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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 …
Continue reading
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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

(1-24 of 24)
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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 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Screaming Frog to perform site audits on both our own corporate sites and competitor sites. It’s a handy way to surface issues like error pages, redirect chains, and a host of other concerns. It’s also a good way to find a list of all the URLs available on our sites.
  • You can easily scan any site.
  • With the paid version, there is no page limit for scans.
  • It provides a wide variety of information about the URL that you scan.
  • Reduce the amount of system resources each scan requires.
  • Create an easy way to compare multiple URLs to make competitive analysis easier.
  • Improve the backlink capabilities.
It works well for any sized business, thanks to the variety of information that it uncovers for whatever URL you research. I like how it’s industry-agnostic and how it lets you research both your own site(s) as easily as competitor sites. I do wish there was an easy way to research multiple URLs (or at least two) to do some real competitive analysis.
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.
April 22, 2020

Screaming Frog SEO

Rolly Chin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Screaming Frog is used by SEO Specialists in the whole organization. With Screaming Frog, we get crawling and indexing issues to be solved.
  • It is easy to use.
  • Can be integrated with Google Lighthouse
  • Can be integrated with Google Search Console
  • We can extract some extra information from our website.
  • It is not a cloud software.
  • For large websites we need to wait a lot.
Screaming Frog SEO is well suited for small and medium websites. But for large websites, it is not.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Screaming Frog SEO Spider in our marketing team to solve a number of website related problems. We initially started using Screaming Frog SEO Spider to crawl websites we were working on to develop a list of pages, titles, meta data, and more. We use this data as a basis for our website content audits.
  • Website crawling.
  • Meta data extraction.
  • Free version limited.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is great for web development teams and SEO teams. For web development teams, Screaming Frog SEO Spider provides data that will become the basis of your content audit. For SEO teams, you can use the crawled data to analyze titles, meta descriptions and more in bulk, without visiting from page to page.
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.
Jeff Smith | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Screaming Frog is our go-to audit tool when first looking at a potential new project. Even the free version of Screaming Frog is quite useful. It is used company-wide and it the fastest way we have found to get a good "look" at the on-page health of a site. And with the paid version it allows integration with Google Analytics and Search Console (WMT). With SF and Google Sheets you can build a fairly comprehensive overview of metas, alt tags, image size, titles, H tags, etc. in a very short amount of time.
  • A solid crawler with a lot of options.
  • Allows one to see the core SEO elements of a site very quickly.
  • The paid version is a bit pricey but for what it does it's worth it.
  • The UX can see a bit confusing at first, but once you begin to use it the learning curve is quick.
If you are doing SEO audits, I think Screaming Frog is the best first-line tool for looking at a site. I have not found another tool that is capable of doing what Screaming From can in a very short amount of time. I do not use it for Looking at the technical side of a site, there are better tools for that. But for getting a feel for how well a site has been maintained as far as core on-site factors and being able to pull that data to build spreadsheets, SF is the best I have found.
November 07, 2019

Screaming Frog Review

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Screaming Frog to give a high-level overview and almost a self-audit style report on our site health. Screaming Frog's crawling capabilities make pulling reports quick and convenient. The content of the reports gives us a total aerial snapshot of site pages and allows for quick changes to be made.
  • Quick crawls.
  • The free version is pretty comprehensive.
  • Reports able to pull in CSV format.
  • Premium version could be cheaper.
  • Integration with other analytics tools - Currently just GA.
  • A scheduling option for the free version would be great.
Screaming Frog is a great lightweight tool for pulling quick reports and giving a great snapshot of how your site is performing from a health perspective. Lots of great features and does pretty much everything one would want from an SEO tool. The free version is really comprehensive and this tool should be in the roster of every SEO team.
Robbin Block | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Screaming Frog is essential to providing SEO services to all my clients. We also use it for gaining insights about our own website. It's great for winning potential clients because it very quickly and easily reveals issues with their websites. And finally, it's just good for making the back-end of any website transparent, which is helpful for other aspects of marketing, i.e., exploring the competition.
  • It has a reliable user interface that makes it easy and fast to scan a website.
  • Reveals issues and opportunities for website optimization.
  • It allows you to filter results, so you can drill down to where the problems are.
  • You can export lists, so clients can either fix issues themselves or it's "proof" of what you're working on for them.
  • There's a bit of jargon in terms of labeling, and with so much data available, it would be nice to have "inline" explanations of what we're looking at.
  • Perhaps better graphical representations of the data, which would be helpful when explaining it to clients.
  • Maybe offer recommendations for fixing issues that are found with a website?
Screaming Frog is the perfect tool for getting into the backend of a website. It's easy to use, at the right price point (the free version is robust), and it's always being updated, so you can rely on it to be current. It's suitable for anyone needing to optimize a website, doing competitive research, and exploring opportunities to help clients (and sell services to new ones).
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.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My company builds websites for clients, and something we focus on is SEO. That being said, it's important to the health of every website to ensure proper 301 redirects are in place before launching a brand new version of the website. If URLs change but old ones are still being crawled by search engines, this is a huge detriment to the visibility of the website.

