Screaming Frog
Your next SEO secret weapon?
This month, we gave Screaming Frog’s Spider Tool our one-hour test drive. So, what did we learn? And would we recommend it? Before we dive into what we found out, let’s start with why a business would use a tool like this.
What is Screaming Frog’s Spider Tool?
Screaming Frog’s Spider Tool is aimed at helping improve your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Having good SEO helps search engines make sense of your website’s content, so they can match it with users searching for relevant, useful results.
When you’re running a startup, SEO can feel like a bit of a mystery. How do those other websites manage to get themselves showing up on the first page of Google?! You know it’s important, but figuring out where your website needs work can quickly turn into a guessing game.
SEO involves more than just good content creation and relevant keywords. It also involves making sure that your website is technically optimised to be search engine friendly. It’s important that there are no broken pages or broken links and your website should load quickly. Technical optimisation boils down to this question: “Does your website work well?”.
That’s where Screaming Frog’s Spider Tool comes in — a handy little tool that scans your site, flags up issues, and helps you figure out what to fix first.
DISCLAIMER: If SEO is a new term to you, and reading the words ‘technical optimisation’ makes you want to run for the hills – you might want to check out our ‘DIY Health Check For Your Website’ webinar to understand a few fundamentals first.
First Impressions: Quick and Easy Setup
The setup was smooth — we watched the intro video, downloaded the tool, and ran our first crawl within 10 minutes. No complicated configurations or endless tutorials required.
The interface does look a bit data-heavy at first glance, but don’t worry — once you run your first crawl, it all starts to make sense. You get a full breakdown of your site, and issues are highlighted. Using the tabs you can easily filter to see smaller slices of the data, and start chunking through the most critical things to fix.
The One-Hour Test Drive
Within an hour we managed to run crawls on two of our websites, learnt some key navigation areas, got to grips with the tools interface, run some reports and bulk exports, and played with the visualisation tools. We’d even managed to engage with some of Screaming Frog’s guides and video tutorials which were clear to follow and easy to find. Not bad going for 60mins!
One of our early favourite features were the visualisation tools (we probably played with these more than we needed to!). Screaming Frog gives you tree diagrams and 3D network graphs that map out your website’s structure. It’s like getting a bird’s-eye view of how everything connects. It’s great for seeing the layout in a clear, visual format that quickly helped us understand how pages link together and where the flow could be improved.
We were also impressed with the support files and videos provided by Screaming Frog, that really help us to get set up speedily and dive into some early tasks.
What We Learned About Our Own Business
In just an hour, we uncovered a few key areas to work on for our own Home of Strive website.
- Low-content pages: Our 1-2-1 booking page didn’t have enough content for search engines to understand what it was about. A simple fix: add a couple more clear sentences explaining the service.
- Missing meta descriptions: Though meta descriptions aren’t taken into account for search engine rankings they can help potential visitors understand your page content. We found a few pages missing them entirely — an easy thing for us to fix.
- Broken links: Nothing tanks the user experience like a dead link. Screaming Frog flagged a couple of broken links we didn’t even know existed.
Quick Wins & Easy Fixes
If you’re short on time, here’s where we’d recommend starting:
- Issue Tab: Take a look at the high priority issues here and how many of them there are. When you click on each one a handy ‘issue details’ box opens up below, which gives clear explanations on how to fix the problem identified.
- Page titles and meta descriptions: Screaming Frog shows you exactly which pages are missing these elements (or where they’re too long or short).
- Header tags: Are your H1s and H2s optimised? The tool makes it easy to spot duplicate or missing headers.
- Redirect chains: Got pages that redirect multiple times? Screaming Frog flags them, so you can clean up your site speed and avoid losing visitors.
Limitations & Trade-offs
The Spider Tool categorises issues, opportunities, and warnings, prioritising them as High, Medium, or Low. This helps you decide where to focus your efforts. But once the high-priority fixes are done, you’ll need to think through which remaining issues matter most for your business. No website is ever perfect, and while Screaming Frog helps you prioritise, some judgment calls are inevitable.
For example, the tool flagged some of our pages as “low content,” but not every page needs to rank in search results. Our 1-2-1 booking page, for instance, is only used by Strivers on our current program via direct links. It’s not something we want showing up on Google, as we wouldn’t want random visitors filling our limited slots. In cases like this, fixing critical issues makes sense, but fully optimising the page for SEO wouldn’t be a top priority.
Free vs Paid — Is It Worth Upgrading?
We only tested the free version, and for our small Home of Strive website, it was perfect. But for larger sites (like our Enterprise CUBE site), we hit the 500-page limit pretty quickly.
The free version also doesn’t let you save or reopen crawls. That means if you close the tool, you lose your data. And you can’t run crawl comparisons to see whether your fixes are making a difference — a feature we could see being super useful for ongoing SEO improvements.
If you’re a small startup with a relatively compact website, the free version will give you plenty to work with. But if your site’s on the larger side or growing fast, it might be worth upgrading to the paid version.
Would We Keep Using It?
We love making the most of freemium tools. It’s a great way to test different platforms and get quick wins without blowing the budget. Other SEO tools like Ahrefs, Moz, and SEMrush all offer limited free features, giving you access to things like backlink reports or a handful of keyword insights.
For quick, in-depth audits and technical SEO fixes, we’d keep Screaming Frog in our toolkit. But we like to combine it with something like Ahrefs Webmaster Tools or SEMrush for things like keyword research or competitor analysis. That way, we get the best of both worlds — deep technical insights and broader strategic SEO data.
Verdict: Is Screaming Frog Right for Your Startup?
Here’s our takeaway after the test drive:
Use Screaming Frog If:
- You want a fast, straightforward technical SEO audit.
- You’re planning a site redesign and need to understand your current structure.
- You’re happy to roll up your sleeves and dig into the data (this isn’t a one-click magic fix tool).
Maybe Skip It If:
- You’re looking for keyword research or content suggestions (this tool focuses on technical SEO, not content strategy).
- You need a long-term SEO tracker (without saving and comparing crawls, the free version is better for quick audits than ongoing monitoring).
If you’re primarily looking for technical insights, Screaming Frog is a powerhouse. And if you outgrow the free version, the paid plan is surprisingly affordable compared to other tools, with an annual license priced at £199 per year. (Way less than some of the bigger players in the SEO space!).
Final Thoughts & Next Steps
Screaming Frog’s Spider Tool is a powerful little beast. It’s easy to download, quick to run, and gives you an incredible amount of insight into your site’s SEO health. In just an hour, we’d run multiple crawls, spotted some easy-to-fix issues, and started to get a feel for where our biggest SEO opportunities lay.
Of course, it’s not a magic bullet. Truly understanding all the data takes a bit more time (and maybe a few video tutorials). But for a free tool that gives you a clear snapshot of your website’s technical health, it’s hard to beat what this tool offers you for free.
We’d start by watching Screaming Frog’s intro video to the tool, and take it from there.