How to Use Screaming Frog

When it comes to marketing, everyone always likes to focus on the front end, the "exciting" parts of marketing. Everyone likes to focus on "making their mark" and creating the content that will generate the maximum amount of engagement. Something that often gets left behind in this rush to make content is the idea of having and maintaining a good website. Having a good website is one part of maintaining good SEO (article about SEO below). Without a good website, the competition may be able to go and rank higher than you on Google, taking away some much-needed business and potentially harming your business. Today we will go through how to maintain a good website and tools to help you know what needs to be improved.

To start, watch this video about how to use a program called Screaming Frog. While there are many different programs to help manage websites, this one is free and contains a lot of useful tools.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/d4dacc_e3f9ef9f0a66469f901fa4d6a0944251/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Wasn't that easy? Screaming Frog is one of the greatest tools at quickly analyzing your website and telling you what is wrong with it if you are willing to be patient. One of the best parts about Screaming Frog, is its ability to analyze more than just what is face value. While you may be only able to look at one or two pages and make determinations about what is working or what is not, Screaming Frog is able to analyze 500 (on the free plan) webpages and tell you details about what needs to be improved for each. This is also a great way to see where people are coming to your website from, and make adjustments if need be.

Using Screaming Frog all starts with entering the correct URL you want to use. This should be the main URL people use to click on your site, as that URL is the most important. By then hitting enter, Screaming Frog will search from that website to find connected websites that link back to your main websites, websites that link to those websites, and so on.

Once Screaming Frog is done selecting 500 different links from the website, it will stop and you will be able to analyze the data. You can see from the video that all 500 links are displayed in the top left of the site, allowing you to quickly view all of them and select the one you want. Once you select the one you want, the information for just that link will appear in the bottom left. This allows you to see all of the information about just that link, what needs to be changed, and the information about how that website is being seen.

In the top right, you will be able to see information about the website as a whole. There are tabs at the very top that allow for easy search of information such as "issues" "response time" and "API". This section also allows you to see how many of each thing exists in your website, such as links, PDF's, and photos. This is the best way to make assessments about your website as a whole, and can allow you to make more general observations.

Overall, Screaming Frog has a lot of different options, too many to cover in one simple blog post or video. If you are interested in learning more about how to use Screaming Frog, click here.

Screaming Frog is one of the best free applications to see how your website is functioning, and to make changes or adjustments. While it may be a bit of a learning curve for those who are not used to making such changes, if you take the time to figure out how to use it, and to use it well, you will be able to make changes that not only will affect your SEO, but your marketing as a whole.

What application do you like best in marketing? Let us know in the comments below!