As a champion for our clients, it's necessary to anticipate these changes before it becomes too late. Screaming Frog SEO Spider has made it extremely easy for us to pinpoint which URLs will need to be redirected. It completely takes the guesswork out of ensuring accuracy.
  • It's simple to use. Just add in the URL you need to crawl and within minutes, it's ready to go.
  • It breaks down URLs and site components by HTML, Images, etc. so you know what to look for.
  • It's easily exportable so you can download the spreadsheet and get to work.
  • Because there's so much information given, it's difficult for a novice user to instantly understand where to look.
  • The overall UX could use some updating. Next steps aren't always super clear.
If you're in the business of building websites, this tool will save you tons of time when it comes to implementing those redirects before launch. It's also helpful if you're involved in search engine optimization or search engine marketing. You can quickly run a report on the website and have a good launch pad so you know where to get to work.
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.
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.
Anthony Daronzio | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Screaming Frog is a standard tool of operation since I introduced it a couple years ago. We use it to perform crawls of sites that we are auditing for SEO, crawls of sites we have built to check for errors, both in staging and development. The project management team now uses it to QA certain implementations of tags, or other aspects on the site.
  • Best tool to crawl a site, hands down.
  • Configurable for custom data extractions.
  • In-depth exports for reporting.
  • Configurable connections to Analytics and Search Console.
  • Wealth of online documentation.
  • Exporting one report at time to CSV or XSLX can be cumbersome and time consuming.
  • Custom extraction requires pretty in-depth knowledge of RegEx or XPath.
  • Not a very visual tool.
  • Larges sites can take up a tremendous amount of resources (RAM, space, connection).
Screaming Frog is the best tool to crawl any site, anywhere, hands down. We use it for all of our SEO auditing purposes. We also use it to quality check new builds in both staging and live environments, some behind password restrictions and other various logins. Even our project management team has found use with it to quickly check changes across multiple pages instead of going to each page one by one. This tool is not the tool for you if you are looking for something to generate auditing reports. This will not will not make a pretty PDF of it's findings for you to show management or send to a client. It gives your raw data which you can export into a CSV or Excel, but will not help in the reporting process if you are looking for something to auto generate a report or insights.
Sean Pomory | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Screaming Frog as a fundamental piece of our SEO strategy. The tool empowers us to dive deeper into information we find in Google Analytics and Search Console. We use it to crawl our external sites, discover 301 redirect chains, check on SERPs, and run basic visualization reports. It is essential to our technical SEO tactics.
  • Quickly crawling sites with thousands of pages.
  • Fantastic customer support and support portal.
  • Great UI, very intuitive and not flashy.
  • Great visualizations.
  • Great export option which can be helpful when sending to those without access to the tool.
  • Updates too frequently and is sometimes unclear on what the update is for. Since I use this on my work desktop primarily, I have to go through our help desk to update. Which turns a quick process into a much more involved, time consuming endeavor.
  • An integration with a CMS (Drupal or WordPress in particular) seems like a great next step.
  • Entry level technical SEO is easy to do. More advanced tools and reports can be difficult to find.
As mentioned in a previous review, Google Search Console is necessary to work with Google. Screaming Frog is necessary to get the most out of Google Search Console. Search Console notoriously has issues with accurate data. I've never felt that Screaming Frog is giving me incorrect information.The tool may be unnecessary for an entry level dev or technical marketer, but it is needed with any site over 100 pages. Approaching thousands of pages, I don't know how we'd get on without it.
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.
Amanda Tessier | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is used by the digital marketing team within the larger marketing department. It helps identify load speed, on-page SEO elements including title tags and meta descriptions, and assess technical health of website.
  • Measure and report on load time and response codes of pages.
  • Custom search can identify pages missing analytics tagging.
  • Export on-page SEO elements to update title tags, meta descriptions, and alt tags.
  • The ability to not only crawl pages for current elements but to push updates to them would be most helpful.
Screaming Frog is a great tool for any team maintaining a website or launching new sites. If you have even more than 1 website, this tool is well worth the investment to assess and manage websites based on SEO-best practices. It's the foundation of any good web-presence strategy to identify load times, on-page SEO elements, and response codes for improved user experience.
Jane Phelps | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Screaming Frog to scan all URLs of a website. Then we parse the information off into sections: error codes, titles, meta descriptions, H1s and word count. It is then exported into Excel where we can analyze the current health of the site. This information provides us with great detail and a nice format where we can provide recommendations.
  • Scans pages that we may not know exist.
  • Provides a great export of information that can be manipulated into a useful document.
  • Provides summaries of each area for a quick look at what elements need attention first.
  • Sometimes a website is large enough that you can run out of memory. There is a way to fix that in the Screaming Frog platform, however I feel like it takes a programmer to figure out and configure the crawl. I wish there was an easy button!
Most important scenario is to get a comprehensive list of all URLs within the website including SEO elements. You do need the paid version though if the site is over 500 pages. There are other tools better suited for a technical audit.
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).
Joseph Miller | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Screaming Frog for adhoc competitor research, site health checks, page list building, sitemap creation and verification primarily. Any time a site health issue crops up that prompts someone to ask "can you quickly check XYZ?" it's typically easiest to go with Screaming Frog.
  • Sitemap generation
  • Adhoc site crawls with particular settings. For example, crawling all URLs on a specific subdomain or with certain URL parameters
  • SEO attribute verification. Say you updated a title template and want to verify across a large batch of pages.
  • Verifying redirects are in place
  • Since its Java based desktop software, the memory management is always clunky
  • It would be great to have a cloud based option. For instance something run off Amazon's cloud services.
  • Easier management of license keys when switching computers
Screaming Frog is a great fit for almost any enterprise level site. For sites with less than 1000 URLs it is probably overkill, although you could get by with the free version.
September 04, 2015

