Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is the crawling tool that is used for SEO analysis. It will help you crawl the website and collect important data of on-page SEO, such as title tags, meta descriptions, internal links and external links, images, and more. Many SEO web admins and professionals use screaming frogs to help them with website audits, find broken links and technical issues and optimize websites.

The Screaming Frog is available on desktop applications like Windows and macOS. You can use the tool for free, but it will have limited functions, and to get a wide range of functions and unlimited crawling capabilities, you need to get a paid version.

What are the Features of Screaming Frogs?

Crawling: Like a search engine bot screaming, Frog crawls websites, collects information, and analyses web pages. It also provides insights on on-page elements like title tags, meta tags, meta descriptions, internal content, etc.
Website Structure Analysis: the tools will help you understand your website structure, including internal linking, site hierarchy, and issues that may occur during crawling.

External link Analysis: Screaming Frog will help you analyze your website’s external links and their attributes, such as no follow links, anchor text, and more.
URL and Redirect analysis: server errors, redirects, and broken links can be identified with the help of the screaming frog tool within the website. This will help you identify issues of your website related to your website.

XML sitemap: Screaming Frog will help generate an XML sitemap based on crawling information, making it quick for search engines to discover and index the website.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Screaming Frog

Advantages

• It provides in-depth information about various on-page elements to help you effectively identify and solve SEO issues.
• You can export crawling information in different formats, such as Excel or CVS, enabling further analysis and reporting.
• The tool also offers user-friendly experiences that will make the process easy for beginners and SEO professionals who have been in the industry for years.
• It will help you identify technical issues like duplicate content, server errors, missing meta tags, broken links, etc. This will help you optimize your website’s overall performance and health of your website.

Disadvantages

• The screaming has paid version that will provide all the facilities. The free version has limited facilities, such as the number of crawled URL. It may restrict the usability of larger websites.
• Since it provides on-page and technical SEO insights, the tool is limited to off-page elements like backlinks and social signals.
• You need vast knowledge about the technical aspects of the screaming frog tool since it provides extensive data.
• In the tool, the larger data is crawled altogether, or even the websites with complex structures can be resource intensive, slowing your device down during the crawling process.
• The tool requires desktop applications for installation, which means you cannot it as a cloud-based tool. It also requires regular updates so that you can stay up to date on bug fixes and the latest features.

How can you Crawl on Multiple Domains with Screaming Frog?

To crawl multiple domains with Screaming Frog SEO Spider, you can follow these steps:

• Launch Screaming Frog SEO Spider.
• Go to the “Configuration” menu and select “Spider.”
• In the “Spider” tab, click on the “Mode” drop-down menu and select “List.”
• Create a text file (.txt) that contains a list of the domains you want to crawl, with each domain on a different line.
• In Screaming Frog, click on the “Upload” button and choose the file that contains the list of domains.

Once the file is uploaded, click on the “Start” button to start the crawl.
Screaming Frog will start crawling each domain in the list and collect accurate data for analysis. It will follow links within each domain and continue crawling until it reaches the limits you have set in the configuration.

It’s crucial to note that crawling multiple domains together may require extra resources and time. It depends on the website’s size and complexity. Make sure your device and internet connection can handle the workload efficiently.

Conclusion

Screaming Frog is the best crawling tool used for SEO analysis. Moreover, it would be best if you remembered that the list-based crawling mode is only available in the paid version of Screaming Frog SEO Spider. The free version limits the number of URLs that can be crawled.