Is Screaming Frog SEO Audit Tool The Best To Use In 2022?
Read this review of the Screaming Frog SEO audit tool and see how it compares with other SEO tools. Know what benefits it offers, how effective it is in terms of SEO and what to expect with this application.
Ongoing trends in digital transformation and the explosion of digital media marketing have combined to create a sort of search results ranking race among websites to land at the top of search results. Digital marketing agencies and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialists have added further fuel to the optimization fire, so to speak, with their promise that they can help websites land at the top of search lists.
To be able to do this, all these SEO specialists need to find out what optimization options have to be done on a website that has to rank up. Some of these things involve advanced technical SEO, and a look at the specific links and contents of a website. The basic idea is that it would need an audit tool such as Screaming Frog or one of those other pioneering SEO audit tools. 
What Users Like About Screaming Frog
Here's an overview of some of the reasons why users of Screaming Frog SEO Audit Tool think it's still the best SEO tool to use in 2022:What Is Screaming Frog?
Screaming Frog is a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tool. It's one of the pioneering so-called internet spiders created for use by SEO specialists such as Bud and other similar agencies. Its main purpose is to enhance the ranking of a website or page in search results, meaning you'll be among the first few things that someone doing an internet search would find.
Top-ranked websites have a higher likelihood of being clicked and thus visited by search engine users. The more visitors you have, the more your website has a higher promotion power than those that don't get as many visits. This alone is an asset that marketing agencies can offer to businesses that want to promote their products or services.
Screaming Frog can identify existing problems in your website's code by crawling over the code written on each page. It can pick out broken links and broken images. It can find orphaned pages or pages that don't have a backlink to your website, which is a common issue when migrating from a blogging platform to a fully-customized website.Screaming Frog Is A Crawler
Screaming Frog is essentially an automated internet crawler. Its primary function is to crawl the pages of a website to look for issues and problems. Think of it as some sort of digital inspector who goes over your website to find out if there are any problems or errors with the computer code which makes up your website.
To run Screaming Frog, you just have to type in your website's URL. This could be any website on which you have an admin role. It would then try to access all the pages of your website if you were able to configure your website properly. Otherwise, it will stop pages that it deems as mere duplications of higher-ranked pages.
It works in a similar way to how Google crawls your site; it follows links, goes to your home page, and then looks for links on your main menu. Then, it will look for links in your header and footer before searching site content for links. It doesn't just look for links; it will also follow where those links lead. This whole process could take up a lot of memory if your website has a large number of pages.
You can configure Screaming Frog to crawl just a subdomain or folder of your website. For example, you can tell it to crawl just the blog of your website. You can also configure it to crawl a specific list of URLs. Keep in mind though that Screaming Frog will not crawl pages that you purposely marked as restricted.
Another awesome feature of Screaming Frog is that it saves progress. With this tool, you can save the data obtained while it's crawling your website. When you're ready to pick up where you left off, the data can be used to continue the crawling process instead of starting from scratch.Use Cases And Scope Of Deployment
Most users who have advanced technical know-how of SEO techniques use Screaming Frog to gain a more robust understanding of their website's hierarchy. They often use the tool to verify live links which point to multiple domains.
Some experienced SEO specialists would even integrate Screaming Frog into almost every stage of their sales funnel management process. For example, a company's sales team can employ Screaming Frog to get an idea of how much time it would need to crawl a website given its size.
For marketing teams, Screaming Frog is a great tool to determine and map out which parts of your website are the best places to put creative content and promotional materials.A Quick Look at Screaming Frog's Tabs
Screaming Frog will sort out the data it gathered from crawling your website into separate tabs. These tabs are categorized and saved into separate tabs. Here are some of the specific advantages of Screaming Frog as applied in some of the crawled tabs:
Internal Tab
The Internal Tab contains crawled data about your website's page. All the different tabs will return the crawled data and present them in table form. Each field in the table contains a URL crawled by the bot that will be presented in corresponding fields, including that URL's attributes. It's a great way to warm up to Screaming Frog if you're still learning how to use the tool.Custom Tab
Another great future of Screaming Frog is that users can create custom search queries. This would enable users to tell the tool to crawl URLs based on how they set up their custom searches. You can even filter the data returned by your crawling tool by creating search-specific filters. Some of its users say that it would take a little bit of playing around with how to configure the settings. But once you get the hang of the controls, you'll be able to get the right mix on what to include in your search filters.
