What is Screaming Frog?
Screaming Frog is an invaluable tool to marketers, ensuring sites are error-free and appealing to search engines.
It is a versatile and easy-to-use website crawling tool once you get your head around the interface. So many professionals adopt this as a key SEO tool because it is so quick in helping to identify a broad range of website issues, however, you need a decent grasp of technical SEO to utilize this tool to its full potential. It is strictly a crawler tool and does not output recommendations as a third-party technical audit tool would.
Another great benefit of choosing a pioneering brand in the crawling space such as Screaming Frog is that it is maintained by a group that handles SEO consulting as part of their core business – so you can be confident it will be updated in line with changes in the industry.
Site crawling use cases
There are endless ways in which Screaming Frog can make life a little bit easier for the SEO, PPC and Digital Marketing experts out there – beyond its well-understood basic crawling capabilities.
From auditing a site’s Internal Linking, rewriting URLs on mass, website scraping to helping to inform linking building and keyword strategies. This technical tool can reveal a gold mine of insight that many businesses and agencies do not yet make the most of.
Check out this Screaming Frog Guide that highlights 55+ ways of using the tool to its fullest potential.
PLATFORM STRENGTHS
- Sophisticated website crawling abilities that enable you to analysis any website from the perspective of a search engine
- Customisable reporting options, enabling you to drill down in very specific areas.
- Most of the data and information you need for a technical audit within a single crawl
PLATFORM LIMITATIONS
- The crawling of very large and/or international domain structured websites eats up a lot of time and memory
- It is not a cloud software, meaning has to be stored locally
- The free plan only allows a maximum of 500 URLs crawled
- Screaming Frog’s duplicate content detection and image alt tag listing capabilities are weak