Not Just a Pretty Graph – How to Use Screaming Frog Visualisation Tools

Emina Demiri-Watson

Not Just a Pretty Graph – How to Use Screaming Frog Visualisation Tools

In SEO and digital marketing, seeing a pretty diagram or graph is very seductive. It’s the nerdy nature of the beast. We love data visualisation. But, showing a visualisation should never be just about making your PowerPoint presentation pretty. Luckily, Screaming Frog visualisation tools are pretty AND useful.

Here are just a few ways SEOs can use them in their everyday work.

Screaming Frog Visualisation Tools – A Quick Intro

If you’ve been working with Screaming Frog for a while, you likely already know a bit about the visualisation tools and where to find them. For those new-ish to it, you can find the Screaming Frog visualisation Tools tucked away within the visualisation drop-down when you open your spider.

You will see there are two ways to explore your website visually:

• Crawl visualisations – these visualisations will show you your website by the shortest path to a page from the start URL. So for example, if you are crawling your entire site your homepage will be the epicentre of the crawl and the other pages will be shown based on proximity (the link depth) to the home page.
• Directory visualisation – as the name itself suggests, directory visualisations let you explore your website on a directory level. The visualisation is hierarchical by URL component and path. The URLs represented are connected via a directory path and not links as is the case with crawl visualisations.

You will also notice that each type of representation has its own format. There are three formats in total:

• Force-Directed Diagrams
  These visualisations will show you the connections between objects – called “nodes”. The type of node connection will depend on whether you are using a Crawl visualisation (Force-Directed Crawl Diagram) or a Directory visualisation (Force-Directed Directory Diagrams). Another element to mention here are edges of a graph. You will want to keep those in mind as we go into the application.
• 3D Force-Directed Diagrams
  As the name hints, these are basically Force-Directed Diagrams but in 3D. They are even more visually appealing, but again, where they really shine is in the application. Let’s face it, not everything needs to be in 3D but some analysis does benefit from the extra visual boost.
• Tree Graphs
  The somewhat less visually appealing sibling of the diagrams are the Tree Graphs. They display your website as a hierarchical structure – as a tree rather than a collection of circles. Unlike diagrams, Tree Graphs can look rather messy, particularly on larger sites. They are still incredibly useful for visualising and understanding your website.

Practical Applications for the Screaming Frog Visualisation Tools

While visualisation tools are a great resource, it’s important to first note that they should never be used as a replacement for a full website audit. For example, full IA audits should also include other analyses such as HotJar recordings and heatmaps, GA4 user flow analysis, real user research and journey mapping and much more.

They are, however, useful as snapshots: tools to quickly troubleshoot possible issues and supporting analysis in bigger pieces of research. So let’s dive into some interesting applications. Specifically, we’ll discuss how you can use the tools to help you:

• 1. Align topics/keywords and development content calendars
• 2. Quickly audit your information architecture and sitemap
• 3. Audit website URL patterns
• 4. Optimise crawling
• 5. Spot-check your internal links distribution
• 6. Check page speed at a glance

Alignment of Topics/Keywords and Development of Content Calendars

Understanding why topic and keyword research is important for SEO, your users and your business is considered to be one of the SEO fundamentals. From a very basic reductive understanding, it’s obvious why: if you own a website that sells elearning software and you want your potential customers to find you on search, you need to understand what people interested in elearning software are searching for and what their intent is behind those searches.

Where Screaming Frog visualisation tools come into play is after you have done your topic and keyword research. They can be a great way to help you see how your website performs against it at the moment and where the gaps are. At least if your website is small or medium. Otherwise, as we said you might struggle with clutter!

Use a Directory Tree Graph for Smaller Blogs to Show How Your Content Aligns With Your Research and Where to Expand Your Content Calendar

Let’s say you’ve come up with an initial list of topics, assigned the keywords with the correct intent and evaluated the market opportunity based on estimated keyword volume. The next step might be to see how your current website – your blog in particular – compares to the research you have done.

Scaling Force-Directed Crawl Diagrams With GSC, Easily Spot Which Pages Are Getting the Most Clicks and Find Further Opportunities

Force-Directed Crawl Diagrams are particularly useful when scaled properly and integrated with other tools. One must-have is the Google Search Console integration. Using this integration allows you to easily spot pages that are getting a lot of clicks and as a result, dig in deeper. For a visual learner, this can be much stronger than the Search Console interface. It allows you to have a bird’s eye view of your whole website in terms of one of the most important KPIs for traffic – your clicks.

Once you have hooked up your Console to Screaming Frog, scaling the data is easy. All you need to do is run the Force-Directed Crawl Diagram, click on Settings and choose GSC clicks.

Website Information Architecture and Sitemap Audit and Development

One of my favourite uses for visualisation tools are in the realm of website IA and sitemaps. As mentioned previously, which tool you use can make a difference here. For IA I prefer to use the Force-Directed Crawl Diagram as it shows me how crawlers see my website. On the other hand, for sitemap, my preference is the Force-directed Directory Diagram which shows me how my website is structured on a Directory level.

The analysis of the two Force -Directed Tree Diagrams can be a decent basis for starting to look at optimising IA for our website as well as using this for the development of a new sitemap.

Organising Your Blog Categories Based on Topics and Bringing Them Into the Sitemap

Again we are assuming here you’ve done the hard work to prepare for this. You are migrating your website and you want to ensure that your topic and keyword research are also informing your new website architecture.

Easily Spot Issues or Further Opportunities in Categorisation

Categorising your content on the website is useful for both search engines and users. But more often than not, we see clients who are just not doing it or are doing it but not strategically. If you have done your topic and keyword research correctly, your categories should follow this analysis. After all, those are the topics and keywords that your users are searching for and if you’ve estimated the market opportunity you already have a great way to prioritise your categories and your future content.

Checking URL Patterns

Closely connected to topic and keyword research and using Visualisation tools to figure out what content is being written and why, is the question of URLs. We know in SEO that optimising your URLs based on keyword research is still relevant for ranking.

Exploring URL Optimisation Using Directory Tree Graph on a Category Level

Let’s use our Vixen Digital SEO category, again very important for our business as we sell those services.

Optimising Crawling

Another SEO fundamental is ensuring your website is optimised for crawling. A lot of the examples already mentioned will help search engines better crawl your website. Things like IA, categories, and optimised URLs all have an impact on crawling.

Spotting Non-indexed Business-Critical Pages

We are finally at the mystery of the red node. You might have noticed some red nodes in the previous analysis in this blog. These are the pages you should pay attention to when it comes to crawling.

Checking Page Speed at a Glance

Ever since Google introduced the Core Website Vitals (CWV) metrics back in 2020 and made them a ranking signal, the SEO community has been debating them.

Final Thoughts

I’ve never met an SEO who doesn’t love a pretty visualisation tool. And the Screaming Frog ones are certainly visually stunning (unless you are trying to use them on a large website in which case I’d urge you to reconsider!)

But what I love about them is that they are pretty AND useful. They won’t give you all the insights in one go and often you will need to dig deeper. But they are a useful and appealing way to start discussions, speak curiosity and gain some valuable initial insights.