After the initial look at a site, phase two of our SEO audit process delves a little deeper without the need to roll up your sleeves and get mired in analytics. To do this we turn to a wonderful tool with a wonderful (!) name: Screaming Frog Spider.
SFS as we shall call it from now runs through your site and collates key elements that we as SEO professionals want to know about. It give a sense of how strong the site is, SEO-wise, as well as providing specific points that need addressing.
The Page Titles and Meta Descriptions tabs should be our focus: we must see no blank page titles or Descriptions, and their lengths should be towards the optimal length (more on that in another post!), so the ability to sort by these columns is a particularly useful feature. As is the ability to export the report – for example I like to use it as a basis for a report about old/new page titles & descriptions.
The free version of SFS has a reasonable limit of pages that can be crawled. I also like their focus on not just meta tag lengths but pixel width. After all, the value of a Meta Description is in it’s ability to entice the users to make that click from the SERPs to the website, and if your well-crafted Description gets cut off its value is diminished.