SEO improvements using Screaming Frog and Google Data Studio

December 3, 2021
Steve Turnbull
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Graphic representing SEO improvements using Screaming Frog and Google Data Studio

All the small things

In the world of SEO, many of the content management systems you might be using (think WordPress et al.) have some pretty clever, automated ways to make sure your website is optimised.

But further to that, there are many small things you can do to elevate your website's optimisation even more.

And a great tool to dig into this is Screaming Frog. Used with Google's Data Studio, you will soon start to see where these small things are hiding.

Find out how we can improve your SEO.

Automated Reporting using Screaming Frog and Google Data Studio

It's easy to utilise Screaming Frog's scheduling feature to push website crawl data to your Data Studio periodically. We choose to do this daily for most of our sites using this system.

What is Screaming Frog?

Screaming Frog is software that you install on your computer, which will crawl your entire website. Screaming Frog offers a free version, but the licensed version doesn't cost a mint and opens up a ton of useful features.

One such feature is the ability to schedule a crawl of your website and have the data automatically uploaded to a template in Google Data Studio.

What is Google Data Studio?

Google Data Studio is part of Google's suite of tools. It takes data that you import to it and visually presents it via graphs, charts, and tables.

How about an example

Look at this screenshot of a section from one of the reports run on our own website. In particular, the area highlighted in blue.

Screenshot of the Screaming Frog data imported in Google Data Studio
Screenshot of Google Data Studio with data input from a Screaming Frog crawl of a website


You can see a yellow line that indicates a lot of pages blocked by robots.txt. The graph line stands out because it started in mid-October. 

We must have altered something, but what?

Looking at the finer detail provided by the Screaming Frog tool, we found that a URL ending with a trailing slash was 301 redirecting to the page without the trailing slash (it was ../privacy-policy/ -> ../privacy-policy).

In reality, this would have been doing very little SEO harm, but we wanted to sort it out.

We looked into the code, found the culprit link and altered it.

As you can see, the following day, Screaming Frog crawled the site and hey-presto; the graph clearly shows that the (albeit minor) issue is fixed.

As I say, just a small thing but lots of small things add up.

If you're interested to learn more about how we set this or how we can help with your website SEO, drop us a line

Tell us what you like, we'll make it happen