What is Screaming Frog SEO Spider?
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a industry-leading website crawler used by SEO professionals and agencies worldwide. It’s available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. This tool helps improve your website’s on-site SEO by performing comprehensive audits that identify common SEO issues. You can download it for free and crawl up to 500 URLs, or purchase a license for £199 per year to unlock unlimited crawling and advanced features.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider Features
Screaming Frog SEO Spider offers a wide array of features designed to provide a thorough analysis of your website’s SEO health.
- Find Broken Links, Errors & Redirects: Instantly crawl a website to identify broken links (404s) and server errors.
- Analyze Page Titles & Meta Data: Evaluate page titles and meta descriptions, flagging those that are too long, short, missing, or duplicated.
- Review Meta Robots & Directives: Check for URLs blocked by robots.txt, meta robots, or X-Robots-Tag directives.
- Audit hreflang Attributes: Ensure correct implementation of hreflang for multilingual websites.
- Discover Exact Duplicate Pages: Identify duplicate content using an md5 algorithmic check.
- Generate XML Sitemaps: Quickly create XML Sitemaps and Image XML Sitemaps.
- Site Visualizations: Visualize site architecture with interactive crawl and directory diagrams.
- Crawl Limit: Crawl up to 500 URLs for free, or unlimited with a paid license.
- Scheduling: Schedule crawls at chosen intervals.
- Crawl Configuration: Customize crawl settings to fit specific needs.
- Integrations: Connect with Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights.
- Custom Extraction: Collect any data from the HTML of a web page using CSS Path, XPath or regex.
JavaScript Rendering: It can render web pages using headless Chromium to discover content and links.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider Use Cases
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a versatile tool applicable in various scenarios:
- Technical SEO Audits: SEO agencies and in-house SEOs use it to conduct comprehensive site audits, identifying technical issues that may hinder search engine rankings. For example, you can quickly find all broken links on a client’s website and export them for fixing.
- Website Migrations: When migrating a website, the tool helps audit redirects, ensuring all old URLs correctly redirect to their new counterparts, preventing loss of traffic and search engine rankings.
- Content Audits: Content strategists can use the tool to analyze page titles, meta descriptions, and headings, ensuring they are optimized for target keywords and are not duplicated across the site.
- E-commerce SEO: E-commerce site owners can extract product data like prices and SKUs, helping manage product information and identify pages with missing data.
- International SEO: For websites targeting multiple regions, the tool can audit hreflang attributes to ensure correct language and regional targeting.
- Competitor Analysis: You can use custom extraction to scrape competitor websites and gather data.
Conclusion
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a powerful, versatile, and essential tool for anyone serious about SEO. Its comprehensive features, from identifying broken links to visualizing site architecture, make it invaluable for optimizing websites of all sizes. Whether you’re an individual website owner or a large SEO agency, Screaming Frog SEO Spider provides the insights needed to improve your site’s search engine visibility and overall performance.
