The SEO Team at Dentons love the Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool. It is one of the two that we use on a daily basis. It helps in a wide variety of SEO tasks and one of those is the ability to check the spelling and grammar on your website.
The tool allows you to do this at scale across your website in a number of different languages, including UK, USA and Australian English.
How to Spell Check Your Websites
Step One – Enable Spell Check
Go to the Configuration Menu > Content > Spelling & Grammar
You now have the option to select Enable Spell Check & Enable Grammar Check.
Step Two – Adjust Language
Screaming Frog will use the HTML lang attribute to select the language if you leave the setting on “Auto”; however, with English, the lang attribute doesn’t set regions (ie. UK/US) so it is safer to set it to manual and select the language required.
Step Three – Add Brand Names and Technical Terms
You can choose to ignore certain words in the spell check. It is useful to add your brand name, any other brand names used on the website (for example we have added WordPress), and technical terms, to avoid any false positives. Click on the “Ignore” tab and add the terms, one per line.
Step Four – Start The Website Crawl
Once you have configured the language and added any “Ignore” words then click the green “OK” button to close the window.
You can then enter the website homepage URL and click the Start button – and go grab a coffee!
Step Five – Review the Results
You can review the results within Screaming Frog by selecting the content tab in the second level menu.
You can click on individual URLs and the spelling errors are displayed at the bottom of the tool when you select the Spelling and Grammar Details Tab.
You can also review the overall results in the right-hand tab by selecting Spelling & Grammar. This window gives you a summary of the most common spelling mistakes on the website.
Step Six – Refine the Analysis
At this point you can refine the analysis and add more terms into the ignore words list. You can do this in the right-hand window ‘Spelling & Errors’ tab, which displays the top 100 errors, and in the lower window ‘Spelling & Grammar Details’ tab. We find it easier to do this via the right-hand window.
Step Seven – Re-Run Spelling & Grammar Checks Without Re-crawling
Once you have finished refining your spelling analysis by adding terms to the ignore list or dictionary you can refresh the data without having to completely recrawl the website. To re-run the scan simply click on the Re-run’ icon in the right-hand window ‘Spelling & Errors’ tab.
This will trigger a review of the spelling data.
Step Eight – Bulk Export Spelling Errors
Once you have finished refining and re-running the spell check you can bulk export the data to a CSV for review and to pass onto whoever needs to make the corrections.
To bulk export the spell check you need to use the Bulk Export Item in the top-level navigation.
Bulk Export > Content > Spelling & Grammar Errors’ export.
We have found the spelling tool on Screaming Frog a great time saver and really simple to use. If you have any questions please feel free to contact the SEO team at Dentons.
