To SEO professionals and digital marketers, site data spells much in knowing how well a site works in search engines. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is quite small when it comes to helping you with your data analysis and optimization processes. This is one of the main purposes of site audits, crawling pages, and pinpointing SEO problems. However, it goes one step further in letting you grab any data about your website according to your custom criteria, thanks to its custom extraction capabilities.
This blog post will explain how to go about doing the initial setup of Screaming Frog for its custom extraction, what is use of it, and the extraction of data of interest regarding optimizing your site for better SEO.
That’s what Screaming Frog Custom Extraction is all about. Screaming Frog Custom Extraction gives you the power to make fairly specific extractions of data from your site that may not have scrawled reports defaulted for you. Some examples could include scraping product prices, author names, publication dates, or even structured data elements such as schema markup. Custom extraction would quickly gain access to that particular data since you’d never have the means to find it manually by roaming around your site.
Healthy optimization in e-commerce, blogging, or in an enterprise-level complex site ensures that Screaming Frog custom extraction can scrape exactly what is needed to make smart business decisions.
Reasons for Using Screaming Frog Custom Extraction
There are many more reasons why Screaming Frog custom extraction finds its relevance in allocating the data to SEO experts:
- Very Targeted Data Scraping: This configuration allows a very specific data focus, which means product price, author names, or review counts. Precision becomes paramount on larger websites with huge amounts of data.
- Automated Process: Screaming Frog custom extraction will free you from going on a treasure hunt to get data from every page of your website. This automates the entire process to save all that valueless time. It crawls your website to extract the necessary data and presents it in a user-friendly report.
- Data-Driven: You can make data-driven decisions. By running an extraction of essential SEO data like meta description, title attribute, or alt attribute, you make sure that your sites are optimally ready to compete inside the SERPs.
- E-Commerce Benefits: One of the reasons why Screaming Frog custom extraction becomes important for e-commerce websites is that it allows one to scrape product prices, availability, or reviews in order to have the respective product pages optimized for the search engines.
Setting up Screaming Frog Custom Extraction
Download and Install Screaming Frog
That is how to set Screaming Frog for custom extraction: download it. Head to the official Screaming Frog site and download the Site Spider tool on whichever OS you operate. The tool is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Download the software and install it; then run it. Here comes a graceful basic interface that is only user-friendly to learning novices.
Commence a Crawl
Feed the crawled site into the very uppermost window bar and click to start. Crawling will begin for the pages of that site. The entire time this tool is running, it is taking in everything related to internal and external links, titles, meta descriptions, headers, and so much more.
Configure the Custom Extraction Rules
Once crawling is active, configure Screaming Frog custom extraction to ensure that what you want is indeed extracted.
- Under Configuration, choose Custom and click on Extraction.
- This should pop up another window where you can probably establish the custom extraction rules.
Extraction rules can be simply put in either of the two ways
- CSS Path: Targeting HTML elements on the page with CSS selectors. This is useful if you are trying to extract some data from product names or prices.
- XPath or Regex: For more advanced exactions, there is XPath or Regex. These are typically used to pull out data that follows a certain pattern across all pages.
For instance, if you want to obtain the price of a product from your e-commerce site, you might establish a CSS Path rule that looks into the HTML element that contains the price information.
Crawl with the Custom Extraction
Now, you can run a crawl again after setting up the custom extraction rules. Screaming Frog will use custom extraction rules when crawling the pages through which it will scrape data according to the definition. The data will be collected by the tool, as well as the regular crawling data, and listed under the Custom Extraction tab.
Check Exporting
Once the crawl is complete, the data will be ready in the Custom Extraction tab for you to click through and examine each URL’s data to ensure extraction was performed accurately. These were also made available as export options to extract data in CSV form; thus, it is easy to organize the extracted data for analyzing findings.
Best Practices to Abide by When Using Screaming Frog Custom Extraction
If you would like to get the maximum benefit from Screaming Frog custom extraction, let’s follow the wise practices that would give accurate results at great efficiency.
Make Your Extraction Rules Specific
The rule of thumb is that the more narrowly defined your extraction rule, the more accurate your data will be. Use broad CSS selectors or regex that bring in unnecessary information. Remember: vague extraction rules equal incomplete or irrelevant data.
Test the Extraction Rules
Test your extraction rules now with some pages before doing a full crawl, and then you can be sure they work. If data does not get extracted as you had expected, rule modifications may be necessary.
Regular Update Of Extraction Rules
With continual changes in structure and HTML, web pages tend to change all the time. This makes extraction rules perhaps old or incompatible. Hence, do make it a point to always update and test your rules so that you are guaranteed to get enough data from them.
Filter URLs Properly for Efficiency in Crawling
Set a specific limit to your crawl to obtain information from very specific areas of the site using the Screaming Frog filter to do just that. This speeds the process up with less strain on the servers.
