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Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog

Overview

Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a versatile tool that has become indispensable for various user needs. Users appreciate its effectiveness in …
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My favorite SEO Tool

10 out of 10
August 25, 2023
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 …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 14 features
  • Integration with web analytics tools (32)
    10.0
    100%
  • Multi-domain support (28)
    10.0
    100%
  • Site audit / diagnostics (50)
    9.6
    96%
  • Global SEO (27)
    9.1
    91%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Paid Version

$149.00

Cloud
per year

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Demo

YouTube
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Features

SEO

Core features related to search engine optimization

8
Avg 7.8

SEO Channels

Features related to optimizing your website for specific channels

7.9
Avg 7.6

SEO Platform & Account Management

Features related to scalability and integration of the SEO platform

10
Avg 8.4
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Product Details

What is Screaming Frog?

Screaming Frog Video

Screaming Frog Demo

Screaming Frog Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(192)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a versatile tool that has become indispensable for various user needs. Users appreciate its effectiveness in auditing client and internal websites, leading to business growth and improved site performance. It allows users to schedule automatic website crawls and receive the results via email, making it easier to identify regular technical issues without manual effort. The software offers a comprehensive solution for website audits and SEO analysis, streamlining operations and improving efficiency. It assists in identifying critical errors such as broken links, duplicate pages, and missing tags, facilitating website audits on a page level. Additionally, it helps users find pages that require attention and deep crawling for e-commerce sites. The software has garnered positive feedback from users who have found it easy to use, with a wide range of functionalities. It is highly recommended for digital marketing agencies and individuals conducting website audits.

Users have made several recommendations based on their experience with the software:

  1. The free version of the software is sufficient for making decisions and evaluating its usefulness.
  2. Purchasing the software is worth the money, as it provides comprehensive crawling capabilities.
  3. The software is recommended for companies of any size.
  4. It is suggested to try out the free version before committing to the premium subscription.
  5. The software is a great tool for finding 404 errors and checking meta data.
  6. Utilize the support documentation and forums for assistance.
  7. The software is great for internal SEO analysis and optimization.
  8. Try out the free version of the software.
  9. The software is recommended for crawling websites and gaining insights on content and keywords.
  10. Do not be intimidated by the technical aspects of the software and utilize available resources for guidance.
  11. The software is highly recommended for its cost-effectiveness and comprehensive website crawling capabilities.

Overall, users suggest taking advantage of the support documentation and forums provided by the software for assistance with any technical aspects and guidance.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-19 of 19)
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August 25, 2023

My favorite SEO Tool

Joe Preston | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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!
  • 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!
There are a lot of SEO's who won't be helped meaningfully by this tool, until they understand the technical aspect of SEO. It can actually help you write better SEO copy, but it is more likely to be of use to someone who makes $ diagnosing canoicalization and duplicate content issues. There are better solutions available if you are limited to slow machines or connections.

There are a lot of false positives for 400 and 500 errors, basically don't go nuts over a few empty title fields, check carefully.

Cole Watts | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Screaming Frog SEO Spider allows me to easily review and scan the Gflenv.com website (as well as other company websites), for all of its technical elements. This allows me to review it from an SEO perspective and to find any potential technical holes in the website, that need to be fixed.
  • Review Technical Elements of a Website
  • Review number of URLs on a website.
  • Review Pictures of a website.
  • No Training is provided w/ download of tool.
  • Not everyone likes the excel like format.
  • The number of tabs on the top can be a bit overwhelming for first time users.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a tool that is well suited, for scanning websites and for providing analysis of it. However, it is limited, to 100 URLs on the free version and it will not do the job or fix anything for you. It's simply a tool that helps you analyze data, you have to put the effort in to fix things.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Screaming Frog to crawl our website for Technical SEO errors. It allows us to check our site's health on a large scale. Instead of having to check each page manually, we're able to do it all at once. Only our SEO team uses it currently, but we are often exporting the results of the crawl and sharing it with our Dev team for fixes that need to be made.
  • Find Broken Links.
  • Crawl Site and Analyze Meta Data.
  • Finding redirect chains and diagnosing technical errors.
  • Sitemap cleanup/generation.
  • UX/UI Improvements -- It's pretty ugly.
  • Crawl Map -- It's a new feature and is improving, but it's still not amazing.
Screaming Frog is an industry standard for dedicated site crawlers. All other crawlers are going to be compared to Screaming Frog, and for good reason. Screaming Frog is great for doing a quick crawl of a small site, or if you only need to look at a section of a site.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The main use of this software is in tracking down broken links within a given website. Screaming Frog is able to crawl an entire site based on the home page, then look at external links on each page and find out where they are no longer working - returning a specific HTTP head error (such as 404). The crawl results can be saved, so it's easy to return to a previous project. The software also offers a lot of SEO insight including anchor texts, indexability, meta titles, H1 and H2 usage, word count, file size and more.
  • Scans all pages on a website.
  • Quickly extracts valuable insight about each page.
  • Clearly presents actionable SEO data.
  • Interface layout is dense and a little intimidating to a new user.
  • Slight learning curve to make the most of all the features.
If you're an experienced SEO consultant and know what to look for - you'll find a lot of actionable insights in this software. A single site scan can result in days worth of actionable work in improving site structure, content, HTML tags, outbound links and more.

