Screaming Frog

Released in 2011, Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool is a UK-based downloadable desktop app that crawls website URLs and analyzes them in real-time. It uses the crawl data to provide a wealth of SEO information for both your own and competing websites, including title and meta descriptions, 404 errors, broken links, site audits, and much more.

Whether your site is large or small, Screaming Frog will quickly scan it and provide fast, critical, real-time SEO analysis data.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Features

Screaming Frog is available to download as a freemium service, with the paid version cost based on the number of licenses required, between £119-£149 per year. The free version offers a suite of powerful tools, albeit with limitations, while the paid version unlocks additional features without use caps.

What’s Included in the Free Version of Screaming Frog?

• Find & Fix Broken Links, Errors, and Redirects
• Uncover broken links, 404, and server errors quickly and effortlessly.
• Analyze Page Titles & Meta Data
• The tool analyzes page title and meta data to highlight instances where titles & descriptions are missing, too long, or too short for optimal SEO.
• Review Robots & Directives
• Quickly discovers whether your site access or content is being blocked by robots.txt or directives such as “noindex” or “nofollow”, which can seriously affect both site usability and SEO scores.

Other Screaming Frog Free Features

• Audit hreflang attributes
• Discover duplicate pages
• Generate XML sitemaps
• Site architecture visualization

What’s Included in the Paid Version of Screaming Frog?

In addition to the core features available in the free version, the paid version allows for unlimited URL crawls (as opposed to a 500 URL limit for the free version), and adds the following additional services.

• Technical support
• Google Analytics, Search Console, & PageSpeed Insights API integration
• Crawl scheduling
• JavaScript framework rendering (Angular, React, and Vue.js)
• Structure data & validation
• AMP crawling & validation
• Custom source code search
• Custom extraction with XPath
• Store and view raw & rendered HTML
• Forms-based authentication support

Screaming Frog Bottom Line: Simple Interface, Powerful Free Functionality

Screaming Frog is used by website owners and SEO specialists around the world to analyze and optimize their sites. The free version offers a level of functionality hard to find anywhere else, and the extra paid features are well worth it for more advanced and enterprise users. In short, there’s no reason not to take advantage of this incredibly versatile and powerful tool.