How to use Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a powerful desktop-based website crawler that helps SEOs, marketers, and web developers audit and analyze website SEO performance. It mimics how search engines crawl a website, revealing issues related to on-page SEO, site architecture, broken links, duplicate content, redirects, and more.

✅ What is Screaming Frog SEO Spider?

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawling tool that scans URLs, images, scripts, and CSS from your website — just like Googlebot — and gives you a detailed SEO audit report in real time.

It’s available as:

Free Version (up to 500 URLs per crawl)
Paid Version (unlimited URLs + advanced features)

Official site: https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

🔍 What Can You Do With Screaming Frog?

Feature	Use
✅ Find Broken Links	Identify 404 pages and broken internal/external links
✅ Analyze Page Titles & Meta Data	Detect missing or duplicate titles, metas
✅ Audit Redirects	Find temporary (302) or permanent (301) redirects
✅ Discover Duplicate Content	Find duplicate content, headers, meta tags
✅ Review Robots.txt & Directives	See how bots are instructed to crawl your site
✅ Generate XML Sitemaps	Create and export XML sitemaps easily
✅ Visualize Site Architecture	Get crawl depth & internal link structure
✅ Crawl JavaScript Sites	Crawl dynamic content rendered by JS
✅ Integrate Google Analytics & GSC	Combine crawl data with real traffic insights

🛠️ How to Use Screaming Frog (Step-by-Step)

1. Download & Install

Go to: https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
Install for Windows, macOS, or Ubuntu.

2. Enter Your Website URL

Launch the tool and enter your domain:

arduinoCopyEdithttps://vijayreddy.in

Click “Start” — it will begin crawling all internal URLs.

3. View the Crawl Results

You’ll see tabs for:

Internal
External
Response Codes
Page Titles
Meta Descriptions
H1s
Images
Canonicals
Directives
Duplicate content

Each tab shows SEO insights and issues per URL.

📊 Key Tabs Explained

🔗 Internal Links

Find all internal URLs and check crawl depth
Identify broken internal links (status 404)
Use the “Inlinks” tab to see which pages link to a particular URL

🧾 Page Titles & Meta Descriptions

Detect missing, duplicate, or over/under length titles/descriptions
Optimize for keyword targeting and CTR

🖼️ Images

Find images without ALT tags
Check image sizes that affect load speed

🔁 Redirects

Identify 301, 302, or redirect chains
Clean up loops or unnecessary redirects

🚫 Robots & Directives

See which URLs are blocked via robots.txt or meta robots
Spot noindex, nofollow pages

⚙️ Advanced Features (Paid Version)

Feature	Benefit
Custom Extraction	Scrape data using XPath, CSSPath or regex
JavaScript Rendering	Crawl dynamic content (React, Angular, etc.)
Scheduling	Automate weekly/monthly crawls
Crawl Comparison	Compare two crawls and spot changes
API Access	Connect with GSC, GA, PageSpeed Insights, etc.

🔁 How to Use Screaming Frog for SEO Optimization

✔️ Fix Broken Links:

Go to Response Codes > Client Error (4xx)
Export and redirect or remove broken links

✔️ Improve Titles & Metas:

Check Page Titles / Meta Descriptions
Rewrite duplicates, and shorten long titles

✔️ Optimize Internal Linking:

Use Inlinks tab to find orphan pages
Improve internal link structure for better crawlability

✔️ Clean Redirects:

Go to Redirects tab
Avoid 302 redirects unless temporary
Fix redirect chains

✔️ Improve Site Architecture:

Use Site Visualisation → Force-Directed Crawl Tree
Identify deep pages (over 3 clicks from homepage)

💡 Tips for Best Use

Run a crawl after every major website update
Schedule monthly crawls for consistent auditing
Combine with Google Analytics, Search Console, Ahrefs for full-stack SEO
Export reports in Excel or CSV for analysis

📦 Pricing

Version	Price
Free	500 URLs per crawl, limited features
Paid	£199/year (about ₹21,000/year) for unlimited URLs & advanced features

🧠 Final Thoughts

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a must-have tool for serious SEO professionals, digital marketers, and web developers. It gives you complete control over your site’s technical and on-page SEO health.

With regular crawls, you can:

Prevent traffic drops
Fix SEO errors before Google notices
Enhance performance and rankings