5 of the Most Useful SEO Benefits of Using Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is one of the most useful tools to audit your website for maximum SEO benefits.
Offering some of the most valuable SEO benefits around and used by big brand names like Apple, Amazon, Disney and even Google, Screaming Frog is a leading website crawler providing powerful technical SEO audits.
In this overview, we take a look at exactly what Screaming Frog offers along with the top five SEO benefits this can give to you.
What is Screaming Frog SEO Spider?
Screaming Frog are a search engine marketing company who have developed a tool called ‘Spider’ which crawls websites and returns valuable insights.
Screaming Frog is free to use and delivers powerful insights into SEO benefits.
Quick, simple and easy to use, you can download the app locally and perform up to 500 crawls. The service is available for free although the paid version not only provides unlimited crawls but additional tools and insights.
Quite simply, Screaming Frog SEO Spider can perform a basic technical audit of your website and provide you with an exportable Excel report that is fully actionable SEO benefits.
What SEO Benefits Does Screaming Frog Deliver?
The landscape of SEO has been developed over many years and is constantly evolving. Though the benefits of SEO can deliver enormous traffic and boost your online visibility, getting it wrong can mean languishing in the depths of SERP and even earn you penalties from the likes of Google.
Fortunately, regular auditing of your website for common SEO mistakes and issues can help deliver you from the danger zone and here’s how Screaming Frog can do it:
Find and Identify Broken Links
Broken links are bad for two very important reasons. Firstly, they create a poor user experience and can leave your visitors frustrated and unable to find the pages they are looking for. Secondly, they don’t make your website very attractive to search engines like Google.
When Screaming Frog crawls a website, it will return a report of all server errors and 404s along with the full details of the URLS that link to them.
Checking broken links is quick and easy with Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Analyse Meta Data & Page Titles
Page titles are extremely important to the way search engines rank your site and these key headlines should fit the required parameters in order to gain the best SEO benefits.
Likewise meta descriptions are vital for optimum SERP performance. They not only condense the content of a page for the user within the search results themselves but are used as the primary html element for search engines themselves.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider analyses all of your page titles and reports on any that are missing, too short or too long or that have been duplicated on other pages of your site.
Identify Duplicate Content
Just as the analysis of your metadata and page titles will include duplicates, the Spider tool also performs an MD5 check to find exact duplicate URLs as well as any content that is partially duplicated such as descriptions and headings. The report will also indicate any low content pages across your domain.
Duplicate content is another area which could see negative SEO benefits even if it is non-malicious and occurs on your own website.
Review Redirects
Whilst redirects themselves are not necessarily a bad thing, implementing them incorrectly can negatively affect your SEO.
Screaming Frog runs a site-wide audit to identify all permanent and temporary redirects as well as identifying loops and chains. This kind of detail is a must when migrating sites and offers useful support to make sure this goes smoothly.
Audit Meta Robots & Directives
Robots are an important tool to indicate to search engines which URLS should be crawled and, importantly, those that shouldn’t.
As well as auditing all URLs that are blocked by commands such as X-Robots, robots, txt and meta robots, Screaming Frog will also return directives like ‘nofollow’ and ‘noindex’.
A regular SEO audit should be part of routine housekeeping for your website.
Opace and Technical SEO Audits
If you’ve had a large drop in traffic or SERP ranking and are struggling to maintain a visible online presence then Opace can offer a full technical SEO audit to identify where you could make changes to deliver the best SEO benefits.
To find out more about our services, contact us today.
Image Credits: Alexas_Fotos/Pixabay, Screaming Frog,Clker-Free-Vector-Images/Pixabay and mohamed_hassan/Pixabay
« Back to Glossary Index