A beginner in the field of SEO may struggle a bit as they don't know the implications of many pieces of data (such as H1 tag use). It is assumed that the user understands these concepts.
Brynna Baldauf | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My team and I use Screaming Frog to crawl websites to better understand the site hierarchy, unravel internal linking structures and verify live links across hundreds of domains. We can also easily find and download page titles, descripts and H1 tags in addition to the canonical links a page. What you can do with Screaming Frog is really limited by your imagination and desires. Our entire SEO team uses the product with every client that we touch and as a whole, the company has integrated Screaming Frog into every phase of the sales funnel. Our sales team uses it to estimate how big a site is and how many hours might be needed while our marketing team uses it to find the best placement for creative materials. It helps us to find information on a site without manually sifting through each webpage.
  • Check status codes for a set of URLs - Simply copy and paste the URLs into the open box and within minutes you are able to see the status code, response time and potential redirects for any of the URLs. While there are online versions of this, Screaming Frog has the best copy/paste option and includes any other URL data you might need as well.
  • Crawl URLs for a Custom Text - Without developing your own spider, there is no other way to do this other than visit each URL individually. This has saved us countless hours verifying proper analytics code implementation across an entire website and finding client mentions across hundreds of links.
  • Finding Canonical Links - Every time Screaming Frog crawls a link or site they report back the basic information which happens to include canonical links. Again, without building your own spider or reviewing hundreds of URLs it would be a lengthy task to find all of this information.
  • Customizing the crawler - It takes a little bit of playing around with the settings to understand what each of them controls and what options need to be checked or unchecked to get the right amount of information.
  • Cannot Crawl a large site - Screaming Frog runs out of memory when asked to crawl a large site, even after playing around with memory settings and allocating additional memory.
I would recommend Screaming Frog for anyone looking to crawl a large number of URLs or a small to medium size site. It does not handle large sites as well, as it runs out of memory, even with custom memory allocation. To crawl a large site I would recommend Xenu instead - you get less information but it can verify a larger number of URLs without running out of memory.
Scott Walker | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
When doing SEO for any of our websites, I like to start by using Screaming Frog to crawl the site. This gives me a starting point to examine meta data, see how discoverable the pages are on the website, and build the sitemap for submission. This is especially useful on web platforms that don't have their own sitemap generator.
  • Sitemap building.
  • Site crawling.
  • The UI is a bi confusing, especially for the uninitiated.
  • Though very customizable, default settings can cause server issues due to high traffic.
Screaming Frog is a go-to tool for SEOs. If you're in charge of your company's SEO strategy and you aren't buying into one of the larger SaaS systems like Moz, then Screaming Frog is almost a necessary tool. Not only does it build your sitemap for you to host on the website and submit to the search engines, but it also allows you to find all the metadata like page titles and descriptions, discover broken links or non-navigable pages, and find all your current redirects.
