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Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a versatile tool that has become indispensable for various user needs. Users appreciate its effectiveness in …
Starting at $149 per year
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- Integration with web analytics tools (32)10.0100%
- Multi-domain support (28)10.0100%
- Site audit / diagnostics (50)9.696%
- Global SEO (27)9.191%
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$149.00
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- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Screaming Frog Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
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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:
- The free version of the software is sufficient for making decisions and evaluating its usefulness.
- Purchasing the software is worth the money, as it provides comprehensive crawling capabilities.
- The software is recommended for companies of any size.
- It is suggested to try out the free version before committing to the premium subscription.
- The software is a great tool for finding 404 errors and checking meta data.
- Utilize the support documentation and forums for assistance.
- The software is great for internal SEO analysis and optimization.
- Try out the free version of the software.
- The software is recommended for crawling websites and gaining insights on content and keywords.
- Do not be intimidated by the technical aspects of the software and utilize available resources for guidance.
- 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.
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Screaming Frog simulates Google's crawling of a website, allowing us to see how search engines view our website. This includes what pages it can see, whether all the features of a pages are being considered and any pages that experience technical issues that would effect Googles view of those pages.
We use this to gather intelligence of our websites pages, ensuring that we can quickly see if anything is missing from Google's point of view, or anything isn't working. It also allows us to see quickly whether changes made on our Content Management System have actually taken place and are being detected by Google. With this in mind we can also quickly see all of the websites meta data, this is used to tell Google what a page is used for. So rounding all of this up quickly, in one place can quickly indicate whether any of this is out of date.
The tool is best used for SEO purposes, and while some of the technical information is useful for general website maintenance its most useful when concerned with how Google views a website and what technical issue might prevent is ranking better in search results. So it is a narrow use case in the grand scheme of website use, but very useful within its niche.
We use this to gather intelligence of our websites pages, ensuring that we can quickly see if anything is missing from Google's point of view, or anything isn't working. It also allows us to see quickly whether changes made on our Content Management System have actually taken place and are being detected by Google. With this in mind we can also quickly see all of the websites meta data, this is used to tell Google what a page is used for. So rounding all of this up quickly, in one place can quickly indicate whether any of this is out of date.
The tool is best used for SEO purposes, and while some of the technical information is useful for general website maintenance its most useful when concerned with how Google views a website and what technical issue might prevent is ranking better in search results. So it is a narrow use case in the grand scheme of website use, but very useful within its niche.
- Screaming Frog is an excellent website crawler, creating accurate, up to date, assessments of all a websites pages
- Screaming Frog is also a fantastic tool for looking at a websites architecture, so you can see which pages are taking priority and are the most well linked around the website.
- Screaming Frog is also useful for creating an XML sitemap that can be submitted to Google to help highlight key URLs
- Screaming Frog is a software based tool (rather than all online like a lot of competitors) so it does take up memory on your computer, an online alternative would be very useful
- When crawling bigger websites, the stability of crawls is less assured and they need to be crawled slowly to accurately retrieve all data. This can make it time consuming to review big websites.
- Its a very technical tool and the interface and metrics referenced are not easy to understand at first. As such some indications in the tool itself of what each function does would be useful
September 26, 2022
Screaming Frog, the Spider that Crawls Your Website
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.
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.
May 19, 2021
Screaming for Screaming Frog
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.
January 23, 2020
Fast and accurate web crawler for SEO projects.
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.
January 18, 2020
Great free tool for small SEO budgets
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.
Our digital agency uses Screaming Frog to help with website audits specifically for SEO related information including metadata, URLs, page titles, response codes, etc. We also use the tool for new website launches to crawl the current site and export URLs to aid with the creation of 301 redirects when necessary.
- Website crawler is solid, making it easy to export into a spreadsheet.
- Analyzes page titles and meta data of your website to help with SEO.
- The UI is a little dated but has improved in recent years.
- Not as intuitive for new users, requires some getting used to and experimenting.
January 08, 2020
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is no toad!
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.
January 07, 2020
Screaming Frog is An Excellent Tool for SEO
I use Screaming Frog for every one of my clients. It allows me to quickly see if there are any underlying issues with their web pages that can be addressed to help with their rankings or usability. One crawl and I can filter in many ways to view just the data I need.
- Allows me to see what pages can be indexed by the search engines
- Shows me quickly if there is any meta information missing
- If I am working with a larger site it's difficult to get Screaming Frog to scan the whole site. I have to stop the scan and reset some settings to get it to work and even then I have had issues.
November 07, 2019
Screaming Frog Review
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.
October 25, 2019
A Fast and Easy Way to Explore SEO Opportunities on Any Website
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?
October 25, 2019
Site audits start here
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.
October 15, 2019
SEO Spider — One Spider You Won't Want to Get Rid Of
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.
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.
June 20, 2019
Simple and powerful crawler for websites
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
February 13, 2019
Weird name, solid SEO tool.
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.
December 21, 2018
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is #1 for Technical SEO Analysis
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.
November 18, 2018
Screaming Frog is The Tool Every Web Dev Needs
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.
September 28, 2018
You'd be crazy not to have Screaming Frog SEO Spider as part of your SEO suite of tools!
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.
August 03, 2018
The first step in building an SEO program to last
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.
June 28, 2018
Nice Complimentary Platform
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!
April 25, 2018
Good, well rounded SEO software
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.
April 25, 2018
Deep analysis, easy to use, flexible reports
I bought Screaming Frog to help review current and potential client onboarded websites. It helps me realize where bloat is, if there are any redirection errors, and generally be able to see the architecture and cross-linking of a site quickly. My primary use is to scan pages if I'm doing a rebuild and be able to accurately "see" any page that may not immediately be visible from front-end navigation.
- The ability to pare down any item on a site by "type"- HTML, image, scripts, etc
- A quick SEO response shows you pages with titles, without, with and without meta data so instead of combing through a site page-by-page (which is ridiculously time intensive) you can make an immediate actionable list
- It's fast. Even with ridiculously bloated sites it spiders rapidly and gives me a visual almost instantly. The various methods of reporting and exporting data are also useful. I use them all, but when reporting back to clients it can be helpful to have the charts and graphs vs just an export of cell data
- No real learning curve, all you have to do is input the URL you're looking for then the clearly labeled buttons and tabs help you start sorting what you're looking at
- I feel the top tabbing could be handled a little differently, though I'm not immediately sure how. Maybe two rows of tabs? There's so many that even on my 27" monitor it cuts off and the arrow down is almost lost beside the search arrow. I sometimes forget the other items off-screen exist
- Consider flattening the colors. While on the whole the muted color palette is fantastic and lets the data show, I feel the soft grey gradients behind bold text could honestly just become flat even color. That would allow things like buttons to pop more, with simple strokes and maybe a light color difference indicating buttons
- Make the bottom horizontal scroll bar on the main window more obvious. Almost always data is going to stretch further to the left and the bar blends in pretty closely with the stretching window beneath, and the arrows are too faint a grey. This sometimes obscures the fact there's deeper data to be seen if cut off at just the perfect point.
October 10, 2017
Great Crawl Tool for Any SEO Professional
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
September 04, 2015
Quick, Easy, and Straight to the Point Data
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!