Screaming Frog Review

Sungwan Jo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Screaming Frog to crawl our sites and provide SEO recommendations to our clients. From my past agency experiences, we've had multiple subscriptions for use across the organization. It helps us perform tech audits when it comes to meta data and content, it also allows us to help understand how efficeiently a website can be crawled and indexed.

In addition, we also use Screaming Frog to educate our clients on the various ways that SEO, PPC and other marketing folks can use the tool for site audits, keyword research, competitive analysis, link building and more.
  • Screaming Frog does a comprehensive job of crawling our sites and returning back important things such as meta data and technical directives.
  • We love testing redirects with Screaming Frog.
  • We also love the outlinks report to finding internal linking opps / orphan pages.
  • Screaming Frog is generally an ad hoc tool, there is no cloud functionality or monitoring like DeepCrawl has.
  • Javascript crawling.
  • More extensive scraper/custom export tool.
How will this be used? DeepCrawl is less technical and allows for newbies to understand the reports better. Screaming Frog is an older tool where you have cult followers.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Screaming Frog is used in mostly just our Digital Marketing Department. We use this tool to determine if pages are missing meta data or if pages have meta data that is too short or too long. We use this tool to collect all the pages that Google crawls when re-writing and building new sitemaps for clients. This tool is also able to address any 404 or 500 issues that need to be attended to. When meeting with new clients we run their URL through Screaming Frog and are able to tell them where their sites current weaknesses are and how we would be able to improve them.
  • Collects all indexed HTML pages of the site. This helps for when we are redirecting old URLs to the URLs of a clients new site.
  • Finds all page titles that are too long or too short and allows us to address them more quickly than waiting for a program such as Moz. It's more immediate.
  • If we have duplicate meta data on pages, this program allows us to find them, sort them, export them and take care of them in a timely manner. In our business (as for many) time is money.
  • Updates. When it wants you to update, you get a pop up, then when you finally agree, it takes you to the website and you have to download it all over again.. Just update!
I would have a coworker use Screaming Frog SEO Spider to determine meta data completeness and consistency. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is also well suited for showing us which pages Google is crawling or not. In one instance, I was looking up a site's meta data info and Screaming Frog found no pages - discovered the site was down. I would not have them use Screaming Frog SEO Spider for keywords. Keywords and keyword ranking is important in our industry and this is something we have to move to a different tool such as Moz for.
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