Consider reviewing your website manually, it can cost excessive time and efforts. Yes, the analysis of a whole website is a monotonous task if done manually but with tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider, we can make the task easier. Google is smart and to impress Google, one needs strong search engine optimization techniques, but how to appear on the list of smart websites using the right tool.
What is Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Like a spider make the intelligent moves, so does the Screaming Frog. Designed from SEO-perspective, it crawls websites’ URLs, links, images and rectifies the flaws that are resisting your website from progressing. It can be installed locally on your computers and it’s completely free but if you want to avail the additional features, the license will be required.
Rather than consulting SEO service online, you can use this tool to fully optimize your website.
Now, let’s have a look at the most important features of Screaming Frog that will help you achieve full onsite analysis.
1) Fix Broken Links:
While creating a web design, developers often delete an interconnected page or forgot to update URL when they change the URL address, this creates a broken link. It comes up as ‘404 error’ and slow down the traffic on your website. In this scenario link builders go for two approaches:
⦁ Collecting the website pages and checking each of them for broken links.
⦁ Digging the relevant resource pages and creating content that will direct to their own site.
SEO Frog Spider helps to find the broken links on your website instantly, it reduces your laborious task and spots the ‘404 errors’ on your website.
2) Prompts poorly written Meta Titles and Descriptions:
Unique SEO Meta Titles and Descriptions counts in the good elements which are necessary for SEO. The keywords should be properly aligned in the title tag and Meta description. A good title shouldn’t be longer than 60 characters and most important keyword should be used in the beginning. Whereas, a Meta description is recommended to have 160 characters in it. When you write a title try viewing it on a desktop, smartphone and tablet and see how it looks.
SEO Frog Spider works the same as search engine optimization professionals, it rectifies the tags and descriptions that are too long and are not pleasant for Search Engine. It shows the results separately under the headings: address, occurrences, length and content. You can then address your mistakes and make the corrections as required.
3) Spot High-Resolution Images:
Images are worth to attract visitors to your website, but not probably from SEO-perspective. Search Engine rejects the image that is too heavy, high resolution or takes a longer loading time. The size of the image should not exceed 100 KB and the alt-text should be well-defined too. Remember to add the keyword in alt-text. A pro tip is to define the image in detail in the alt-text so if the image could not load anywhere, one can take the idea by reading alt-text.
SEO Frog Spider tells you the images that are not good for your website and need to be compressed. In addition to it, you can see the comprehensive report of images hosted on your website. If you are largely using ‘unoriginal images’ on your website, it will suggest you create your own image and improve the quality.
4) Generate XML Sitemaps:
For SEO it is important for every website to have an XML sitemap, as the search engine can fetch pages quickly, even if the internal linking isn’t that good. It directs search engine to the whole content placed on your website.
Using SEO frog spider you can create XML Sitemaps within no time. However, adding images in the sitemap is optional. Once you have created the file you can change the frequency of some pages manually.
5) Identifies bad URL structures:
SEO-friendly URL structures is a basic tactic one should never miss. A properly crafted URL can help improve the indexation of your website, but still there exist some websites that use erroneous URLs. As a result search engine don’t pick them up. That’s the reason the right Search Engine Optimization Services always keep the URL short and descriptive.
In the URL tab of SEO Frog Spider, you can evaluate all the URLs. It checks the length of all URLs and defines column-wise, spot the long ones and duplicate URLs.
6) Audit Redirects:
Screaming Frog SEO Spider proves to be really helpful to audit redirects in a site migration. This happens when you move to a new domain or change a URL structure. That’s why it is recommended to audit the URLs and check if they are correctly redirecting. It addresses many issues search engine might have and you can extend the time of the visitors on your website.
SEO Frog Spider examine the redirect issues and explore the hops coming in the way.
7) Review Directives:
With SEO Frog Spider you can see the information related to Meta robots tag, rel=next/prev annotations and canonical links. It follows robots.txt in the same way as Google, if certain pages are not allowed by Google, SEO spider will not go for it either. Also, you can view the URL blocked by Meta robots or X-robots. This feature is also helpful to find the certain pages which are set not to be indexed.
A pro tip is to set these pages to “no index follow.”
8) Google Analytics Integration:
An amazing feature of SEO Frog is that it can link to Google Analytics API and pull in data directly. The data you can find includes user and session metrics, bounce rate and conversions.
You can choose the search Console account from where you want to pull the data and define the date range too. You can see the pages of your site where there is no traffic and the ones that have very low traffic. Or maybe some issues can become more visible when you bind the two datasets.
Moreover, if you are running an AdWords or PPC campaign you can also record the number of impressions and cost clicks.
This is not all, these features of SEO Frog Spider have make it credible to use.
- Exporting Data
- Data Visualization
- Crawl Large Websites
1) Exporting Data: It offers excellent export options to convert all the data needed to excel. You can export all the data simply by clicking the export button in SEO Frog Spider but if you want the specific data you can filter the data. It will only export the data within the filtered option.
It also offers ‘Bulk Reporting’. For instance, if you want to export all the ‘In links’, ‘Out links’ you can do it at once by selecting the specified column.
2) Data Visualization: Tired of the number of rows and columns in your excel sheet? No worries! Data Visualization is an advanced feature of Screaming Frog SEO spider which comes in paid version but the results are incredible. You can make your data pleasant and easy to understand via this feature. It will help you make your report visually appealing and you can make your developer work on the acquired results.
3) Crawl large websites: When it comes to large websites, memory requirement increases to save and process the data. The screaming frog SEO spider uses a hybrid engine that allows large-scale crawling. To save crawl data to disk you need to configure SEO spider which will let it crawl at an unprecedented pace.
However, it offers two storage memory storage and database storage.
- Memory Storage: If your machine has less RAM than hard disk space it is better to keep it in “Memory Storage” mode.
- Database Storage: It is recommended for users with an SSD as it allows more URLs to crawl for a specific memory setting.
Final Thoughts:
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a great tool to optimize your website, increase the performance and identifies the flaws hurting your website. With the increasing number of websites, it has become highly important to make your website SEO-friendly. Moreover, it is convenient to use and remove the hassles of manually checking the website. And surprisingly, you can use it in free and it can crawl up to 500 URLs in the ‘lite’ version. But the free version don’t give access to custom source extraction, google analytics, data visualization, and search console and metrics integration. For the advanced features an official license is required which is of 149£ per year.
One great thing: You’d be surprised to know that screaming frog has regular updates that is new features keep on adding. You can continue enjoying your work with the additional features coming. Did I miss anything? Let me know in comments.