Screaming Frog is one of the tools used in SEO studies. SEO work is extremely popular today. The increasing number and actions of internet users in the digital world have been effective in turning SEO studies into an important need. SEO using tools like Screaming Frog is effective in moving companies and brands one step ahead of their competitors.
Screaming Frog is commonly used by those looking for on-site auditing and optimization. Because with this tool, it is very easy to crawl websites and identify technical SEO errors. Checking the values that are important for SEO work, printing out graphic reports, examining external links, identifying technical errors and resolving the detected errors are among the things that can be done with Screaming Frog.
You can find other curious details about Screaming Frog, which can analyze your competitors as well as your own website and offers the opportunity to carry out SEO activities in the most ideal way.
What Does Screaming Frog SEO Spider Do?
Screaming Frog SEO Spider optimizes site structure for search engine bots to easily crawl and index websites. Screaming Frog works similarly to Google browsers.
The highly functional Screaming Frog SEO Spider is available in free and paid versions. The free version has a crawl limit of 500 URLs. Much more advanced features such as Google Analytics integration are available with the paid version. Giant companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon and Disney are among the users of Screaming Frog SEO Spider.
The following basic functions can be realized with Screaming Frog SEO Spider.
- Searching for broken links
- Making permanent and temporary routing calls
- Analyzing metadata
- Create XML sitemap
- AMP Scanning and verification
- Conducting recurring content searches
- Analyzing site architecture
- review the txt file and other instructions
SEO Spider can be used for many purposes. It makes it easy to master everything from routing loops to scan depth.
- It allows real-time analysis of results.
- Visualizes the site architecture so that URL structure and internal linking can be evaluated.
- Imports important on-site SEO elements such as meta description, URL and page title into the table.
- Discover unsafe forms and pages.
- It generates digestible reports and statistics for the on-site data it serves.
- Displays the date of the last modification to the HTTP header.
- Shows routing loops and chains.
- Allows pages to display the response time to requests.
- Google Analytics integration makes it easy to get conversion and user data directly during any scan.
- It is possible to see the number of words on each page and check grammar and spelling in more than 25 languages.
- It offers access to CrUX (Chrome User Experience Report) data and PageSpeed Insights integration with Lighthouse diagnostics and metrics at scale.
- It allows to find images larger than 100 KB on a page, images with more than 100 characters of alt text, and images with missing text.
- Google Search Console integration enables the collection of click, average location and impression data by URL.
- It allows checking for incorrect and inconsistent language codes, non-canonical hreflang and missing check links.
- It offers the possibility to validate structured data by extracting it according to Google and Schema.org search specifications.
How to Install Screaming Frog SEO Spider?
How to Crawl a Site with Screaming Frog?
Site crawling with Screaming Frog is extremely simple. Simply open the application you downloaded to your computer, enter the URL address to be scanned in the specified field and press the start button. The crawl must be 100% for the data to be analyzed. Some of the things you can do with Screaming Frog are as follows.
Scanning a Page or Index
This step, which is also available in the free version, allows you to scan specific subdirectories. Before starting this process, the previous scan can be canceled or the program can be restarted. File > Configuration > Clear Default Configuration path can be followed to access the relevant section.
Sitemap Creation
A sitemap, as it is commonly known, is an XML file that lists the URLs found on websites. This XML file informs search engines about the URLs that can be crawled on the site. A website needs to create its own sitemap in order to be properly crawled and indexed. This issue is also extremely important for performance in SEO efforts. To create a sitemap with Screaming Frog SEO, it is enough to follow the Sitemaps > XML Sitemap step and make edits on the newly opened page.
URL Analysis
After crawling the site, all URL addresses on the site are determined and a classification is made as follows.
- Underscores: Refers to links separated by underscores.
- Non ASCII Characters: Used for unsupported characters. Structures whose URL structure is in Turkish are included in this field.
- Duplicate: Links with the same or similar structure are shown.
- Uppercase Indicates links that use uppercase letters.
- Over 115 Characters: Links with 115 characters or more are shown here.
- Parameters: List links that use parameters that are not appropriate for the URL structure.
Detecting 404 Pages
404 not found error, i.e. broken links, are disliked by both search engines and users. Therefore, the presence of broken links on the site negatively affects the site. Code 4xx is in the Client Error list. Therefore, all codes starting with this code must be corrected. Screaming Frog can detect all Client Error errors on the site. To detect all errors, after scanning the site, simply click on Response Codes in the top menu and select Client Error 4xx from the right panel. All broken links on the site are reflected in the newly opened section with details.
Visual Analysis
Images on websites have an important place in SEO studies. They therefore need to be optimally optimized. If addresses are detected in the missing alt attribute and missing alt text sections of images on a crawled site, these negatively affect the website’s SEO performance in particular.
Checking Problematic Page Titles
In order to talk about an SEO compatible site, the main title (H1) must be used on every page. Subheading (H2) varies according to the content. The Screaming Frog dashboard can be used to check whether the title tags are used correctly.
- Duplicate Indicates that a title similar to the title on another page is used.
- Missing: Pages with missing page titles are detected.
- Same as H1: Refers to pages with the same page title.
- Over 60 Characters: Shows pages with a title longer than 60 characters.
- Over 554 Pixels: Pages with a page title that is longer in pixels are detected.
- Below 30 Characters: Shows pages with a title of less than 30 characters.
- Multiple Shows pages with multiple titles.
- Below 200 Pixels: Shows pages with a short page title in pixels.
What are the Advantages of Screaming Frog?
Today, it is extremely important to increase the performance and therefore the traffic of the website with SEO studies. Site performance needs to be high to reach potential customers and target audiences. In order to work on improving the performance of a website, it must first be analyzed in detail. Screaming Frog is a tool that helps to make the analysis needed for SEO work in detail.
It is a great advantage for users that it provides ideas on how to fix the errors that occur after the site scan. Another advantage of Screaming Frog is that there is a free version. This allows you to scan up to 500 URLs for free.