Frank Watson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Having been doing SEO for 20 plus years - Screaming Frog SEO has been a tool that since it first launched that I have used consistently. It crawls a site and gives insights into all areas that technical SEO needs to examine. I highly recommend this tool - use it - learn how to read the numbers and develop responses to the information - whether it is duplicate tags and content, use of H tags, internal and external linking - the tool covers all the areas you need to improve the organic rankings of your site
  • Check title and description lengths
  • See duplicate title and descriptions
  • Could break results out into categories to streamline and quicken the process.
  • The schema information is lacking.
I use Screaming Frog SEO for specific things - tags, content, links - the areas they do not cover there are other tools to use.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is used by the SEO department for crawling and website troubleshooting needs. It helps us see all URLs on a site. It helps us notice if there is missing or duplicative metadata. It helps identify 404s or other issues with URLs. It also helps generate an xml sitemap file.
  • Crawling an entire website
  • Gathering all URLs on the site
  • Telling you where a 404ing URL was found on the site
  • It crashes sometimes when you first open it
It is very useful for situations where you want to see all URLs on a site. It's very useful for when you're re-launching a website and need to gather all the URLs on the site. It's useful after launching a site to see if there are any broken 404ing URLs on the site. It's also useful for seeing if you're missing any titles, descriptions, etc. or if any meta data is duplicate. You can also filter results based on specific criteria, such as "show me all urls with titles that say _____". It's not useful for finding exactly where a 404ing URL is linked to on your site (at least, not to my knowledge).
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's used in the search and analytics department. I use it for crafting pitches - getting insights on possible site issues on a client site - troubleshooting any site issues for active clients, and completing audits, particularly tracking internal linking webs, scraping metadata, and assessing status code issues - both within the web app and in Excel spreadsheets.
  • I love the ability to scrape all internal links on the site - even with anchor text! Great for troubleshooting site circulation.
  • The Building Tree view is useful for quick visualization of the site structure.
  • I just love being able to scrape all the metadata - makes the setup for optimization super easy.
  • The Crawl Tree Graph always seems like it would be great, but the output is extremely unwieldy
  • Sometimes the status codes come out wrong - I always feel the need to double-check a few, when I end up with a list of 404s—and often I need to run them again in list mode to get the proper code. Not sure why!
  • I wish you could save a crawl within the platform - say I crawl a site, then crawl a different one, and want to poke around within the platform at that first site again. It seems I just have to perform the crawl again, rather than being able to load up an old crawl.
Screaming Frog is fantastic for digging in for an SEO audit. It's the first thing I do when I start looking at a site—throw the domain in the Screaming Frog. Then I can export a few views and start sorting by status code, empty or duplicate metadata, canonicals, etc. Filtering the URLs allows me to get a good handle on the URL hierarchies. I can knock out a big chunk of the technical audit in a few steps with Screaming Frog!
October 25, 2019

