According to experts, Screaming Frog is one of the best SEO tools available, especially when considering the value for money. Screaming Frog is a crawler that thoroughly analyzes your website. The goal is to determine how your website performs in terms of SEO. This allows you to identify areas that could be improved.
Below, you’ll first find an overview of the key features, so you know what Screaming Frog can be used for. Then we’ll list the pros and cons of this SEO tool.
What can you use Screaming Frog for?
With Screaming Frog, you can uncover a wealth of SEO-related information about your website. The following aspects are particularly useful for your website’s SEO:
- Screaming Frog provides insight into the quality of your URLs. This is particularly useful if they are found to be too long and/or too complex. After all, short, easy-to-remember URLs are preferred.
- Screaming Frog maps out the meta titles and meta descriptions and analyzes their structure. Consider, for example, duplicate titles or descriptions, as well as those that are too short or too long. These titles and meta descriptions have a major impact on the CTR, or click-through rate, of your SEO rankings.
- Images on your webpage make both the text and the page itself more appealing. Using images that are too large is not advisable, and Screaming Frog will alert you to this. Large images (i.e., image files larger than roughly 500 KB) cause your website to load more slowly. You’ll gain insight into which images these are, so you can resize them, for example using the free tool Pixlr.
- From an SEO perspective, it’s wise to provide each web page with unique content. If you’re using the same text on different pages—or, more accurately, duplicate content—Screaming Frog will flag this. You can then fix it.
- A strong internal link structure is essential for both search engine optimization and the user-friendliness of your website. Screaming Frog analyzes this link structure. Based on this analysis, you can implement improvements so that your most important internal pages gain more link value.
- In principle, you can crawl almost anything that can be crawled on a website, but this requires more experience with the tool. Consider, for example, checking the Google Analytics pixel on your website: with Screaming Frog, you can verify whether this script is present on all pages—or not.
The pros and cons of Screaming Frog
Based on the existing pros and cons, you can ultimately decide whether Screaming Frog is the right tool for you. That’s why we’ve listed these pros and cons for you, starting with the positives:
- As you’ve read above, the tool offers numerous features that will ultimately take your website’s SEO to the next level.
- Screaming Frog offers a free version that allows you to crawl up to 500 URLs. For free software, that’s a pretty generous offer.
- The paid version of this tool, with an annual fee of around 150 to 200 euros, is certainly not expensive.
In contrast to the advantages mentioned above, Screaming Frog has the following (potential) disadvantages:
- For large websites, the free version certainly does not offer enough capacity.
- Screaming Frog does not provide context regarding, for example, backlinks to your website, as SEMrush or Majestic SEO do. It is therefore particularly suitable for checking the “hygiene factors” on your website, but not much more than that.
In short, Screaming Frog is a very suitable tool for SEO, but not a tool that can handle every aspect of SEO. We recommend combining Screaming Frog with, for example, SEMrush and/or Majestic SEO so you can get the most out of your website’s SEO.
