How To Do SEO Auditing With Screaming Frog?

How To Do SEO Auditing With Screaming Frog? What is Screaming Frog? Screaming Frog is a crawling tool that analyzes an entire website looking for problems. You can also call it an SEO spider. The software provides valuable insights for your search engine optimization problems by crawling the whole website. 

With the help of this SEO auditing software, you can examine different parameters on your website. For example, many other parameters for your website are outbound links, site links, anchor text, meta descriptions, broken links, security, ALT tags, and response time.

Additionally, Screaming Frog will crawl more than 500 URLs for free.

Screaming Frog SEO Tool Review:

Something you must know about Screaming Frog is that it is not a cloud-based solution. Screaming Frog is a tool you have to download and install on your laptop or desktop. This tool works only in Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu. So, if you are working on any other operating system, you are out of luck. 

You can get started with a free version of Screaming Frog. This tool will crawl up to 500 URLs for free. Suppose you like to crawl more than that. In that case, you can also access advanced configuration options like JavaScript rendering, custom search, custom extraction, integrating with Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or pulling in external link metrics. However, you must buy an annual license to get all of this.

If you buy this software, the price is £99.00 annually for one to four licenses. However, there are different prices if you want to buy more than four licenses. For five to nine charges, you have to pay £89.00 annually, 10 to 19 Licenses need to pay £79.00 per year, and for 20+ claims, your bill would be £69.00 per year. Screaming Frog is a British company, so you will have to pay in pounds.

It All Starts With Crawling

Once you install it, just enter the URL of your site, and the tool will start to crawl each page if you have configured your website correctly.

Screaming Frog crawler works the same way that googles crawler work on your website. It will find links on your website menu, header, footer, and within your content. 

You might ask yourself: What are the benefits of bot crawling around my website? Crawling helps you find website issues. For example, you might have broken links on your website. If so, Screaming Frog will find them. Different points can identify you.

The Tabs

After completing the crawling of your site, you will have access to more information about it. 

Luckily, it’s all categorized and put into separate tabs. Those tabs are Internal Tab, External Tab, Response Codes Tab, URL Tab, Page Titles Tab, Meta Description Tab, Meta Keywords, H1 Tab, H2 Tab, Image Tab, etc.

Internal Tab

The Internal tab gives you every insight regarding pages on your website. Like the case with the remainder of the accounts, the information introduces itself in a table. Each line in the table addresses a different URL.

For every URL, you will see important details. For example, the status code returned, page title, meta description, H1 contents, H2 contents, and word count. It is the best beginning stage if you are new to the tool. That is the reason why it is the default tab.

External Tab

The External tab will show you data about external URLs. While you will not see as much insight regarding external pages as you do about inner pages, you will still get plenty of valuable data, like the content sort, status code, and the number of connections that point to the URL. 

Protocol Tab

The Protocol tab shows you which pages utilize the secure (HTTPS) convention and which use the non-secure (HTTP) convention. Each line will show you the status code, and content kind of the URL crawled. 

Response Tab

Utilize the Response Codes tab to rapidly see which URLs on your site are returning something besides a decent (200) response.

The “bad” response is the 404 code (not found).

Furthermore, the report will show redirect (3XX) and worker mistake (5XX) response codes.

URL Tab and URI Tab

The URI tab incorporates data identified with the said URLs. You can look at Daniel Miessler’s clarification if you are genuinely keen on learning the contrast between URLs and URIs. However, it is anything but a subject that you will discover exciting. The tab incorporates data about every URI, like its content, status code, and hash esteem.

Title Tab

You may think about the significance of page titles in SEO.

That is why the Page Titles tab is so valuable.

It remembers information about titles found for every URL—for example, the number of labels per page and the length of each title.

The tab will also show you pages with missing tags, duplicate titles, and titles that are either excessively short (under 35 characters) or overly long (over 65 characters). 

Meta Description

The Meta Description tab is one more tab that experiences its name. For every URL crawled, you will get to know the number of duplicate metadata found on the page, their contents, and their lengths. The tab will also show you pages that are missing meta portrayals, pages with duplicate meta depictions, and pages with meta portrayals with over 320 characters.

AJAX tab

AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) is a famous innovation that creates a rich client experience.

Programming-as-a-Service (SaaS) arrangements use it constantly.

You will need to arrange Screaming Frog to crawl your site with JavaScript rendering to see legitimate data in the AJAX tab.

If you are keen on learning more regarding your AJAX URLs and the status codes they return, click on this tab.

Custom Tab

The Custom tab will show data recovered with a Screaming Frog custom hunt. You can use custom inquiry to access your HTML source and extract data with XPath, regex, or CSS Path. Then, at that point, you can inquire clear filter in the Custom tab to see the data you find.

Analytics Tab

The Analytics tab will show you measurements assembled from Google Analytics. That is, accepting you integrated the device with GA. Suppose you are now acquainted with Google Analytics. In that case, the Analytics tab will show you natural information, like the number of meetings, level of new discussions, number of new clients, and average meeting duration. You can use this tab to discover pages with a high bounce rate.

Conclusion: Screaming Frog is Helpful

Screaming Frog is undoubtedly one of the best SEO auditing tools out there.

It will help you detect critical technical errors on your website. The downside of this tool is that it doesn’t have a free trial version.

Also, you need to download the tool on your pc or laptop to use it.

But overall, the tool is quite good and will take your technical SEO audit to a new level.

We hope this blog has provided you with everything you need to know about SEO audits. Furthermore, if you want to learn more about SEO audits and how to do them with Screaming Frog, consider following our newsletter for more updated information.