Screaming Frog Tool Review | Scripted

Screaming Frog is a helpful SEO tool created by a company out of the UK. It pitches itself as "a website crawler that helps you improve on-site SEO by extracting data & auditing for common SEO issues." It's powerful, flexible, and fast, whether you're crawling small websites or huge ones. With that said, Screaming Frog is far from the only web crawler out there, so here's what you should know about its features and capabilities.

What to Consider When Looking for an SEO Solution

Screaming Frog is an SEO tool, but it's far from an end-all, be-all solution. Rather, Screaming Frog focuses on doing a handful of things really well, rather than trying to be a suite of SEO tools. As a web crawler, Screaming Frog can help you explore the web and collect valuable information about competitors' websites, but it's not going to give you recommendations for optimizing your content and, on its own, it won't tell you much about keywords, either.

It's important to recognize these things because, while Screaming Frog never promises to deliver on either of those fronts, every business should know that SEO is an extremely complex and varied field. A million tools classify themselves as "SEO tools," but that doesn't mean all of those tools can help you. Reviewing and choosing SEO tools takes a great deal of time and research, or else you'll end up diving into tools you don't need.

With all of that said, figuring out what you require from your SEO tools is an essential prerequisite before you can start making any decisions about whether or not Screaming Frog, or any other web crawler is right for your needs. To give you a better idea of what Screaming Frog can do, think about it as an on-site analysis for any website you plug into it. This analysis will help you find broken links, redirects, duplicate content, page titles, and so much more.

When used correctly, a web crawler like Screaming Frog can dig deeper into a competitor's website to help you outrank them by amplifying your efforts where they're doing well (like a keyword they're targeting all over) and filling in the gaps where they're missing things. Most often, you'll end up using a web crawler in conjunction with one or more SEO tools, be it a keyword research tool or something other. On its own, Screaming Frog can prove extremely beneficial, so long as you understand its purpose and limitations.

Features and Benefits of Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a feature-rich web crawler that can help you quickly break down a website's strongest and weakest points. Features include:

Finding broken links
Auditing redirects
Discovering duplicate content
Analyzing page titles and metadata
Generating sitemaps
Visualizing architecture
Scheduling audits

One of the best use cases for a web crawler is to help you automate maintenance for your website or the website of one of your clients. Crawlers can check for broken links and a lot else, helping alert you when there is a problem that needs you to address it.

Pros of Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog comes with plenty of benefits.

Screaming Frog is a feature-rich web crawler that can help you easily start crawling your websites for maintenance purposes or other use.
The free version is generous, giving you all the features listed above and allowing you to crawl a high number of URLs before you need to upgrade.
While many web crawlers are open source, Screaming Frog having a paid license option comes with many benefits -- including better support and more thorough, frequent updates to fix bugs and security flaws.

Cons of Screaming Frog

Like all applications, Screaming Frog also has some downsides you should consider before adopting it.

If you're looking for an all-in-one SEO tool or a tool that can help you optimize or plan your content, Screaming Frog is not intended to fill that role.
If you already subscribe to an SEO tool, there's a good chance you'll find some overlap as most SEO tool suites already offer at least a basic web crawler.

Screaming Frog Plans & Pricing

Screaming Frog has a very basic pricing structure. The free version gives you all of the features mentioned above, but it limits you to 500 URLs. If you want to upgrade, you'll pay £149.00 (207 USD) for a year of access, with unlimited crawls included. The paid version also has a number of extra features, like the ability to schedule crawls, configure, save, and upload crawls, compare crawls, find almost duplicate content, create custom robots.txt, and so much more.

Opt for the paid version if you want:

Spelling and grammar checks
AMP crawling and validation
Structured data crawling and validation
Custom extraction
Integrations

With the paid version, you'll also get technical support in the event that you run into any issues, something not included with the free version of the tool.

Customer Reviews

Screaming Frog boasts that its users include Disney, Amazon, Apple, and countless other big names, but its price point makes it accessible for any business that needs a web crawler without a bunch of bells and whistles added on. Here's a look at some real user reviews from G2.

"At our agency, we use screaming Frog for a variety of different tasks. It is a helpful tool for running a full site audit (ie. looking for 404 errors, missing meta descriptions, improper website architecture, etc.). We also use it to run pre and post website launch crawls! It's a great tool to help identify any glaring issues after our web development team launches a new site. Additionally, it can be a great tool for quickly pulling website information. If we want to re-optimize meta title and descriptions on a website we will first pull the current information using Screaming Frog."

"When crawling websites to see whether there are any missing or broken links, H tags missing or images where file size is too small, Screaming Frog is a fantastic tool to explore. As a marketer who often does SEO work, I found the premium version to have many capabilities that my agency often uses and finds helpful for client presentations. Its API integration with Google's digital tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console are especially helpful when pulling together data needed for analysis."

"ScreamingFrog is incredibly useful for search engine optimization tasks. I can easily scan a website and export the meta titles and descriptions for each page, H1 tags for each page, alt tags/missing alt tags for images, and so much more. ScreamingFrog easily helps identify any errors or missing information that needs to be updated for SEO purposes especially. It improves efficiency in terms of completing SEO audits."

Power Your Content Marketing

If you are searching for a web crawler that can help your brand identify broken URLs, missing tags, export information for indexing, or handle any other of the basic but fundamental tasks that Screaming Frog is capable of, it's worth trying. While a couple of open-source alternatives exist that might be able to deliver on similar things, Screaming Frog is backed by real support and a dedicated company, meaning the timely updates and answers simply can't be matched by open-source software.

What's more, Screaming Frog has a free plan with all the tools many businesses need and a generous crawl limit so that you can get hands-on with the software, whether you intend to upgrade or keep the free plan in the long term. With all of that said, Screaming Frog isn't the end-all solution to SEO. While a web crawler can play a part in your SEO plan, the fact is, you need high-quality content to start with if you want to get good results.

Scripted's service can help you create content that outperforms the competition by putting experts writers into your hands. Interested in learning more? Explore Scripted writers today! and discover how they can help you grow your brand.

Published by Ciara Antolini on Friday, February 11, 2022 in Marketing Agencies, Tool Review, Tools, Tools Reviews.