Screaming Frog, you might have seen the name pop up in your LinkedIn feed or in SEO blogs. But what is Screaming Frog and what can you do with it?
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is an application that can mimic the crawl of various types of bots, such as the Googlebot, on your websites and domains. The application provides you with feedback and data on how your website is perceived by search engines. Are certain pages missing an H1, or is indexing blocked without you realizing it? The Screaming Frog SEO Spider gives you easy and quick insights into this.
The data that Screaming Frog collects for you can show you how you are discoverable online for crawl bots. This can then help you optimize your website for search engines.
When you start Screaming Frog and begin a crawl, you will quickly be overwhelmed by the many different tabs and rows of data streaming in. Listing everything Screaming Frog reads for you here would quickly fill this page, so we prefer to focus on our favorite features!
Screaming Frog SEO Insights
Screaming Frog provides you with a very comprehensive analysis of your website, spread across different tabs, pages, graphs, and tables. If you look at the box in the top left of the application's interface, you will find a long list of tabs with various types of information, which is summarized for you on the right in the application, with visual support.
In this list of tabs, you will immediately find several handy pages that give you quick insights into your website. For example, you can check the status of the following SEO elements:
- Page indexability
- Status code
- H1 and H2 heading elements
- SEO page titles
- Meta descriptions
- Alt tags for images
- Number of internal links to page
- Canonicals
Screaming Frog Integration with Google Marketing Platform
In addition to the standard features and analysis you perform with just the Screaming Frog Spider, Screaming Frog also offers integrations with the various tools of the Google Marketing Platform. This allows you to not only retrieve standard data during a crawl but also immediately include the data you retrieve in the Google Marketing Platform.
Screaming Frog and Search Console
One of the integrations you can do is with Search Console. Through an API call between Screaming Frog and the Google Search Console, you can connect your Search Console account with Screaming Frog and select the property that belongs to your domain. Once you have set this all up, you can then retrieve the data associated with your Search Console account during a crawl.
This way, you can see for your various pages how many clicks there have been, how often they have been shown in a search result, and what click-through rate (CTR) the different pages have when they are shown as a search result. With this data, you can quickly find the pages that do not display well or do not perform well in search engines.
Screaming Frog and Google PageSpeed Insights
In addition to Search Console, you can also link Screaming Frog with PageSpeed Insights. This connection is also made with an API call, for which you need an API key from the Google Developers Console.
The connection between PageSpeed Insights and Screaming Frog allows you to test multiple pages at once to see how they score in terms of load speed. Screaming Frog provides you with the Core Web Vitals data of each page, so you can quickly see where, for example, the LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) speed is low, and address this to improve your website's performance.
Screaming Frog Version 18.0 and Google Analytics
Screaming Frog initially only supported Universal Analytics, but earlier this month there was an upgrade to version 18.0. Since version 18.0, there is also support for Google Analytics 4! This link is also established through API calls, giving Screaming Frog access to a specific account, property, view, and segment in your Google Analytics account.
After linking your account, you can choose from 65 different metrics to import from your Analytics account. Here you will find, for example, the bounce rate, the number of pages per session, and the average page load time. But also data about the events you have set up in Google Analytics 4 becomes visible in Screaming Frog, allowing you to view all your data clearly and per page.
Now that Universal Analytics is transitioning to GA4, this connection is definitely a must for Screaming Frog!
Screaming Frog Version 18.0 – PDF Support
In addition to the integration with GA4, the latest version of Screaming Frog also offers support for crawling PDFs. This allows you to quickly see what links a PDF contains, where they lead, whether they still work, and on which page of the document you can find the various links. This way, you can quickly check if the links in your whitepapers are set up correctly!
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