These days, everyone’s looking to boost their website’s ranking on search engines, right? Well, there’s one free SEO tool that’s really been making waves—Screaming Frog. It’s got all the features you could want, and the best part? It’s either free or super affordable.

This tool is like a Swiss Army knife for SEO. It can crawl your site, spot technical issues, and give you a clear plan to fix them. Imagine having a tool that dives deep into your site, finds those pesky errors, and tells you exactly how to sort them out. If you’re serious about squeezing every bit of potential out of your site, Screaming Frog is your new best friend.

Whether you’re a seasoned SEO pro or just getting started, this guide will walk you through everything you need to know to make the most of Screaming Frog.

Free SEO tool: The ultimate guide to screaming frog

Why Screaming Frog?

Have you ever felt like the SEO issues in your websites are like a game of whack-a-mole? One moment you find that your site has a high SEO ranking and another moment it is buried under a pile of technical errors. What if there was a tool that could help you to catch all the moles as well as make this game more predictable? Enter Screaming Frog.

What is Screaming Frog?

Screaming Frog SEO spider is one of the best free SEO tools that acts as a website crawler to help you improve the onsite SEO by auditing and extracting data for common SEO issues. The free version of Screaming Frog has the capability of crawling up to 500 URLs, making it perfect for small to medium-sized websites requiring maintenance. For larger websites, the full potential of this tool can be unlocked by the paid version which offers many more features. Screaming is free to download from the internet

Key Features of Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is known for its various set of features that provide to a large range of SEO needs. A deeper study into understanding Screaming Frog features :

1. Comprehensive Site Audit

Screaming Frog is renowned for its unique ability to crawl through your entire website, to gather detailed information about each URL. This feature is important in understanding the technical status of your site as well as identifying areas that needs improvement. Here’s what you need to know:

Broken Links: The tool can easily locate 404 errors and external links as well as broken internal links that negatively affect SEO performance and user experience.

Page Titles and Meta Description: By analyzing the length, relevance of your page titles, uniqueness, and meta description to ensure they are optimized for search engines.
Hreflang Attributes: By ensuring your sites are correctly configured for multilingual features, the sites can target the right language and region.
Response Codes: Use the tool to view the HTTP response codes of your URLs to identify sites that not working correctly.
Canonical Tags: You can avoid issues of duplicate content issues by checking for the proper use of canonical tags.

2. XML Sitemap Generation

Screaming Frog is able to generate a sequence of XML sitemaps which is crucial for search engine optimization. The roadmap of your website is an XML sitemap that helps search engines understand the structure and find all the important pages. The features of this include:

Customizable Sitemaps: Based on your specific needs, you can create sitemaps to include only certain types of pages or exclude URLs with specific parameters.
Image Sitemaps: Improving the visibility in search results to generate sitemaps for images.
News Sitemaps: By creating sitemaps specifically for news articles, helping them get indexed faster and more precisely

3. Robots and Directives

Auditing and analyzing directives and site robots.txt files is vital for ensuring search engines crawl your sites as intended. Screaming Frog gives you tools to:

Robots.txt Analysis: Reviewing the robot.txt file to ensure that important pages from the site are not being blocked by search engines and various other sites.

Canonical Tags: To ensure that canonical tags are precisely implemented to avoid fake and duplicate content issues.

Meta Robots Tags: Analyzing the use of meta robots tag across your site to maintain how search engines index and follow your pages

4. Integrations

Screaming Frog seamlessly fuses with other tools to boost the data insights available for your SEO efforts:

Google Analytics: Importing data from Google Analytics to check how your site’s pages are performing in terms of bounce rate, traffic, and other key metrics.
PageSpeed Insights: Integrating with Google PageSpeed Insights to improve and analyze the speed and performance of your site’s pages
Google Search Console: Integrating with Google Search Console to gain insights into your site’s search performance, including impressions, average position, and clicks.

5. Advanced-Data Extraction

The custom extraction feature of Screaming Frog allows you to pull specific data from your website using Regex, XPath, and CSS Path. It is useful to show:

E-commerce Sites: Finding product information, prices, availability, and other structured data.
Content Sites: Pulling publication dates, author names, and metadata from blog posts and articles.
Custom Audits: Extracting other specific data points that are important for your SEO analysis.

Advanced custom extractions in screaming frog

6. JavaScript Rendering

JavaScript frameworks is crucial to ensure that search engines can crawl and index your site’s content precisely. Screaming Frog offers advanced JavaScript rendering capabilities to:

Performance Analysis: Identifying performance issues related to JavaScript that impact the site’s SEO.
Accurate Simulation: Mimic how search engines like Google render your pages to ensure all content is being indexed.

7. In-Depth Reports and Visualizations

Screaming Frog provides a variety of visualization and reporting options to help make sense of your data and share insights with your team:

Crawl Overview Reports: Get a summary of key metrics and insights from your site crawl, including the number of URLs crawled, crawl depth, and duration.
Orphan Pages Reports: Identify pages that are not linked to from anywhere on your site, ensuring all valuable content is discoverable by search engines.
Custom Reports: Generate detailed reports on specific aspects of your site’s SEO, such as redirect chains, duplicate content, and more.

Screaming Frog 20.0: New Features and Enhancements

Screaming Frog continually progresses as one of the best free technical tools in SEO world. With the newest Version 20.0 update, several exciting updates enhance its usability and effectiveness. Let’s explore the most significant additions:

1. Crawl Overview Report

The newest Crawl Overview Report provides a comprehensive summary of a crawl’s key metrics and insights, which is invaluable for quickly understanding the overall health and structure of your website. This report covers:

Crawl Information: Number of URLs crawled, crawl depth, and duration.
Response Codes: Distribution of status codes (e.g., 200, 404, 301).
Content Types: Breakdown of content types (e.g., HTML, images, JavaScript).
Key Metrics: Page titles, meta descriptions, word count, and more.

2. Orphan Pages Report

Orphan pages are those pages that are not unnoticed as they are not linked to from anywhere on your site. These pages may not be indexed by search engines to ensure that all valuable content is easily discoverable by search engines and users. Screaming Frog 20.0 includes a new Orphan Pages Report that identifies these pages by:

Integrating with Google Analytics and Search Console: Finding URLs that are receiving traffic but are not linked internally.
Crawl Path Analysis: Highlighting pages that are isolated from the main site structure.

3. Custom Extraction Updates

Custom extraction allows you to pull specific data from your site using XPath, CSS Path, or Regex. The latest updates make this feature even more powerful by:

Enhanced Configuration Options: More flexibility in setting up extraction rules.
Improved Data Handling: Better performance and accuracy in extracting large volumes of data.

This is particularly useful for e-commerce sites looking to extract product information, prices, or other structured data.

4. Improved UX and Interface

Screaming Frog 20.0 also brings several user experience and interface enhancements, including:

New Dark Mode: An eye-friendly dark mode for working late hours.
Enhanced Visualizations: Improved data visualizations for clearer insights.
Simplified Navigation: More intuitive menus and settings for easier use.

These updates make the tool more accessible and user-friendly, allowing you to focus on what matters most—optimizing your site’s SEO.

Conclusion

Screaming Frog is an indispensable tool for anyone serious about technical SEO. Its comprehensive features, ease of use, and robust free version make it a standout choice for website audits and optimizations. By following this guide, you can harness the full potential of Screaming Frog to elevate your website’s SEO performance.

References

For further reading and more in-depth guides, check out these resources:

Start leveraging Screaming Frog today and watch your SEO efforts pay off!

Screaming frog ultimate guide