I receive many questions about SEO regularly and answered hundreds of questions. Recently, one of my clients asked me “How to boost site’s SEO by optimizing Google’s Crawl budget?”
Well, there is a lot more to know about SEO. There are many things that affect the rank of your site. One such thing is ‘Google Crawl Budget’. It is important for webmasters to know how search engines interact with their website. If you understand crawl budget, you can use some techniques to make sure that your site gets crawled effectively. The concept of crawl budget was like a guessing game among SEOs. You will first need to familiarize yourself with the term ‘Googlebot’. Googlebot is nothing but Google’s spider that discovers new and updated pages to be added to Google index.
Before I go into detail, let’s start with what Google’s crawl budget is and how it helps you boost your site’s SEO?
What is Google crawl budget?
Google crawl budget is one of the SEO concepts that are overlooked by many SEO experts. As it is not very well understood by online marketing professionals, they often ignore it. Search engines use crawler bots to crawl across web pages and find information about them — based on which they add them to their index. These spiders detect links on pages they visit and attempt to crawl across those pages also.
The number of times a search engine crawls across your web page in a given time is known as crawl budget. The whole idea behind Google crawl budget is to know how ‘Googlebot’ crawls your site.
Small business owners should not worry about crawl rate. However, if you are running a large website, you should optimize crawl budget for SEO success. Here are some tips to optimize crawl budget that result in SEO success.
- Make sure that the webpages are crawlable
You should configure the robots.txt and .htaccess so that they don’t block the critical pages of your site. If the search engines can find and follow the links within your website, your webpage is considered as ‘easily Crawlable’.
- Do not use redirect chains
Each URL you redirect wastes a little of your crawl budget. When your website has more redirect chains, Googlebot may drop off before they reach destination page. This means your page won’t be indexed. The best way is to have fewer redirects on your website.
- Fix broken links
You should avoid broken links on your website. Be sure to check your website for broken links once a month if your business is small and medium but if you are a big brand, I suggest weekly broken link analysis.
- Clean up your sitemap
XML sitemaps help spider bots as well as users, by organizing the content in a better way. It is essential to keep the sitemap up-to-date and remove clutter that may harm your site’s usability.
- External links
Link building is a hot topic even after years. There are a number of tools to measure external and internal links pointing to every page of different sites. There is a strong correlation between the number of external links and spider visits. The best way to optimize your crawl budget is to build links as well as publish fresh content.
By following the above tips, you can optimize Google’s crawl budget to boost site’s SEO. By managing your crawl budget in a smart way, you can double the crawl count for individual pages.
By now, you probably have understood the best practice to improve crawlability tends to improve your ability to search. If you are wondering whether crawl budget optimization is important for your website, it will surely boost your SEO efforts.
When you make it easier for Google to index your website, you will get more crawls — which will eventually improve overall user experience and ultimately result in better SERPs ranking.
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