Site audits start here

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Screaming Frog is where every site audit begins. More and more, Google cares about the integrity of a site's links, tags and page structure. Given the importance of search to our business, losing rank because of broken links and missing tags is an unacceptable loss. SF helps us make sure we're producing top-quality pages and maximizing our search potential.
  • Validates tags.
  • It helps with canonicalization.
  • Corrects problems with no index.
  • Checks internal and external links.
  • Screaming Frog runs locally. It would be nice to see a pure cloud-based version.
  • It's a very complete piece of software which means it can take a while to learn.
Most organizations have lots of older web content. These pages may not be up to modern standards. SF helps to quickly analyze thousands of pages for errors and bring older pages up to web standards.
Roman Yarovyi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are a small company that focuses on digital marketing and SEO service for our clients. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a great tool to check out what internal structure a client website has. It works like Google robot and scans a website for links and makes list of website pages. After a full scan, you get a report about the basic info of these pages (meta tags, different kinds of errors) and you can create a sitemap with pages and images.
  • You receive a report with internal structure of the website (Pages with status codes, depth structure)
  • List of the pages with incorrect meta tags: meta titles & descriptions, also H1 tags
  • List of the pages with insecure content and links to this content
  • List with 404 errors and response codes
  • List with pages where there is Google Analytics ID mismatch
  • Can create sitemap with pages and images
  • You can't pay per projects, only a subscription is available
  • You need a lot of RAM for big websites (more then 10 millions pages)
  • No cloud version
It's a good tool to check out the internal structure of client's website, create a tree with pages. You can check out a website like Google robot and understand which pages can be visited and what content can be submitted to Google. Also, this utility will create reports with different errors, like 404 pages, incorrect meta tags like long meta titles and descriptions, and missing H1 tags. And you can create sitemaps with pages and images if you need.
Justin Roodman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I currently use Screaming Frog as one of the tools for managing and maintaining our company websites. I primarily use the program for doing SEO audits. I use it to verify links and find broken ones, identify content types and scripts, find duplicate content, and create XML sitemaps. Analyzing our sites allows us to detect potential SEO issues proactively and make educated decisions about site content.
  • Finds broken links (404 pages). Broken links hurt user experience.
  • Identifies pages that include meta directives like nofollow/noindex/canonical etc. Helps understand what your pages tell crawlers to do.
  • Get information about all of the internal and external links on my site (anchor text, links per page, etc). Helps in identifying key word choices and page weight.
  • Requires Java. This isn't a huge deal as many computers already have it installed, but it's yet another 3rd party component.
  • The free version has a crawl limit of 500 pages per site. This is fine for smaller sites, but if you're running a big e-commerce site then you'll need to pay for Pro version.
  • The user interface isn't very pretty. This is an analytics tool so it doesn't really have to be, but it might be helpful for improving the overall user experience.
Screaming Frog tracks the crawl level, internal links, outbound links, title tags, and meta descriptions of the pages it crawls. It also adds HTTP status codes, title tag length, meta description length, H1, H2 tags and lengths, and canonical tags. Many of these elements are also broken into their own tabs at the top so that you can easily focus in on problem areas. You can right-click on any URL for many more options. The program is definitely valuable to anyone who is looking to gauge factors regarding SEO. However, if you are not a web designer/admin, you're going to lack an understanding of the information it provides.
Geoffrey Hoesch | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Screaming Frog helps us identify pages with 404s, broken links, and canonical issues. We've used it for years to identify issues that would take significantly longer to identify without the app.
  • It identifies broken links to a website and helps with link reclamation.
  • It scans all pages on a site and provides status codes, helping identify areas that need fixing.
  • It helps us easily download Titles and Descriptions for an entire website. This is particularly useful for SEO.
  • It's a very pared down app and requires a decent amount of technical SEO expertise to fully comprehend. I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing, but it makes it difficult to understand for some first-time users.
Screaming Frog as an invaluable tool for SEO. It's great for conducting site audits and identifying site issues.
Scott Richardson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Screaming Frog SEO Spider to perform SEO audits for current and prospective clients. It allows us to get an all-encompassing view of the technical SEO elements of a website. I currently use only use the free version, as I find the cost prohibitive for what I use it for.
  • Analyzes all metadata
  • Character counts of all metadata
  • identifies missing alt text on all images
  • identifies all H1 and H2 headlines
  • identifies broken links and loops
  • The GUI is a little old school
  • No cloud version is available...desktop version only (Chromebooks are SOL)
  • Pricing isn't terrible...but there is no monthly option. £149.00 or roughly $190USD/yr.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is perfect for quick SEO audits to show prospective clients where their websites are falling short. It covers all the details you'd want an SEO audit tool to cover. It is probably a little confusing at first to beginner SEO's as it is fairly technical and as stated before, the GUI is not all that user friendly.
Jon Kaspszak | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I've been using Screaming Frog SEO Spider for about a year now.

The tool is great for running a speedy SEO audit of an entire domain.

We got value out of the paid subscription after migrating a site over to a new URL format. It was useful for pinpointing all broken links which needed redirection.

