What is Crawl Budget In SEO & How To Optimize It

If you want search engines to efficiently crawl and index your website, you must understand the crawl budget and how to optimize it. A digital marketing agency often finds that this technical subject is avoided by many webmasters, yet it doesn't have to be difficult. This blog will explain what a crawl budget is (as well as words like crawl rate, crawl data, etc.), why it's important for SEO, and how to optimize it.

What does an SEO Crawl Budget Mean?

The quantity of pages Google crawls and indexes from a specific website over a specified time frame is known as the crawl budget. Site structure, duplicate content (inside the site), soft 404 errors, low-value pages, website performance, and other factors all have an impact on the crawl budget.

It should be emphasized from the beginning that crawling is not a ranking signal. This means that crawling does not directly impact the position in which a page will appear in organic search results.

How to Make Your Crawl Budget More SEO-Friendly

Below are 7 ways you can make your crawl budget more seo-friendly. 

1. Establish a website structure that is hierarchical

In order to find, crawl, and index every page on a website, search engine crawlers begin their visit on the homepage and proceed via any links. Any website should ideally have a hierarchical structure with no more than three levels.

2. Make internal linking better

Search engines prefer to prioritize the most significant pages on any kind of website when it comes to crawling and indexing. The quantity of internal and external links on a page is one way they determine which pages are important to a website.

Good and Bad Internal Linking:

While internal links are simple for every webmaster to optimize, external links are more crucial yet more difficult to acquire.

Making internal link optimizations that support crawl budget entails:

• Make sure the most valuable pages on your website have the most internal links.

• The homepage provides links to all of your key pages.

• There is at least one internal link linking to each page on your website.

• Having "orphan pages"—pages on your website that lack both internal and external links—makes it harder for search engine bots to do their jobs and wastes your crawl budget.

3. Make your website faster

Speed has a significant impact on the crawl budget, is a major usability aspect, and is a ranking factor.

Googlebot can crawl more pages of a website in less time when it loads quickly. This encourages crawlers to retrieve more content from the specific website and is an indication of a robust architecture.

4. Address the problem of duplicate content

On-site duplicate material is one of the things that can have a detrimental effect on the crawl budget. When the same or comparable content appears on your website under many URLs, it is considered duplicate content.

When comparable products are placed in several categories on eCommerce category sites, this is a regular problem. Besides eCommerce sites, blogs can have issues with duplicate content. 

5. Remove any thin content

Thin content pages are another element that might affect the crawl budget, much like duplicate content. Pages on your website that have little to no substance and don't benefit the user are known as thin content. They are also known as low-value or low-quality pages.

You should identify and correct thin content pages in order to maximize your crawl budget by:

• Taking them out.

• republishing and improving their material to give users more value.

• Use the noindex tag to prevent them from appearing in search results.

• Send them to another, more useful page on your website.

6. Resolve Soft 404 issues

There are numerous causes of soft 404 errors, and figuring out the precise cause isn't always simple. Viewing the Index Coverage error report in the Google search dashboard is the best method to handle soft 404 failures and maximize your crawl budget. Select "Submitted URL appears to be a Soft 404" to see and correct the list of impacted pages.

7. Resolve crawl issues

Cutting down on crawl errors is another method to boost your crawl budget. It is a waste of time to crawl around on mistakes that shouldn't be there. Using the Google Search Console's "Index Coverage Report" to identify and address crawl issues is the simplest method for doing this.

Final Thoughts

The technique of optimizing your website for technical SEO is the same as optimizing your crawl budget for SEO. A Mayfair SEO company would advise that enhancing the usability and accessibility of your website will benefit users, search engine optimization, and your crawl budget.

Lastly, it's a good idea to periodically examine your crawl statistics report in order to identify and look into any unexpected decrease or increase in crawl rate.