Screaming Frog SEO: site analysis and SEO prospecting
Xenu and AnalogX are among the crawling tools available on the web, but many SEOs regret their austere appearance. It is possible to analyze a site’s attributes with precision using a Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool.
This software is available as a paid version, but a very useful free version is also available for download, which you can learn a lot from if you know how to use it properly.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider allows you to identify all the important characteristics of a page in terms of natural referencing. All you have to do is select the site you want to study in the “enter URL to spider” field, select the HTML filter in “Internal” and the tool will show you the criteria for all the pages crawled.
Identify the SEO fundamentals of each page with Screaming Frog SEO
In the blink of an eye we can see the structure of URLs, the different page titles, the presence or absence of H1 and H2 tags, etc.
You can also find out the meta-description and meta-keywords (even if this is no longer used for SEO purposes, it is still useful for determining the semantic field of a page if the webmaster has filled in the tag). The number of internal links and outgoing links is also revealed for each page thanks to the analysis. On this subject, you can read our article explaining how to optimize your title tags with Screaming Frog SEO.
In addition, you can use the configuration tab to configure the crawl stage, by choosing its depth, selecting the use of a proxy and much more. The free version limits use to just 500 URLs, but there is a trick for successfully carrying out a full audit of a large site.
This involves selecting ‘List’ mode in the software’s ‘Mode’ menu to import a list of URLs from a text or .csv file. In this way, the software crawls the entire list of URLs without taking into account the initial limit of 500 URLs.
You can import a long list of URLs from a CSV file and crawl them without restriction!
Screaming Frog SEO Spider can help you identify the points that are blocking natural referencing on your site (duplicated title, forgotten H1…), but above all, it can become your privileged partner for prospecting. It will show you almost instantly the SEO fundamentals of a page, so you’ll know whether an online shop or blog is well optimised, or whether SEO work, or going through an SEO agency, is useful and could be useful for boosting your audience in the long term.
