BeamUsUp is a free SEO crawling software and a good alternative to Screaming Frog. The free software BeamUsUp shows you all the common SEO errors and broken links related to any website. You simply have to enter the URL of the website and it will go through all the available links. The software groups all the URLs having the same type of error to make it easier for you to check them. However, you can also choose to see all the URLs irrespective of their error.
Apart from this, you can check further details for each of the URLs. The details include incoming links, outgoing links, URL address, status code, status, title, meta description, canonical URL, etc.. You can also export the URLs.
Note: Apart from Windows, the BeamUsUp software is also available for Mac OS X and Linux.
Using this Free SEO Crawling Software:
The software BeamUsUp has a pretty clean interface as compared to the Screaming Frog which makes it easy to use even for first timers. When you will launch it, you will see the interface shown in the screenshot posted below. You have to enter the website URL in the text box given at the top and the click on the Start button.
The software will start crawling all the URLs of the website entered by you. This process can take a really long time depending upon the number of URLs it has to crawl. However, the software will start showing the errors in real-time which means you can stop the crawling process any time you want if you don’t want to go for all of them. The interface of the software has 3 crucial sections which will help you read and analyze the data. I have marked these sections in the screenshot.
Section 1 shows the list of the SEO errors found in the website whose URL you had entered. For each of the errors, you can also see the number of the URLs found having that particular error.
To see all the URLs having a particular error, you have to click on the error type. The list of all the URLs having that error will be shown to you in the section 2. For each of the URLs, the website shows URL address, Status Code, Status Message, Title, Description, Description Length, Keywords, Keywords Length, H1, H2, H3, Meta Robots, and Canonical URL.
Clicking on any of the URLs will show you further details at the bottom of the screen which is labeled as the section 3. Here, you will have the following tabs: Information, Incoming Links, and Outgoing Links. The Information tab will show you the same details which I’ve explained above and as for Incoming/Outgoing Links, you can check the Anchor text, Image, Image Alt, and Follow. In the tab of Outgoing links, you will get one extra tab of Response Code.
This way, you can easily analyze all the URLs of any website to find out the SEO errors they might have. You can also export all the URLs via various ways. The available ones are: Export URLs, Export Visible, Export All, Export XLS, Export Drive.
The BeamUsUp software has a Configuration option which lets you configure the settings which it uses for crawling any URL. There are options like Use cookies while crawling, Load external URLs, Smart duplicate check, Crawl outside the starting folder, crawl subdomains, Parse robot.txt, Parse sitemap.xml, and Don’t follow No Follow links. You can also set the number of crawlers threads, HTTP timeout, and User agent.
You may also like: Online SEO Checker to Test Website for SEO, Accessibility.
Final Verdict:
BeamUsUp is a good and worth trying SEO crawling software to find out the common SEO errors and the broken links. The software is good enough for those who want find the errors and don’t want to spend money on Screaming Frog which is quite expensive. It is true that it is not as feature rich as the Screaming Frog, but it does what it says without any limitations imposed on you.
