How Important Crawl Budget Is In Boosting Your Site’s SEO

SEO is the lifeline for any website, and SEO experts always work to the fullest to maintain SEO standards. One of the concepts that come under the SEO is crawl budget, let us understand this term with precision.

What is a crawl budget?

The concept of crawl budget relates to page indexing. The crawl budget is the number of pages Googlebot crawls and indexes on a website within a given timeframe. Its concept is often misunderstood and commonly discussed in digital marketing communities. But, the vitality of the crawl budget in SEO is unmatchable.

Why is it important for SEO?

Google indexing is the most vital aspect of any web page. If Google does not index a page, there will be no rankings. You have to ensure that your number of pages should not exceed the site’s crawl budget, or else the pages won’t get indexed. With all being said, below are some of the factors which will give you a clear view on why you need to pay attention to crawl budget,

• If you have a big website, Google will find it tough to index its pages. In this case, the crawl budget will be more than beneficial.
• If you have added a bunch of new pages to your existing website comprising more than hundreds of pages, crawl budget gives you the leverage of indexing them quickly.
• If there are a lot of redirects and redirect chains, your crawl budget will be at the receiving end. Therefore, there shouldn’t be many redirects.

How Google allocates crawl budget

Google is responsible for establishing your site’s crawl budget automatically. This is because Google doesn’t want the flow of your website hinder. After all, once your budget is exhausted, the web crawler will stop accessing your site’s content and jump to the other sites.

Below are the factors that state how Google allocates crawl budget,

• The size of the sites matters the most. The bigger the sites, the more crawl budget they will require.
• It also depends on the server setup. Your site’s performance and load times might affect the quantity of budget allocated to it.
• It is also essential to update your content regularly. Google always prioritizes content that is updated regularly.
• The digital marketing services and SEOs crunch part is Links. For the crawl budget, Google also determines the internal linking structure and dead links.

The importance of the crawl budget is clear now. Now it is time to look into the best practices to boost your site’s crawl budget.

Also Read – Google Search Console: Index Coverage Report Goes Off-Track

Tips to boost a site’s crawl budget

• Improve the speed of the site: If you can improve the speed of your site i.e. the loading and scrolling time, the page speed can lead to Googlebot crawling more of your site’s URL. Google states that “Making a site faster improves the users’ experience while also increasing the crawl rate.”If your site loads pages slowly, it kills Googlebot time, on the other hand, if your pages load quickly, Googlebot can index more pages as it has ample time.

• Use more internal links: SEO agency and experts time and time emphasize the fact to use internal links to boost a website’s SEO. Apart from boosting SEO, internal links are also helpful in the crawl budget. It is because Googlebot prioritizes pages that are engulfed with both internal and external links. Your internal links disperse Googlebot to all the different pages on your website that you wish to index.
• Flat website structure: Google states that “URLs that are more popular on the Internet tend to be crawled more often to keep them fresher in our index.”A flat architecture helps to give some link authority to your site’s page by following them. This is the only reason why you should use website architecture on your site.
• Do not use orphan page: The pages which do not have internal or external links are called the orphan pages. For Google, finding an orphan page is a tough ask, and usually, it skips orphan pages. Therefore, you should ensure that there’s at least one internal or external link pointing to every page on your site.
• If possible, use HTML: Yes, if we are talking about Google, it is said to be its crawler works seamlessly while crawling JavaScript. But what about other search engines? Are they leveraged with all that Google uses? Probably not. Therefore, wherever possible you can use HTML for a better chance of crawling.
• No duplicate content: This one is basic. Content should not be plagiarized because it can hurt your crawl budget immensely. Google will never waste its time indexing multiple pages of the same content. Therefore, ensure your content is always 100% authentic and unique.

Time to wrap up:  I hope now you would know the importance of crawling budget on a website’s SEO. It has been one of the stalwarts of SEO and probably remains the same shortly as well.

Hopefully, the tips aforementioned will guide you and help you optimize crawl budget and elevate your web age performance.