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Hey folks, John here again from Digital Badi! In this post, I’ll provide an overview of the powerful website crawler Screaming Frog SEO Spider and how it can amplify your SEO efforts.
What is screaming frog
Screaming Frog allows comprehensive auditing of websites for technical SEO best practices. It provides invaluable data to diagnose issues negatively impacting organic rankings and site health.
We use Screaming Frog extensively during SEO audits for clients. Let’s explore some of its key capabilities:
In-Depth Site Crawls
Screaming Frog can deeply crawl websites up to 1 million URLs to analyze every aspect including:
- Pages, images, CSS, JS, XML sitemaps
- Redirect chains and status codes
- Links, anchors, alt tags
- Headers, response codes, caching
- Crawl errors and broken links
This reveals critical issues that Googlebot also faces when crawling sites.
Customized Audits
Granular controls exist to customize crawls for specific audits like:
- Page speed analysis
- Security audits
- HTML validation
- Duplicate content checks
- Link audits
- Mobile friendliness checks
Fine-tuning crawls allows heavy focus on issues impacting performance.
Data Visualization and Reporting
Crawl results can be visualized through features like:
- Tree maps of largest pagesize, response codes etc
- Graphs of most linked pages, images without alt text etc
- Tables highlighting crawl errors, duplicate content issues etc
This simplifies analyzing huge crawl datasets and identifying optimization areas.
Site Exploration and Inspection
Every individual page and file crawled can be inspected through:
- Page content, HTML, headers, response codes
- Images and resources loaded
- Links pointing to and from the page
- Page speed metrics and size
In-depth inspection helps diagnose specific page-level issues precisely.
Comparison Against URLs List
Crawl results can be compared against a list of target pages to analyze:
- Pages with issues like duplicates, technical errors
- Pages not being crawled and indexed
- New pages missing meta info and content
This helps define the scope of issues affecting important pages.
Change Tracking Over Time
Running periodic crawls allows tracking changes in key metrics like:
- New pages added or removed
- Increase or decrease in crawl errors
- New links, lost links
- Changes in page speed
Ongoing change monitoring ensures critical SEO aspects don’t regress over time.
Exporting Data and API Integrations
Crawl data can be exported into reports and integrated with other platforms like:
- Excel, Google Data Studio, Google Sheets
- BigQuery, JavaScript, PHP etc
- SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz
This enables further analysis, dashboards and workflows.
Why Screaming Frog is Essential for SEO
In summary, Screaming Frog provides expansive capabilities to:
- Crawl all pages and assets of large websites
- Customize crawls for specific audits
- Visualize and report on key metrics and issues
- Inspect individual pages deeply
- Compare against target URL lists
- Track changes over time
- Export and integrate data with other platforms
For both in-house SEO teams and agencies, Screaming Frog is an essential website auditing tool. They offer a free version allowing 500 URL crawls.
I highly recommend every serious SEO practitioner try Screaming Frog to analyze and optimize website health. It will uncover issues you likely didn’t realize before that impact organic rankings and traffic. Let me know if you have any other questions!
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