If you really want to control what is going on your website, then you need first to know what the crawl budget is and how you can optimize it for the SEO of your website. Being the technical term, it is avoided by most webmasters. This guide will help you in knowing all about the crawl budget and how it affects SEO.

Define Crawl Budget

The frequency with which various search engines’ crawlers go to the pages of your domain is called a crawl budget. This frequency is the tentative balance between Googlebot’s attempts to not overcrowd your server with Google’s total desire to crawl your domain. The rate at which the bots of search engines’ visit the pages is crawl budget optimization. The number of times a web page is visited, the quicker it gets into the index.

Why Is Crawl Budget Important For SEO?

Crawling does not affect the ranking of your website directly, and it even will not impact the position of your page. However, crawl budget as well as crawling is important for SEO because if the search engines do not index a page, then it will not appear in any of the searches. Even when the websites have too many pages within, then also Google will not index all the pages. Moreover, if you have made any changes on the page, then it will not appear so fast in the search result.

Define Crawl Budget Optimization

The process where search engines can crawl and index all the important pages of a website on time is called crawl budget optimization. If you have a website with a few pages, then there is no issue with crawl budget optimization. However, for the website with a greater number of URLs, it is crucial.

Steps to Optimize Crawl Budget for SEO

You have to follow the below-mentioned tips to optimize the crawl budget for SEO of your website:

✔ Hierarchical Website Structure

Whenever the search engine crawlers visit your website, it starts from the homepage itself, and then it follows all the other links for crawling and indexing to all other pages of the website.

If we talk about the ideal website structure, then the hierarchical site structure, which is not more than 3 levels, is the best. It merely means the URL of any page will be accessible from less than three clicks. That is why it is said that having a website with a simple structure will make the crawling faster and easier.

✔ Optimizing the Internal Links

Search Engines like to give priority to the page that is most important for your website, and it can be identified by the number of internal and external links the webpage has.

You should optimize the internal link of your website in a way that helps in the crawl budget that means all the importance of your website should be linked with the homepage. Make sure that the most important page of your site has the highest number of internal links.

✔ Improve the Speed of The Website

Speed of the website affects the crawl budget of your website, which means if your website loads faster than Googlebot’s can crawl a greater number of pages on the same site that too in less time.

Increasing the website speed does not only affect the crawl rate, but it also improves the user’s experience.

✔ Resolve the Issue of Duplicate Content

Having duplicate content on your website can affect the crawl budget. It means if the similar content appears in more than one URL of your website, then it can affect your crawl budget. This issue is very common in the e-commerce pages as they have similar products in more than one category.

You can solve the issue of duplicate content on your website by using the canonical URLs, robot.txt, and optimizing the XML sitemap.

✔ Remove Thin Content

Thin content pages also impact the crawl budget of your website like duplicate content. The pages on your website where there is no or very little content are thin content. You can even refer to them as the low-value or low-quality pages.

You can find and then fix the thin content pages of your website by removing them or by increasing content on these pages. You can even block these pages from the search engines, or you can redirect these pages to any more valuable page of your website.

✔ Fix the crawl errors

You can increase the crawl budget by reducing the number of crawl errors that occurred on your website. The crawling that is spent on the errors is the time that is wasted, so removing them will increase the crawl budget.

You can use the Index Coverage Report from Google Search Console to find and then fix the crawl errors.

If you want to learn about the Crawl budget and how it affects the SEO of your website, then you can avail SEO services from Advology Solution.