I'd recommend the tool for anyone looking to get a bird's-eye view of there site's technical SEO health. I'd say it's good to have a basic understanding of technical SEO when using the tool. If you don't, I'm sure there are blog posts and downloaded content provided by Screaming Frog to guide your efforts.
  • Site wide Technical SEO analysis
  • Pinpointing broken links
  • Providing text based on page SEO details
  • Fast run time
  • Exporting features. There are good exporting features available, but when trying to export detailed information, it's hard to retrieve.
Well suited for: Site wide analysis technical SEO

Not well suited for: Someone looking for simple SEO recommendations.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Screaming Frog has generally been utilized only by myself in all SEO roles that I've had in the past, as well as now. I absolutely love Screaming Frog. It makes website audits so simple, but it's an incredibly powerful tool. It solves the problem of knowing what's going on in your site, and what you can solve to have better on-page SEO.
  • Finding broken links on your site - I’ve yet to use a tool that lists broken links as simply as Screaming Frog SEO Spider.
  • Finding redirect loops - These are rare, but when they happen, they’re annoying and can negatively affect your SEO. Luckily, Screaming Frog points these out very simply.
  • Page analysis - Some other tools are more “plain speak” than Screaming Frog SEO Spider, and some may view this as a con. I see the technical side of this tool as an extreme benefit. In my world you can have easy or you can have powerful, but it’s extremely different to have both. As it relates to page analysis, it gives you simple, technical, actionable data to make your recommended changes.
  • I have 0 complaints about Screaming Frog SEO Spider. What it claims to do, it does well. It’s the industry standard for sure. I don’t say this being biased - I’ve just tried many tools to do the things that this tool does, and Screaming Frog SEO Spider is my favorite.
If you have a site that you care about or are doing client work for SEO, you can't afford not to have Screaming Frog SEO Spider. There are other tools out there that do similar things, but so far, I haven't found any that do it as solidly as this app. My recommendation - they have a free version. Try it out first, test it out. Spend some time with it. I used the free version for the first while, as I wanted to become acquainted with it. To unlock its full potential, you need to get the paid plan. But the free version is enough for you to realize how powerful this tool is.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Screaming Frog SEO Spider was used to help us determine which pages on our website were missing important meta data.
  • Scan your entire website for missing meta data.
  • Easily allowed us to identify duplicate pages on our website.
  • Assisted us in finding broken links quickly and easily.
  • It would be nice if the free version scanned more than 500 pages and included the crawl configuration features. Even better would be if there was a free fully functional version available for a time limited period. This would allow us to better determine if the product would meet all of our needs.
It's a great product for small sites. Seemed to take a while to run a scan on our entire website (10,000+ pages).
Jake Pittman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Screaming Frog is peerless among SEO tools. The SEO individuals at Clicky use it for a range of different reasons, however, it is used by other people within the marketing team when necessary.

Screaming Frog is really the only tool that pulls out all relevant SEO-related information of a website. If we need all the page titles for each URL on a domain, or if we simply want all the URLs on a domain, we use Screaming Frog. We wouldn't be able to do our jobs without it.
  • Very quick at crawling a website.
  • Pulls out comprehensive information for each URL.
  • Able to export information to CSV files and others.
  • Screaming Frog needs to have a function allowing the user to pull out ALL information, not just sections such as inlinks, outlinks etc.
  • Users should be able to filter non-HTML pages with the click of a button, as opposed to having to manually exclude them.
  • Visually, it could be improved.
Screaming Frog is suitable when one needs to crawl a website and find page titles, meta information, directives for thousands of pages very quickly. Screaming Frog also pulls information such as broken links and 404 pages. As all of the information is displayed as tables, Screaming Frog is perhaps unsuitable for client-facing documents, audits, and reports.
Tim Colling | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Screaming Frog to analyze websites that fall into a number of categories:
  • For websites that we create and manage: to watch for emerging problems like newly broken external links.
  • For websites of new clients and prospective new clients: to analyze site structure for the sake of identifying defects and planning to repair them, as well as to detect internal and external 404s (broken links) for the sake of fixing or removing them.
  • For websites of competitors to our company or competitors to our clients to look for opportunities to learn from what they have done well or done poorly.
  • Crawls the structure of any website, producing a variety of reports that are useful
  • Helps identify defects like broken links that need fixing
  • The interface for Screaming Frog is "terse" and not easy to understand at first. With practice, though, it can be learned.
  • The price is sinfully expensive.
Well suited: analyzing websites' structure and link quality
Less appropriate: other tasks not supported by it, such as backlink analysis, visitor traffic stats or keyword ranking; also, where the user has a very limited budget
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