Screaming Frog Advent Calendar- Win a Free Licence!
Matt Hopson
Posted 30 November, 2012 by Matt Hopson in News
Screaming Frog Advent Calendar- Win a Free Licence!
So with December beginning tomorrow and the run up to Christmas now well and truly underway, to celebrate we will be opening a door each day on a SEO Spider advent calendar on our Facebook page. Behind each door we’ll be giving you some ideas on how you could use the Spider as well as tips & tricks that we’ve learnt over the years.
To keep up to date with these tips & tricks all you need to do is to Like us on Facebook and as we open a (metaphorical) door each day you’ll get them direct on your timeline!
As we’re really getting into the Christmas spirit this year, as well as giving all you lovely people great ideas about how to use the SEO Spider we’re also giving you the chance to WIN A FREE LICENCE!! (Aren’t we great!?!)
To be in with a chance of winning all you need to do is let us know in the comments below the most creative way you use the spider and how it’s helped you over past year. We’ll then put all of the commenters in our Santa hat (he’s lent us one especially) and one lucky so-and-so will win their license for next year!
Good luck everyone and Merry Christmas!
Terms & Conditions:
One entry per person
The prize is 1 (one) annual licence for the premium version of the Screaming Frog SEO Spider, valid from January 1st 2013
If the winner is already a licensee Screaming Frog will extend their respective licence by 1 year
The winner will be randomly selected at 12noon (GMT) Monday 24th December 2012
The winner will be announced on the Screaming Frog Facebook page (so keep your eyes peeled)
The licence will not be transferable to another person
No part of the prize is exchangeable for cash
By entering the competition the winner agrees to participate in such promotional activity and material as Screaming Frog may require
Entries after the closing date will not be counted so don’t do it
Please ask the bill-payers permission before calling (in fact, don’t call as we’re not taking entries via the telephone)
If you see gum on the street, leave it there. It isn’t free candy
Last but not least, Don’t eat yellow snow
I’m not sure it’s very imaginative… but I’m keen to get my hands on a free licence ;)
I put clients’ competitors sites into Screamin’ Frog – it helps me spot the long tail terms they’re ranking for… so I can target them for my clients.
I also tend to use SF as a monthly check to ensure nothing untoward has changed.
PS the trouble with the ‘pull it out of the hat’ winner is it makes me less inclined to tweet about it as I’m reducing the chances of my winning by encouraging more people to enter!
Tweeted anyway.
LOL, that made me chuckle.
Thanks for the tweet and good luck in the competition G.
I’d like the frog that Santa has in his hat, ho ho ho!
Hi guys, a nice idea.
As a redesign agency we use the software to check, tipically during site migration projects:
– to get useful information about the content inventory and the information architecture of the web site
– error pages (404 in primis)
– how much is important the onsite optimization for the client
– if the website is core for the client (than I don’t expect any lorem ipsum!)
It’s become a creative use once we use it on lead or compatitor: it’s useful beacuse often we don’t have a lot information or a GWT access.
seriously you guys awesome….
I used it to help cut down on my email and increase the time I can work on projects. How does it cut down on my email? I trained our inside sales team to use it. Now they can find all sorts of issues on their own instead of asking me to audit a prospect. : )
I use Screaming Frog as a sales tool. I offer to do a free technical audit, identify where the issues are, and am then invited to offer a proposal. It is very effective!! I also use it to compare the sites of a client or prospect’s competitor.
Of course, once on the project, the software continues to be of great value. Thanks for making such a great product!!
Screaming Frog is a terrific sales tool. Because it’s so fast and easy to use I can run it for a lead before I even initiate contact. Then I have a ton of info about the site right in front of me while on the phone.
It would be amazing to save those reports! Looking forward to scoring a free license.
A question came up during a client meeting and I did not have the answer ready. However, the client didn’t even notice me running screaming frog while talking about the issue in general for brief moment and then giving an answer based on sf data on their current situation.
I use the tool as an icebreaker with prospective clients. “So hey, did you realize you have a canonicalization issue?”
It puts some urgency to follow-up questions and a first meeting with me. It helps identify a problem they didn’t know they had which could potentially be really holding them back. And it gets my foot in the door.
Win-win.
Oh man… Right now I’m using it to audit all of our redirects. We have about 2,000 or so, and many are redundant or broken. Using the List mode, and the status code I can quickly find which ones are broken. Using the export feature of the destination URL, I can re-run the resolving page URL, and anything that isn’t a status code 200 is redundant and needs to be updated.
Time saver? Another way to say it is “I couldn’t do it without Screaming Frog”
Time saver number 2: A while back we were working on all of our YouTube videos, and needed a list of what videos we had (we have about 700+).
Screaming frog to the rescue. By isolating our YouTube ID, some RegEx writing, and the “External” URLs, we were able to build the list in a few minutes and do our work.
Great comments Dan, love hearing about unique ways the spider has been used.
It’s probably not the most imaginative use, but I couldn’t live without Screaming Frog when I’m checking if a site has Google Analytics code on every page.
Thanks Tara, hoping to extend this feature a little further next year :-)
A couple of top posts on this, from Kev Strong – http://www.stateofsearch.com/checking-google-analytics-is-installed-on-every-page-with-screaming-frog/ & Rachael over at SEER – http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-to-verify-google-analytics
I have used SFSS for a few large site migrations this year. By crawling the live site I can take the resultant urls and run a crawl on the staging environment in list mode to see if we’ve broken anything before we push the button.
The site migrations have also incorporated large numbers of 301s and rel canonicals (250K+ urls). SFSS has been the only way we can categorically say how many existing pages we have supported on the new platforms and therefore allowed us to accurately estimate some level of known risk.
SSFS is also great for checking certain assets are where they should be. We store the location of some of our images in our db and with a bit of excel I can have a list of urls that should return an image on our cdn.
I LOVE using the tool to test our search tech. I regularly cane the individual search indexes to check robustness and speed and have used SFSS for checking the relevancy of search results pages for users: By assigning an to the “x results for y” text on the page I can see exactly which popular canned search pages are light on content due to the low number of results.
I’d be lost and much worse at my job without SFSS
Awesome Richard, love how you use it on the search indexes.
Thanks for leaving the feedback mate!
Wow, great giveaway. I may not have the most creative use, and but I use screaming frog all the time on my own blog and getting a license to be able to lift the reporting restrictions would be amazing. It’s a killer product to those of us just starting out with its freemium model. The nowyl take it to the next level
Just did, just liked you guys :-)
This is a great product.
I can analyse a site faster than it takes me to open it in firefox and run browser tools against the site.
Partly because i sometimes have 500 tabs open or its just crashed because of flash. 8-)
It does one job, fast and efficiently.
Excellent.
Haven’t used but would like to!
Used it, love it… will recommend others.
Screaming Frog helps gives our digital marketing agency the perfect tool to analyse our clients websites performance! I love finding those pesky missing ALT text for images!!!!! ;)