Screaming Frog SEO Spider
What is Screaming Frog SEO Spider?
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a powerful website crawling tool that helps analyze and audit various technical aspects of a website. Acting as a crawler, it allows users to scan an entire website or XML Sitemap to identify potential SEO issues, track performance, and ensure the site is well-optimized for search engines.
One of the key features of Screaming Frog is its ability to detect broken links (404 errors), find redirects, and highlight any pages that may be causing issues for both users and search engine crawlers. Additionally, it can analyze metadata, headings, duplicate content, page titles, and response codes, making it an essential tool for SEO professionals and web developers.
Beyond basic crawling, Screaming Frog can be used to search for specific text or code snippets within a website. This is particularly useful when checking for outdated information, missing tracking codes, or ensuring specific keywords are present on certain pages.
Currently, Screaming Frog offers a free version, but it comes with a limit of 500 pages per crawl. For larger websites or advanced features like JavaScript rendering, scheduled crawls, API integration, and custom extractions, users can upgrade to the paid version, which provides unlimited crawling and more in-depth analysis.
How does Screaming Frog SEO Spider work?
Crawling Your Website
One way to use Screaming Frog is by entering your website URL and allowing the tool to crawl through the pages, just like a search engine bot would. You can choose whether or not to follow the rules set in the robots.txt file (which determines which pages search engines are allowed to crawl). If you disable robots.txt restrictions, you can check pages that are normally blocked for search engines, such as admin pages or internal content.
While the tool crawls your site, you can manually click through the pages in the interface to review their structure, metadata, response codes, and other technical aspects.
Crawling Your Website
One way to use Screaming Frog is by entering your website URL and allowing the tool to crawl through the pages, just like a search engine bot would. You can choose whether or not to follow the rules set in the robots.txt file (which determines which pages search engines are allowed to crawl). If you disable robots.txt restrictions, you can check pages that are normally blocked for search engines, such as admin pages or internal content.
While the tool crawls your site, you can manually click through the pages in the interface to review their structure, metadata, response codes, and other technical aspects.
Crawling a Custom List of URLs
Another option is to upload a custom list of URLs directly into Screaming Frog. This can be done by pasting URLs manually or importing a list from a file (such as a CSV). This is especially useful when:
- You want to check specific pages only instead of crawling the entire site.
- You need to analyze a set of competitor URLs to compare structure or performance.
- You want to audit pages from a paid ad campaign or a batch of landing pages.
Additional crawling features
Screaming Frog offers several advanced features to refine your website crawl
- Custom filters allow you to focus on specific data points, such as missing meta descriptions, duplicate title tags, broken links, or pages containing certain words or phrases.
- With the Custom Search feature, you can scan pages for specific text, code, or patterns within HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. This is particularly useful for locating outdated information, verifying the presence of tracking scripts, or checking for structured data markup.
- The Custom Extraction feature takes this a step further by allowing you to extract specific elements such as headings, image alt text, structured data, canonical tags, or metadata. This makes it easy to analyze content consistency, technical SEO elements, and accessibility features across a website.
How to use Screaming Frog SEO Spider effectively?
There are many tools that monitor website errors, but these are often reactive. One advantage of Screaming Frog is that you can proactively crawl not only a website but also an acceptance or staging environment to detect and fix issues before they go live.
If you need to replace a product price or phone number on your website, it can be challenging to find where it appears. Screaming Frog allows you to automatically search for specific text across your entire site.
If you are not yet familiar with regular expressions (Regex), it might be useful to explore them, as they can help you refine your searches and improve efficiency when using Screaming Frog.
Want to learn more?
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a tool with endless possibilities. If you would like advice or need help starting with Screaming Frog SEO Spider, feel free to reach out via the form below
or call +31 651378397.