This level of flexibility is one of the reasons why Screaming Frog is still the best SEO audit tool to use in 2022. Without this functionality, you would have to invent your own crawling tool if you want to go over each individual URL. External Tab
The external tab displays info on external URLs that are linked to your website. Info found in the external tab isn't as detailed as what you'd find in an internal tab. However, it still contains a lot of useful information such as status codes, content type, and how many links point to the URL.Protocol Tab
The protocol tab will show which pages on your website have the secure protocol (https://). It will also show which among the pages are on a non-secure protocol (http://) so you know which parts of the website need an update.Response Codes Tab
The Response Codes tab will show you the status code of the links or URLs returned by the crawling bot. You'll know that your pages are good if their URLs return a status response code of 200.
You've probably also received an error message stating that the web page you're looking for is 'not found.' The status response code for this is 404. You get a status response code of 3xx if your attempt to access a webpage has been redirected. On the other hand, you will get a status response code of 5xx if you receive an error message that the webpage couldn't be accessed or loaded because of a server error.
Screaming Frog' status code check functionality is one of the reasons why it's still the best audit tool to use in 2022. It's so simple to use: you just have to paste the URL into the search field. After you've run the crawling bot, it comes up with the status code of the URL, together with the response time and any potential redirects of the URL you crawled. This functionality has its counterpart in the cloud-based versions. But, many SEO specialists would tell you that Screaming Frog SEO Audit Tool has the best copy/paste option.URI Tab
The URI tab contains information about the URLs of the links that Screaming Frog attempted to crawl. Some of the information included in the URI tab are the status codes returned by the crawled URLs, the webpage contents of each URL crawled by the bot, and the hash value of each URL.Page Titles Tab
The Page Titles tab contains some of the most valuable data crawled by Screaming Frog. This is because page titles are highly important in SEO. When an internet user receives the search results after typing in their search keywords, what they'll get are results listed according to their page titles.
The Page Titles tab contains the titles of each URL crawled by the Screaming Frog tool. It will also contain other important details/ information such as the character length of every title, as well as how many titles there are per page. Some of the other information you'll see on the Page Titles tab is information on pages with titles that are too long (those with more than 65 characters) or too short (those with less than 35 characters).Not Being Cloud-based Is Not A Bad Thing!
Skeptics of Screaming Frog say that its main shortcoming is that it's not cloud-based. Unlike some of its competitors, you have to download Screaming Frog and install it on your computer. It's currently supported in Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu. You won't be able to download it if you're using a different operating system other than those mentioned.
The developers of Screaming Frog have a very sound reason for making it a downloadable software application, instead of being cloud-based. They didn't want to host a website on their server because that would run bots to millions of webpages over the internet. Perhaps, it's the sheer memory requirement or the security risks that they were trying to avoid.
Skeptics would also say that another shortcoming of Screaming Frog is that it tends to run out of memory if you tell it to crawl a large site. They say this happens even if you allocate more memory. The truth is that you can choose to increase the memory uptake of Screaming Frog.
In the alternative, you can also shift to database mode. This would enable Screaming Frog to save the crawl data on a disk or USB, instead of saving it in your computer's memory. You also have the option of setting a limit on the crawling operation to just a specific subdomain or folder for it to cover.Limited Free Version
If you don't feel like you're ready to pay for Screaming Frog, you can always give it a test run. You can download a limited version of Screaming Frog for free, which is good for crawling up to 500 pages. Paying for a $200 annual fee unlocks the full suite of features including Google Analytics integration, link metrics, and Google search console.Conclusion
Screaming Frog SEO Audit Tool is highly recommended by its current users for crawling huge numbers of URLs on websites that have a small to medium size. Some users are hesitant to use it on large sites because they say it tends to run out of memory. But this can be easily solved by saving crawled data on disks rather than memory. Overall, Screaming Frog is still the best audit tool to use.
Bio Description:
As founder of his digital marketing growth agency, Bud, Tom is a trailblazer in leveraging smart SEO and performance marketing strategies to maximise growth online. Tom has worked through every tier of the digital marketing industry in WA, from small businesses to multi-million dollar digital portfolios.
