If you are wondering about what is crawl budget, you are at the right place. Here we will guide you on what is a crawl budget is, its importance, and tips for optimising a crawl budget. Let’s start with the definition of the crawl budget.
What is A Crawl Budget?
It is considered as the number of URLs on any website that search engine bots crawl in a specific time period to index and rank it. Once the crawling is done, it moves to another site.
Now, here, remember one thing, i.e., there are billions of websites worldwide, and every website has several pages, so based on SEO factors, the crawlers prioritise what and when to crawl.
So, let’s talk about why a crawl budget is important for website search engine optimisation.
Importance of Crawl Budget for SEO:
Search engines like Google need to crawl the website and index its pages accordingly so it can rank on SERPs. So, everything must move on smoothly during the process to show the most effective results in search engine result pages (SERPs).
This is because crawling is based on various tasks such as fetching, sending and storing data along with indexing and ranking accordingly. It can significantly leave an impression on organic traffic and affect your business’s digital marketing goals overall.
Most web owners do not worry about crawling budgets as Google and Bing’s crawlers are efficient in fulfilling the task. Yet the crawling resources are limited, and billions of web pages are updated every day. Moreover, in some specific situations, a search engine crawl budget becomes essential for SEO. For instance;
Size Of The Website:
Sometimes, the size of the website is complex and large (sometimes the website has over 20 thousand + pages). It usually happens on e-commerce sites. So, the crawlers might not be able to find the updated content or new page right away.
Frequently Add New Pages:
Sometimes, the web owners add pages to the site. The addition is not done in a specific systematic way, so the crawling can be affected.
Technical Issues:
Bugs and errors need to be fixed regularly. Otherwise, the crawlers cannot crawl effectively.
How to Check Your Crawl Activity?
Google Search Console – GSC is the authentic way to check crawl activity for your website. You can use it and get complete information about how Google crawls the site. Due to some reasons and issues crawling behavior for your website can change over time. By checking the crawl activity, you can fix the issues on time.
Tips for Crawl Budget Optimisation:
Once you have checked your website’s crawl activity and know the issues that are hindering your pages from indexing or ranking higher, It is time to optimise the crawl budget for an effective SEO campaign. Here are a few of the things you can do:
Work On Website Speed:
A site that loads fast ranks faster on Google and other search engines. It can lead to better use of the website crawl budget. Additionally, the feature boosts user experience and is effective for SEO. There are several ways to improve website page speed, such as;
Optimise Images:
The media on web pages like images and videos take time to load and it causes slow web speed. Therefore use tools like Image Compressor to minimise the size of files without affecting their quality.
Minimum Scripts and Consider:
Try to use online tools and plugins like WordPress Rocket to minimise the site code for fast loading.
Use CDN:
A content delivery Network or CDN is a distributed network of servers that aids a website in delivering content quickly based on users’ location
Smart Internal Linking:
A strategic internal linking can simplify the crawlers’ effort to understand your content. Therefore, crawling is efficient and increases ranking potential. A hierarchical website design with a landing page at the top can be quite helpful for crawling budget
Make sure that every branch in the systematic structure leads to a detailed page, relevant posts, and a related category page that is linked to the main/homepage.
You can add internal links to all crucial pages so the crawlers can find the most important pages easily. The activity also helps to avoid the creation of orphaned pages.
Up-To-Date Sitemap:
It is important to keep your web page XML sitemap up-to-date. With the help of this strategy, you point out the crawlers toward important pages of the website that need to be crawled.
Block URLs When Necessary:
It is important to block URLs by using robots.txt files on the pages you do not wish to crawl. The robots.txt file is a file that tells search engine bots which pages should be crawled and which should not reduce the crawling of pages that you do not wish to rank.
So here is the question: why stop the crawlers from crawling? It is because sometimes pages are not very important compared to several other pages on site or private, and you do not want the crawlers to waste resources on these pages:
Work On Broken Links:
Broken links and 404 errors mean an increase in bounce rate, which is not a good thing for web SEO. It can be problematic when you have redirect chains and you have more than one redirect between the original and final URL. Therefore, it is important to find and fix the broken links.
Conclusion:
We can say that understanding what is a crawl budget and ways to optimise it is crucial for effective SEO. It ensures search engines like Google efficiently index and rank your website’s pages, directly impacting organic traffic and digital marketing goals.
Regularly check crawl activity using tools like Google Search Console, optimise site speed, maintain an up-to-date sitemap, use smart internal linking, and manage unnecessary URLs with robots.txt. Address technical issues, such as broken links, to enhance the crawl budget usage. These steps collectively help in achieving better search engine rankings and overall website performance.
