Learn To Crawl: SEO Spider Training Days

On the 24th of January SEOs gathered in London for Screaming Frog’s inaugural SEO Spider Training Event. Attendees flew in from far-flung places such as France, Germany, and even… Cornwall. (If you’re British you’ll appreciate just how far away that is!)

Their destination was Marble Arch, London. More specifically, room ‘Adjust’ within the exquisite function centre we’d hired for the event. Other rooms on the same floor were named: ’Accept’, ‘Action’, ‘Affirm’, ‘Assume’, and ‘Agree’; So positive vibes (and jokes about adjusting crawl speed) were felt throughout the day.

Veteran SEO Frog and all-round nice guy Charlie Williams was our expert for the day. Charlie’s day was targeted towards intermediate users who knew how to crawl sites, but wanted to get the most out of the plethora of extra features the SEO Spider ships with after nine years of continuous development and improvement.

His excellent sermon, which was frequently expanded on through enticing audience questions, was divided into the following topics:

• Setup, configuration, & crawling
• Advanced crawling scenarios
• External data & API integration
• Analysis & reporting
• Debugging & diagnosis

(Spoiler Alert!) For more specific details on what was covered, Ian from Venture Stream who attended has put together this great roundup.

We're talking all things #SEO on the blog today as we attended the world's first ever SEO Spider training session, hosted by SEO Strategist @pagesauce of @screamingfrog

Check out the light-bulb 💡 learning moments and tips to help your own crawl here:https://t.co/V3MbOmE5eo pic.twitter.com/en7wwAUoJm

— Venture Stream (@VentureStreamUK) January 30, 2019

We also had an exclusive live link (Twitter DMs) back to Frog HQ, so we could pass any questions straight back to the development team in real time. While they were super helpful on numerous queries, they remained tight-lipped when pressed on what might be included in the upcoming SF Version 11…

Hot actionable advice wasn’t the only thing on the menu, though. There was food on the menu too! Frequent coffee breaks gave everyone time to refresh and network; and our venue provided a premium cooked lunch which was delicious, and crucially came with amle pudding. (No, frogs legs were not an option.)

Another added bonus was a helping of branded swag to take home- bottles, pens, notebooks, and those illusive SF stickers that everyone wants for their laptops.

We had some great feedback from attendees:

• Of those surveyed, 88% rated the day as either ‘very good’ or ‘excellent’.
• 88% of those surveyed felt that the event was at the right skill level for the audience- something we were very keen to get right!
• 100% said they would recommend the training to a friend

Some other feedback included:

Thanks @screamingfrog and @pagesauce for this amazing #SEOSpider training! Die Einblicke werden wir demnächst in unserer Reihe #screamingfroghacks mit euch teilen. Seid gespannt! #ScreamingFrog #SEO #technicalSEO #crawling #Fortbildung #albertbauerdigital #abdgital pic.twitter.com/XpSNYhJAvZ

— wyn (@wyn_rocks) January 25, 2019

“Charlie was a top bloke and it was a great place to learn more about the features of Screaming Frog I seldom use. It was a great place to voice very technical queries and issues. The live link to HQ via the SF helpers was also a great addition.”

“The event was very well structured and thought out. Individual sessions were just long enough to keep the audiences attention without splitting the day in too many separate parts. I especially liked our host, as he was able to explain complex subjects very easily understandable.”

“I learned things that I didn’t know existed – for example what you can do with AOPIS from GA/SC… I also liked being surrounded by high level SEO people- it’s not often that you get to meet such experts.”

If you consider yourself a budding technical SEO, and you want to gain total confidence using Screaming Frog’s SEO spider then you’re in luck. Our next training event will be on the 18th of March in London. You can get an early bird ticket here, though act fast, as our first event sold out quickly and we have very limited spaces!

We’re also open to running more bespoke inhouse training events, if you have an internal SEO team, or you’re an agency, you’re welcome to pop us an email via support.