NON-TECHNICAL THINGS YOU CAN DO WITH SCREAMING FROG

The SEO’s Swiss Army Knife can do much more for you — not just for Technical SEO!

Photo by Mobin Jahantark on Unsplash

Screaming Frog is probably the most popular tool in SEO. Yet I often see people list them in their tool sets only for Technical SEO. This powerful gem can be used for so much more:

CONTENT

• Find (near) duplicate or thin content
• Find keyword cannibalisation
• Check for grammar or spelling mistakes
• Analyse content depth
• Check if your content is indexed by Google
• Find content ideas
• Full content audits

INTERNAL LINKS

• Find new internal linking opportunities

EXTERNAL/BACKLINKS

• Find backlink opportunities

MONITORING AND QA

• Regular monitoring for QA

… and support pretty much anything you do with other tools with additional data ❤

I am not going to re-invent the wheel but I aggregated the best resources for you and commented on them:

Find (near) duplicate or thin content

1. Screaming Frog Guide for Duplicate Content — comprehensive, walking you through with a video if you wish so.
2. Seer Interactive’s popular Guide to Doing Almost Anything with Screaming Frog has a section about finding thin content.

Cannibalisation: Find internal pages competing for the same keywords

Ideally you use Google Search Console and maybe another tool at your disposal, eg. ahrefs or Sistrix, for keyword cannibalisation — but Screaming Frog can add nicely to the mix, too:

1. Zazzlemedia have a short guide how to find cannibalisation through looking at your title tags. ⭐️You can use the same method to check out your headings, too! (At the time of this post, the CSS seems to be broken but the info is still there and valuable!)
2. Keyword list ready? You can use a simple feature to pull in any keywords where they appear in the content as you crawl — Screaming Frog’s Custom Search!

🔱ADVANCED: If you wanted to fetch those keywords from elsewhere on your pages, you can scrape them while running a crawl.

Check for grammar or spelling mistakes

Screaming Frog do that in 39 languages! You might want to build and keep a glossary for terms to exclude, eg. brand terms, product names, or abbreviations, for that one.

Analyse content depth

Kaizen detail ways how you can assess content depth for every page of yours using Scremaing Frog.

Check if your content is indexed

Wouldn’t it be sweet if you could check in bulk if your content is indexed by Google? Might explain why it’s not bringing in any traffic yet!

1. Screaming Frog show you how you can use Google’s API and even overcome their API’s limits.
2. Seer Interactive have a good approach, too.

🔱ADVANCED: If you do fancy it a bit more technical, there is an excellent guide by Tory Gray and Tyler Tafelsky about 6 Things You Might Be Overlooking during your content audits. (Requires more than just Screaming Frog.)

Find content ideas

This one is a bit outdated, and those of you very familiar with our favourite crawling tool might know shortcuts and alternatives — but this Moz article explains how you can generate content ideas with Screaming Frog in a nice way.

Full content audits

Admittedly, to fully audit your content, you will need more tools than just Screaming Frog — but you can use Screaming Frog to pull in data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and ahrefs or Majestics to aggregate. Might save you some vlookup Excel party (unless that floats your boat — no kink shaming in SEO!)

1. The mighty Screaming Frog guide for content audits. Can’t go wrong with this one!
2. Ryan Stewart offers a free content audit template to combine data from Screaming Frog crawls, Google Analytics, and more — and details how to use it in this video.

⭐️If you display the date when the content was published and/or last updated, you can use Screaming Frog’s Custom Extraction feature to add that data to your content audit, as shown by Jon Eric Dela Cruz. This helps you to quickly find outdated content.

Find new internal linking opportunities

1. Craig Campbell details every step on how to create opportunities for internal links within your website nicely.
2. Sagi Shtrosberg adds a nice touch to it — Sagi’s solution counts the number of a given keyword per page in Google Sheets, which you can use both for internal linking as well as to find potential cannibalisation issues.

🔱ADVANCED: Seer Interactive’s Guide on how they built a tool to find internal linking opportunities. Analysing the position of existing links within your pages can also help you to further improve your link graph.

Find or assess backlink opportunities

All you need can be found in the backlink section of Seer Interactive’s Mega Guide.

Screaming Frog’s Data Studio template for automated crawls

Automate Screaming Frog Crawls for QA

1. You can schedule a crawl to run weekly from your local machine or a server you have access to and save those crawls in your cloud storage.
2. If you want to automate crawls and their results, Screaming Frog show how you can do just that and see the results in Data Studio
3. Want to run Screaming Frog from the cloud? Not nearly as hard as you think! (Can get costly though, be careful if you plan on doing so for a large website!)

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