To improve your website’s SEO performance, you need to frequently analyze your work. At this time the right SEO Audit tool can help you with the same. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is one of the most useful tools to analyze your website.
It helps to identify factors that help you enhance your website’s online performance. It can also identify factors that can be harmful to the performance of your website in SERP.
Here, in this article, you will know what the Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool is and learn the most appropriate way of using it to improvise your website’s online visibility.
What is Screaming Frog SEO Spider? – A Free SEO Audit Tool
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a small website crawling tool that you can install locally on your Linux machine, Desktop, or Mac.
It crawls a URL, page title, meta description, headings, etc, and essentially shows you what a search spider would see when it crawls your website.
This information allows you to quickly audit, crawl, and analyze a site from an onsite SEO perspective. Also, it can accurately analyze both large or small websites, without missing a single defect present on your website.
For big websites there are chances of missing every important factor including redirections, meta refreshes, duplicate tags, image alt’s, etc.
But, with the help of SEO Spider, you can crawl and export key onsite SEO elements like URLs, page title, image alt, meta description, headings, etc to a spreadsheet so that it can be used as a reference for SEO recommendations.
The most amazing factor is, you can get all of this without paying a single penny. It allows crawl and downloads up to 500 URLs for free. If you need to remove this crawl limit, then purchase a license £149 per year to access the advanced features.
How to Use Screaming Frog Tool?
The Screaming Frog is a flexible, robust, and useful site crawler that helps you to efficiently analyze the results in real-time, allowing SEOs to make informed decisions.
So, are you ready to crawl and analyze your website? Let’s start!
First of all you need to paste the root domain in the box and hit the Start button.
If you want to crawl additional subdomains like a blog on the URL ‘blog.website.com’, you need to check the Crawl All Subdomains box under Configuration > Spider.
Depending on the size of your website, the crawl process can take a couple of minutes. Check the progress bar in the top right corner to see the status. Once it is done, you can start analyzing the outcome.
The ‘link score’ metric is displayed in the Internal tab and calculates the relative value of a page based upon its internal links.
This uses a relative 0-100 point score from least to most value for simplicity, which allows you to determine where internal linking might be improved for key pages. It can be particularly powerful when utilized with other internal linking data, like counts of inlinks, unique inlinks, and percentage of links to a page (from across the website).
Below are some basic and important audits that you can carry out:
1. Find Broken Links
You can crawl a website instantly to find server errors and broken links (404s) with source URLs.
These tabs provide more detail on the URL, such as their inlinks (the pages that link to them), outlinks (the pages they link out to), images, resources, and more.
2. Analyze Page Titles and Meta Data
You can analyze page titles and meta descriptions that are too long, short, missing, or duplicated across your site. This is visible on the right-hand side of the main window in the Overview section.
Relevant Article: Important SEO Metrics To Measure The Growth Of Your Website
3. Redirects Audit
You can identify redirect chains and loops, find temporary or permanent redirects to audit a site migration. To check redirects, head on to the Reports in the menu bar and select Redirects. Here you can check All Redirects, Redirect Chains, and Redirect & Canonical Chains.
Also, you can bulk export all redirections under the Bulk Export menu. Then Response Codes and then Redirections.
4. Find Duplicate Content
You can find partially duplicated headings, page titles, descriptions, low content pages and also can find exact duplicate URLs with an md5 algorithmic check. This can be seen in the Overview section under SEO Elements.
5. Generate XML Sitemaps
You can quickly create Image XML Sitemaps and XML Sitemaps with advanced configuration over the URLs in the Sitemaps menu.
6. Review Robots and Directives
You can check URLs blocked by robots.txt, meta robots or ‘nofollow’, ‘noindex’, canonicals, rel=“next” and rel=“prev”.
7. Extract Data with XPath
You collect social meta tags, additional headings, prices, SKUs or more from the HTML of a web page using CSS Path, XPath, or regex.
8. Integrate with GA, GSC and PSI
You can fetch user and performance data of all URLs in a crawl for greater insight by connecting to the Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Page Speed Insights APIs. You can check this on the right-hand side under the API section.
9. Visualize Website Architecture
Using interactive crawl, directory force-directed diagrams, and tree graph site visualizations, you can evaluate internal linking and URL structure. To view this go to Visualizations in the menu bar.
10. Crawl JavaScript Websites
Render web pages using the integrated Chromium WRS to crawl JavaScript rich websites, dynamic websites, and frameworks including Angular, React, and Vue.js.
So here you are done with the easy steps to utilize this helpful tool.
Now, what are you waiting for?
Start working on increasing your online presence with this simple and easy to use free SEO audit tool.
