Screaming Frog SEO Spider: A Free, Do-it-Yourself SEO Tool

There are countless resources available that can provide valuable insight and recommendations into the “SEO” of your website. There are companies that will analyze your site and make (or execute) on suggestions for improvement, and there are various tools, both paid and free, that can help businesses do it on their own. One of the best free SEO tools is from Screaming Frog.

After installing the program on your machine, run your website through it. The tool will grab key elements associated with SEO as if it were a search engine indexing your site. The resulting report dumps the data into Excel so it’s easy to sort. From here, depending on your familiarity with the concepts, you can see what’s missing or what could use some work for improving the organic ranking of your website.

There are a few small differences between the paid and free versions of the tool; for most of us, the free tool is more than sufficient. If your website is small, with only a handful of pages, some of the elements are easy to spot without needing the tool, but for larger websites it is incredibly useful in quickly identifying elements such as:

  • Duplicate content
  • Page errors and redirects
  • Broken links

As well as the more obvious elements, like page title, use of alt and header attributes, meta descriptions, etc.

An obvious disadvantage to the tool is while it provides the data, it doesn’t do the work for you – you need to have the ability (and knowledge) to go into the backend of your website and make the necessary changes. Some elements are fairly intuitive, others not as much, so if there’s confusion, it can be helpful to consult with an individual or organization who regularly performs this kind of service!