My favorite SEO Tool
Rating: 10 out of 10
August 25, 2023
JP
Vetted Review
Verified User
4 years of experience
Screaming Frog is used as a tool for primary analysis of site behavior by our Search and Analytics Team. We use it to crawl sites, debug indexing issues on our sites, to vet site tagging, and to assess the SEO health of every part of the web site. We increasingly use it to identify specific content for text extraction. We recently studied outgoing links with it, we recently foxed some microcopy we couldn't find with other reporting processes.
- Effectively and quickly assesses the scale of any problem that can be determined in the HTML source of a web site. Most sites of any age or of sufficient scale have numerous systems interacting to generate the source code. Screaming Frog's filters let you figure out where issues lie, and where they don't -- which can be key to solving for the issue.
- Screaming Frog lets you crawl your site (and others - SHHHH) as Googlebot. If Googlebot can't get everywhere you want it to go, you can fix that.
- Screaming Frog can effectively find duplicate content.
- Screaming Frog can filter for HTML, Javascript, Images, I use custom filters all the time to find little bits of code. Great for Wordpress Plugin Issues.
- It's a true SEO crawler. Reliable site-wide analytics on Metadata. You can find your canonicalization issues with this tag.
- It will build XML sitemaps for you. Good ones!
- The integrations with Lighthouse, Google Search Console, and Ahrefs!
Cons
- It's slow on slow machines.
- It's a bit of a resource hog.
- It could go even further and add some intelligence and direction to it's wonderful analytics. No reason it couldn't provide recommendations.
- I am still finding features I love on this application. You could say thats a good thing, but isn't kind of a bad thing -- i have used it so much!