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Five Critical SEO Issues Discovered with Screaming Frog

Have you ever crawled your own site? It’s a great strategy to fix some rather blatant issues with your site that you may not have noticed. Good friends at Site Strategics told us about Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider. It’s a simple crawler that’s free with a limitation of 500 internal pages… enough for most websites. If you need more, purchase the £99 annual license!

We now utilize this platform on a daily basis to crawl our client sites and identify issues. It’s also a fantastic means of auditing your site for optimization. Here are critical Search Engine Optimization issues:

  1. Not Found – Find 404 errors with internal links, external links, as well as any asset (CSS, JavaScript, Images). Referencing images that aren’t found can slow your site down. Referencing internal links incorrectly can frustrate your visitors.
  2. Page Titles – Titles are the most critical element of your page, have you optimized them with keywords? A simple crawl of your site will extract every page title with Screaming Frog.
  3. Meta Descriptions – These are displayed as the description of your pages in search engine result pages (SERPs). By improving the meta descriptions, you can drastically improve the click-through rate to your pages.
  4. Headings – H1 is a heading tag and you should have 1 central heading per page. If you have more, you’ll want to shift them to other headings. Screaming Frog will show you your H2 and H3 tags as well (having more of those in a single page is fine). All headings should be keyword rich and relevant to the page topic.
  5. Image Alt Tags – Alt text assists search engines in properly indexing your images and display the alternative text for screen readers and apps that block text (like when you embed your blog content in emails). Audit your images and fill in the alternative text tag with keyword-rich, relevant text.

Another great feature of the Screaming Frog SEO Spider is the List Mode. I can take an export of competitive pages from a tool like Semrush, put it into a text file, and import it into Screaming Frog to crawl and retrieve an analysis of all the elements of the competitors’ ranking pages!

Additional Screaming Frog SEO Spider Features:

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler designed for SEO optimization. Here are some of its key features:

  • Website Crawling: The software crawls websites, analyzes data, and generates reports to identify any technical issues that might impact search engine rankings.
  • Link Analysis: The tool allows you to examine internal and external links, identify broken links, and audit redirects.
  • On-page analysis: Screaming Frog SEO Spider reviews HTML tags, identifies duplicate content, and provides recommendations for improving the on-page SEO of your site.
  • Custom Extraction: The software allows you to extract data from any website and generate customized reports.
  • XML Sitemap Generation: The crawler generates XML sitemaps that can be submitted to search engines to help them crawl your site more effectively.
  • Integration with Google Analytics and Search Console: Screaming Frog SEO Spider integrates with Google Analytics and Google Search Console to help you analyze website traffic and search engine performance.
  • Visualization: The software visualizes data in graphs and charts, which allows you to easily identify patterns and trends.
  • Customization: The software can be customized to meet your specific needs and preferences, with options to configure the crawler settings and generate custom reports.
  • Multilingual support: Screaming Frog SEO Spider supports crawling in multiple languages, making it useful for international websites.

Overall, Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a powerful tool for analyzing and improving the technical SEO aspects of your website.

Download Screaming Frog SEO Spider Today!

Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is CMO of OpenINSIGHTS and the founder of the Martech Zone. Douglas has helped dozens of successful MarTech startups, has assisted in the due diligence of over $5 bil in Martech acquisitions and investments, and continues to assist companies in implementing and automating their sales and marketing strategies. Douglas is an internationally recognized digital transformation and MarTech expert and speaker. Douglas is also a published author of a Dummie's guide and a business leadership book.

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