What is the definition of a crawl budget in SEO?
A crawl budget is described as the level of attention search engines give your website. All the level of attention is based on things like how frequently they'd like to crawl and how frequently a website can be crawled too. If you are wasting your crawl budget, search engines will not be able to crawl efficiently. This would end up hurting the SEO performance of your website.
In the SEO industry, a crawl budget is to indicate a system of concepts that search engines use when deciding how many pages and which pages to crawl on. In simple words, it is the attention that the search engines will give to your website.
Wondering why search engines assign crawl budgets to websites?
It's because they have a limited number of resources and so they divide their attention across millions of websites around. Hence, they need a more reasonable way to prioritize their efforts. Assigning crawl budgets to every website helps them do this.
How to boost your rankings with crawl budget optimization?
Multiple factors affect the ranking of your website. Some of them are external links, keyword usage, site speed, and many more. After you start optimizing your site, you need to remember that for all your SEO to pay off, your website needs to be indexed and crawled. As we have explained before, the crawl budget is determined by the way your website is crawled. The number of times the bot visits your site during a certain period. Including your site's visibility depends upon the crawl budget.
Check your website crawl budget in the Search console?
If your website is verified in Google Search Console, you can get an overview of your website crawl budget for Google.
- Sign in to Google Search Console & select your domain.
- Go to Settings > Crawl Stats > Open Report. There you can see total crawl requests for your website.
Here are a few tips on how you can boost your rankings with crawl budget optimization:
Sitemap should be up to date
The first thing you have to do after your website is ready, is create a sitemap. So if you don't have one, create one using one of the many available sitemap generator tools. The .xml file is the sitemap that helps crawlers or spiders get easy access to your website content. In other words, the sitemap contains information on all the pages of your website that helps the search engine bots to understand and organize your website content well. Hence keeping the sitemap tidy is a need.
You also need to make sure that your sitemap does not contain any broken links, canonical links, or links that are blocked from indexing. Keep the sitemap updated. Any newly added web pages need to be added to the sitemap. You can include the sitemap in your robots.txt file so that the crawlers are well instructed about all your web pages.
Have a site structure that can be easily navigated
A good site structure is when all your pages on the website are easily reached. Generally, every important page should be a maximum of 3 clicks away. Make sure your website has an easy navigation menu on top that includes all significant pages. You can also include all the links like contact us, about us, and other pages in the footer of your website.
Another major factor is internal linking when it comes down to SEO. All the major and important pages of your website must be internally linked. This is done to allow users to explore other pages too from the page where they landed from.
Use ‘URL Parameters’ in Search Console
Open your search console panel and use special URL parameters. They will prevent you from wasting your Crawl budget on duplicate pages. Notifying Google of these URL parameters will be a win-win situation, saving your crawl budget and avoiding duplication issues. So be sure to add them to your Google Search Console account.
Make sure none of your web pages has multiple redirects
So what exactly happens when there are multiple redirects? The web crawlers drop off before it reaches the destination page. Hence these types of web pages will never get indexed. Also, each redirect will waste your crawl budget. You need to make sure that the number of redirects to the destination page is as low as possible or preferably one.
Improve website speed
If a site takes more than 3 seconds to load, then users are more likely to hit the back button. A website that takes time to load is only annoying to users but for web crawlers too. Your website speed has a direct effect on the crawl budget. You can check the speed of your website with a tool called Pagespeed insights. Get your website hosted on a server that has a lot of space for crawlers crawling your website, as the load on the server increases. In conclusion, maintain the high loading speed of your website and do not hold back on the server space. If you don't know how to get these things done by yourself, you can always take the help of an SEO Agency (link: www.digitalcrafts.in).
Keep updating the content on the website
The final tip to boost your rankings with crawl budget optimization is to keep updating or adding fresh content to your website. This way you give a reason to the web crawlers to keep visiting your site. Make sure you update the existing content on your site too. The content on your website should be updated at regular intervals on your website so that the users are up to date too. Finally, avoid duplicate content on your website. Original and fresh content is always the preference of search engines today.
Final Thoughts
Crawl budget is an important SEO metric that directly influences your chances of getting indexed and making on top of the search engine. Make sure to monitor the accuracy of your robots.txt file and XML sitemap. Then your most important pages will always be exposed to crawl, ultimately increasing your SEO performance. Follow these above-given tips to optimize the crawl budget and increase the indexing of your website. If you need any help in optimising your crawl budget & SEO rankings, connect with us at [email protected]
