Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Crawling and diagnosing technical issues

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a really nice tool. Anyone who’s a technical SEO or an experienced SEO will have used this tool, and it has a freemium model.

You can crawl up to 500 URLs and you can get limited features for free, or you can pay for the premium package and that will give you all your URLs and more advanced features.

It’s very good at diagnosing technical issues:

• Finds URL errors in real time: With Google Search Console, there tends to be a bit of a lag. If you’ve released a brand new website, it might take a day, or two days, or even three days for some of these errors to be reported. Whereas with Screaming Frog SEO Spider, you’ll hopefully be able to catch them a lot quicker.
• Gets a full list of crawlable URLs: That can be quite useful.
• Reviews key on-page SEO elements: It’s very good for reviewing on-page SEO elements.

When and why should you use this tool?

When you’re brand new to a website, it’s very good for a first-time assessment. It also helps you gauge how much content you’re dealing with, and how many pages are you dealing with. And it can be quite good just to see how well-optimized title tags, meta descriptions actually are on the site.

Has there been previous SEO work done? Or maybe there hasn’t been work that’s been done. And if you don’t use this tool, you might find that you’re losing a little bit of search engine trust because you might have more errors that are being thrown up on the site. Also, it can mean that you’ll just miss out on finding unoptimized title tags and descriptions and that sort of thing.