In this report I will share my Screaming Frog guide and explain how you can use it for your SEO audit. Let's start by saying that Screaming Frog is one of the most popular SEO tools, which we can use to examine and analyze any number of websites. analyze can. Furthermore, the tool costs just £150 per year for unlimited use and, with a limit of 500 crawled subpages, it is even cheaper. free of charge.
In the first step of the instructions we have to install the Screaming Frog before the so-called Onpage analysis can be started.
Screaming Frog guide: Settings
In the following, I will present a number of different menu items that allow you to customize the configuration settings.
File. The "File" menu item offers us various options to save the current crawls ("File à Save") or to save the past six crawls under the "Recent Crawls" tab. Crawls again. Finally, we can save the changed settings as the default via "Default Config.".
Configuration. With this menu item or the specific selection options, we can edit the various crawls as we wish.
- Spider. This sub-item specifies which content should be examined. For example, we can add or remove images, CSS, JavaScript, subdomains and many other settings. We can also set the maximum click depth and the total number of crawled pages.
- Include & Exclude. These selection options allow us, depending on our interests, to include only certain URLs ("Include") or to exclude them ("Exclude").
- The maximum number of URLs crawled per second is displayed here.
- Custom Search & Extraction. A kind of filter ("Extraction") and search engine ("Search") for specific URLs.
- API Acess. This tool serves as a professional troubleshooting tool by allowing us to link the Screaming Frog with its Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Fashion. "Mode" is another menu item that offers us two different options: On the one hand, we can enter the URL by hand; on the other hand, we can select a list of analyzing and to examining URLs which we can then upload via the upload field.
Bulk Export. Bulk export allows us to export web addresses with certain characteristics, such as images over 100 KB.
Reports. Enables us to automatically generate reports such as Canonical Errors, SERP Summary and others.
Sitemaps. As the name suggests, we can use this menu item to construct a sitemap.
Screaming Frog instructions: Onpage analysis
With a Onpage analysis we must first enter the URL and then click on "Start". The tool then crawls the corresponding website and provides a current status report.
Check meta description and title tag
The meta description and the title tag are standard measures in search engine optimization and are particularly important for websites with many URLs. Once we have completed the crawler, we can select one of the following filter functions (Missing, Duplicate, Over 156 Characters, Below 70 Characters, Over 940 Pixels, Below 400 Pixels and Multiple) to display the pages that can be improved in terms of the meta description and title tag. This also gives us the opportunity to extract non-optimal elements.
Edit meta description and title tag
Another function of the Screaming Frog tool is that it can help us to edit the meta description and the title tag by selecting the options "Page Title" and "Serp Snippet". To do this, both elements simply need to be entered into Screaming Frog and you will receive a display for different devices such as mobile, PC or tablet as well as an overview of the respective number of characters. In order to make the adjustments on the website, we need to export the results.
Optimize images for the search engine
Images are known to be an important part of websites, blogs and many other pages on the Internet. Therefore, these should also have optimal settings, whereby the Screaming Frog tool is once again of great use to us. By clicking on the "Images" menu item, we can display all the images on the website and also filter out certain images, for example those with more than 100 KB.
H1 and H2 headings
H1 headings are essential data for structuring websites, so it is all the more important that they are unique and specific. The Screaming Frog examines the respective website for H1 headings that are too long, duplicate or missing so that we can optimize them.
404 and 504 errors
I recommend using the menu item "Response Code" to avoid so-called 404 errors, where the website links to non-existent pages, or 504 errors, where the respective page cannot be accessed due to a server problem.
Analyze and optimize click depth
In search engine optimization, the click depth, i.e. the number of clicks with which the most important subpages of a website are reached, is essential and should be a maximum of three clicks. We can use the "Site Structure" option to display the click depth graphically.
Pages with over 300 words
If we call up the "Internal" tab, we can use the "Word Count" column to find out how many words the corresponding page has and also sort the results so that we can further analyze them in an Excel table, for example.
Response time
Using Screaming Frog's "Response Time" menu item, which we can find under the "Internal" tab, we can check the server response time in seconds or the time it takes for the website to load.
Detect duplicate content
Duplicate content is a problem that is very difficult to prevent, especially on large websites. If we use the Screaming Frog tool together with Excel, we can detect duplicate content. To do this, we first need to select the "Internal" tab to get an overview of the URLs and then filter the results by HTLM documents. If several URLs have the same hash value, which we can find in the fourth column from the left, this indicates that the content of the URLs is identical. For a clearer presentation, we export the HTLM documents to Excel, where we can mark the URLs with homogeneous content.
URL cleanup
The length of the URLs also plays an important role in search engine optimization, as it is responsible for the clarity of the search results, among other things, and should therefore be checked regularly. If we click on the "Tab" option and filter the results with more than 115 characters, we can find URLs with too many characters or special characters (non-ASCII characters).
Check internal links
The number of internal links (inlinks) can be used to optimize the position of the results page. For this reason, we should always identify and improve pages with few links. The Screaming Frog tool can also help us here by displaying the linking pages via the "Internal" and "Inlinks" tabs (sixth column from the left).
Create sitemap
In order to download new sitemaps and submit them to the Google Search Console, we need to select the "Create Sitemap" function via the "Sitemap" menu item. This will include certain HTLM pages that reflect the (reachable) status code 200 and exclude 301, 404 or even 504 pages as well as those that have been set to noindex. Pages that have been blocked in robots.txt or that have a canonical tag are also excluded. However, these settings are not fixed and can therefore be modified in the configuration menu and adapted to your own wishes.
Conclusion Screaming Frog guide
The guide only shows you a small selection of the many functions of Screaming Frog, which is certainly one of the most important SEO tools. I particularly recommend the use of Screaming Frog to smaller companies that want to manage their own search engine optimization, also in view of the low price of £150.
I hope you enjoyed my article: Screaming Frog instructions & that it was helpful.
