How can you improve your technical SEO audits with Screaming Frog?

Screaming Frog is a powerful tool for conducting technical SEO audits, and you can enhance the quality of your audits by using it effectively. Crawl Analysis : It gives you the site structure in Visualization from "crawl tree" from crawl analysis" tab when auditing .From that we can understand site structure which is very helpful for larger sites Set up custom user-agents to mimic different user agents, like Googlebot or mobile devices, to ensure that your site is optimized for various user experiences. Adjust the crawl speed to avoid overloading your server and getting blocked. Prioritize crawling based on XML sitemaps. Some other parameters using "SF" Technical audit are canonical, title, description, URL ,response codes h1,h2,content

Crawl Configuration: After starting the crawl, click on the 'Configuration' tab in the top menu to access the crawl settings. General Tab: In the 'General' tab, you can set various parameters for your crawl: Crawl Limit: Define the maximum number of pages to crawl. This is useful if you have a large website and want to limit the number of pages analyzed. Crawl Speed: You can adjust the speed of the crawl to avoid overloading your server or network. User-Agent: Choose a user-agent string to simulate how the spider appears to your website (e.g., Googlebot, Bingbot). Render JavaScript: Enable this option to render pages with JavaScript, which is essential for crawling JavaScript-heavy websites.

One of the most important and crucial settings is the option to render JavaScript, which is valuable for sites heavily reliant on JavaScript. Enabling this feature allows the tool to render pages as a browser would, providing a more accurate analysis, especially for websites with dynamic content.

Consider leveraging APIs for platforms like Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, and Google Analytics. By integrating these APIs, you can access vital data that enhances your audit's depth and accuracy. Also, don't forget Screaming Frog's List Mode feature. It enables you to focus on specific batches of flagged URLs, streamlining your audit process.

Screaming Frog is one of the best for Technical SEO audits. When it comes to reviewing site structure, the crawl depth report, and the different visualization reports such as the Crawl Tree graph and Directory tree graph can also be used can be used screaming frog to study and review the site structure.

Before starting your crawl connect your Screaming Frog with your Google Search Console. In the settings go with 6 months or 12 months of GSC data, whatever suits you. Once that is done, start the crawl and sort your pages with clicks. Where you see a high number of clicks and no metadata that is your time to shine. Write super awesome meta titles and descriptions for these pages and see your clicks increase even further. (Chat GPT can easily make this process easier)

Crawl Your Website: Enter your website's URL in the 'Enter URL to spider' field. Click the 'Start' button to initiate the crawl. This process may take some time, depending on the size of your website. Analyze Metadata: Once the crawl is complete, navigate to the 'Page Titles' and 'Meta Descriptions' tabs in the left sidebar. These are essential for optimizing your metadata. Review the titles and meta descriptions for each page. Look for opportunities to make them more descriptive, relevant, and enticing to users. Duplicate Content: Use the 'Duplicate' filter to identify pages with duplicate or similar titles and meta descriptions. Duplicate content can hurt your SEO efforts, so consider making each page's metadata unique. Optimize URLs:

Orphan Pages Also another important aspect to mention is that Screaming Frog's crawl analysis is highly effective in identifying orphan pages that have no links within your website. This is crucial as search engines may struggle to discover these pages, which can negatively impact your site's SEO performance. Moreover, the tool's ability to export all the gathered data simplifies sharing insights with team members or clients, streamlining the audit procedure. Based on my experience, it stands out as one of the comprehensive tools available for conducting a technical SEO audit.

Connect Screaming Frog with your PageSpeed Insights API. Run your crawl and check the relevant tabs. View the page speed tab and analyse your results. The key here is that you can have an overview of your pages and escape from analysing them 1 by 1 on google's pagespeed test.

Screaming frog has great feature of allowing us to download customised report according to our requirements. It significantly reduces unnecessary time to combine sheets and compare data. Additionally, we only need to change few things in excel to understand the data effortlessly.

It is a freemium tool so If you are just a startup do not have a marketing budget, only a few pages on the website. You can use it without spending too much.