data collected by Screaming Frog for further analysis or to share with your team:

  • Click on Bulk Export or Export in any of the tabs to download the data as a CSV or Excel file.
  • You can also generate a report for specific SEO issues like missing titles, broken links, or duplicate content.

Common SEO Issues Detected by Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog can detect a variety of SEO issues, including:

  • Broken Links (404 errors)
  • Redirect Chains
  • Missing or Duplicate Titles and Meta Descriptions
  • Thin Content
  • Large Images Without Compression
  • Missing Alt Text for Images
  • HTTP vs. HTTPS issues
  • Duplicate Content
  • Canonical Tag Issues

Best Practices for Using Screaming Frog

  1. Regular Crawls: Perform regular site crawls to stay on top of new SEO issues that may arise due to updates or changes in your site structure.
  2. Prioritize Critical Issues: Focus on fixing high-priority issues like broken links, missing meta tags, and duplicate content first.
  3. Set Custom Crawl Parameters: Use Screaming Frog’s advanced settings to customize the crawl for specific areas of your site or certain types of data.
  4. Analyze Competitor Sites: Screaming Frog can also crawl competitors’ websites (if publicly accessible), allowing you to gather insights and improve your SEO strategy.
  5. Integrate with Google Analytics: Screaming Frog can integrate with Google Analytics and Google Search Console, providing deeper insights into your SEO performance.

FAQs

1. Is Screaming Frog SEO Spider free?

Yes, Screaming Frog offers a free version that allows you to crawl up to 500 URLs. The paid version provides unlimited URL crawls and additional features such as custom extraction, Google Analytics integration, and more.

2. What’s the difference between a free and paid version?

The free version limits crawls to 500 URLs and doesn’t include advanced features like JavaScript rendering, custom extraction, or integrations with Google Analytics. The paid version (costs around £149 per year) unlocks these features.

3. Can Screaming Frog crawl large websites?

Yes, the paid version of Screaming Frog is designed to crawl large websites. You can set storage options to save data to your hard drive, enabling it to handle massive sites.

4. Can Screaming Frog identify mobile SEO issues?

Screaming Frog can identify mobile-specific issues, such as missing alt text for images or pages that aren’t optimized for mobile use, if you crawl your site with the appropriate user-agent (e.g., Googlebot-Mobile).

5. How often should I use Screaming Frog?

It’s good practice to use Screaming Frog for regular site audits, such as once a month or before and after significant site updates or migrations.

By following this guide, you’ll be able to use Screaming Frog SEO Spider to effectively audit and optimize your website, ensuring it performs well in search engines.

Useful links

Related Posts

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top