Extraction Comes in Handy for SEO Audits
Screaming Frog custom extraction should be employed for periodic SEO audits. These audits should extract important SEO items like meta descriptions, title tags, header tags, and alt text to measure the level of on-page optimization on the site.
The Importance of Screaming Frog Custom Extraction in SEO
The importance of being able to extract custom data through Screaming Frog custom extraction is pivotal for SEO professionals for numerous reasons.
Content Optimization
Pulling key on-page elements such as title, meta description, and header tags makes it easier to check if content is search engine optimized or not. This also helps in identifying duplicate titles and missing meta descriptions, which can very easily affect your website’s ranking in the search engines.
E-commerce SEO Monitoring of Product Data
If you conduct an e-commerce business, import product data like price, availability, and review count so that your product pages are properly optimized. It will help you in getting the missing product data, broken links, or duplicate content among product pages.
Competing Studies
To scan competitors’ sites for possible structures and elements is yet another thing that Screaming Frog custom extraction can do. This could go a long way in figuring out how competitors do their content, meta tags, and product data. This could be critical in finding out gaps in one’s SEO strategy.
Elevating the Structure of Data
If your site uses structured data (or schema markup), you will be able to get Screaming Frog custom extraction to check how a certain piece of data is marked as being implemented.
Put Together Screaming Frog Custom Extraction with Other SEO Services
Combine Screaming Frog custom extraction with other SEO tools and services for even more SEO advantages. For example, in need of a redesign to ensure the layout of the website is very SEO friendly, then work hand in hand with a website redesign agency that will ensure that the custom extraction data has been properly incorporated into the new design.
Additionally, website maintenance services can help you keep your site’s structure up to date, ensuring that your extraction rules remain accurate.
In addition, maintenance services can be able to take care of updating your structure updated for ensure that the extraction rules will be able to be accurate.
Suppose you’re interested in tracking your site’s performance via analytics; in that case, I suggest Google analytics consulting services that can customize data extraction and merge it with the Google analytics audit checklist to give you a better understanding of user behavior.
Meanwhile, to ensure your tags and tracking codes are properly managed, consider Google tag management consulting services to optimize your setup for better data tracking.
Conclusion
Any SEO professional trying to scrape specific data from a website should have Screaming Frog custom extraction. It allows concentrate on some of the big parameters by scraping relevant information directly related to your SEO strategy. From product pages to blogs and structured data, Screaming Frog custom extraction will optimize your website for search engines.
This guide has documented procedures for extracting value-added data that can be leveraged for SEO enhancement. In addition, you must consider and use other services that provide SEO consulting with a b2b web design agency or a team of professionals engaged with travel website development company to enhance your website’s overall performance.to improve your site’s overall performance.
FAQS
What are Screaming Frog custom extractions used for?
Screaming Frog custom extractions are used for scraping specific data from your website while crawling it. The data could be anything specific price of a product, meta description, structured data, or anything else customized you want to keep an eye on. It empowers SEO practitioners with the ability to get very specific information that is not part of crawl reports by default, thus providing more insight regarding how the website is performing overall and what requires optimization.
How do I set Screaming Frog custom extractions?
To set up the custom extractions in Screaming Frog, click Custom on Configuration and then Extraction. You can create extraction rules using CSS selectors or via XPath. From there, just crawl, and it will scrape data per your specifications. Rule testing is important as well.
Will Screaming Frog Custom Extraction Improve My SEO?
Yes, in fact, Screaming Frog Custom Extraction can significantly increase your SEO efforts by enabling you to store those vital sets of data, such as titles or meta descriptions, and their kin-structured data. Those would help in diagnosing SEO problems like missing meta tags, duplicate content, or improper schema markups, which could be fixed for better search visibility. To further enhance your website’s SEO, website maintenance services may ensure all areas are optimized.
Can I extract data from competitors’ sites using the Screaming Frog custom extraction tool?
Yes, running Screaming Frog custom extraction allows crawling of competitor websites to amass tailored competitor data, including the prices of the competitor’s products, their meta descriptions, or headings. Such information can go into analyzing the competitor strategies and serve as the grounds for knowing areas where your site can score over the competition in search rankings. Furthering the efforts of a travel website development company would help enhance your competitiveness by ensuring that this extracted data is captured on your travel website.
Screaming Frog Custom Extractions: What kind of data to extract?
Screaming Frog custom extraction allows you to extract from several types of data simple ones like metadata, headings, and product pricing to, for example, stock availability, structured data (like schema markup), image alt attribute value, and many more. This freedom allows you to extract anything that is suitable for meeting your given SEO purposes. In addition to obtaining specific tags related to your analytics setup, Google Tag Management Consulting Services will assist you in effectively managing and optimizing those tags for better results.
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