HomeOur BlogHow Crawl Budget Impacts SEO and How You Can Optimize It for Your Website

How Crawl Budget Impacts SEO and How You Can Optimize It for Your Website

crawl budget impact on SEO

Unfortunately, website optimization isn’t always an exact science. Sometimes, even the best SEO experts in the digital marketing industry might be confounded or totally stumped as to why a specific website is performing poorly or how to improve its performance. In most cases, however, all it really takes is a little fine-tuning and working toward boosting your website’s crawl budget. Small changes and applying all of the latest SEO strategies can have a big impact on improving your website’s visibility, rankability, and overall performance.

What Is Crawl Budget?

Crawl budget doesn’t refer to the monetary value of crawling your web site. Actually, crawl budget refers to how frequently search engines and bots, such as Googlebot, crawl your website and index specific pages on your website within a given timeframe. It also refers to how many pages, and which pages, search engines decide to crawl on your website.

Why Is It Important for SEO?

Search engines use these programs for more beneficial reasons such as collecting analytic data to help you determine which pages are ranking well and which ones need improvement. These search engine or web service spiders can be used to obtain valuable information regarding what you can do to boost your specific page and overall website rankings.
Search engines like Google are constantly updating and changing their algorithms for web crawlers seemingly for the purpose of keep digital marketers on their toes. The real reason, though, is so that Google can ensure the best search experiences for the billions of users that use the platform every second of every day.
The more frequently your website is crawled, the higher the chances are that Google will index it and find it more quickly for future related searches.

Optimizing Your Website’s Google Crawl Budget

That leaves one crucial question. How can you make sure that you don’t get left out in the cold when it comes to achieving high rankings on Google’s SERPs? There are actually quite a few actionable steps you can take to improve your website and web page rankings while boosting your brand visibility and relevancy.

Improve Website Speed

The importance of website speed improvement isn’t exactly a well-kept secret in the SEO industry. Every web designer and their mother are well aware of just how important it is to have a fast loading website that also easily navigable across multiple devices.
In fact, if your website or any of the pages on it takes longer than two seconds to load nowadays, users are more likely to navigate away and go to your competitors instead. Not only does improving the website speed also make for a much more positive user experience (which is likely to lead to higher conversion rates), but it actually also makes it easier for search engines like Google to crawl your website for content that your target audience is searching for.
Why does this matter? The faster and easier it is for Google to locate relevant content on your website, the faster Google can then present that content to your users who are actively searching for it. Fast website crawling speed makes it easier for Google to comprehend search queries through word recognition and search intent and then match those queries with the relevant content.

Simplify Website Structure

Another great web optimization strategy is to simplify the structure of your website. Create an easy-to-follow sitemap that includes internal links on all webpages. Update your sitemap regularly to guarantee that all links are still working and that they lead to the appropriate pages.

Optimize Robots.txt Files

On a related note, you should also take special note of the existing robots .txt files that currently exist on your website. Robots .txt files are essentially digital robots that inform search engine crawlers which pages to crawl based on any given search query.
Essentially, this is the digital equivalent of ships sending flares up into the air to alert surrounding vessels of their locations. Think of it as guiding, directing, or gently nudging search engines to your website.

Optimize HTTP Errors

On-page errors like HTTP, 404, and 410 errors can take up a great amount of your Google crawl budget and they can also negatively impact user experience, causing users to navigate away from your website and go right into the open arms of your competitors.
Nobody wants that to happen as it can result in revenue and credibility losses for your business. To prevent that from happening, you need to stay on top of your protocol applications and ensure they’re always in excellent working condition. HTTP errors are inconvenient and frustrating for users, and they can also negatively impact your conversion rates as a direct result.

Avoid, Eliminate, or Edit Orphan Pages

What are orphan pages? Orphan pages are singular pages on your website that aren’t linked to or don’t link to other pages on your website. You may be wondering why this is a bad thing. The answer is simple. Search engine crawlers have a difficult time locating these pages on your website. Oftentimes, they go completely ignored or are bypassed during the crawling process, which means they render very little traffic, if any at all. In fact, the only way most users even come across these pages is by directly clicking on these pages from your website. In order to do that, of course, users need to somehow be directed to your website in the first place.
The more orphan pages you have, the lower the chances are that your website will be found or rank well in search results. A simple solution is to add backlinks or interlinks to these pages. If the content on the pages is irrelevant, then it may be time to restructure or remove it entirely.
Need help making the necessary modifications to help your website gain more visibility and traction? The web design team and SEO experts at Numero Uno Web Solutions can come up with strong digital marketing strategies to help you meet and exceed your goals while also boosting your ROI. Contact us today to learn more!

About Adrian Newman, BA

President, Numero Uno Web Solutions


Adrian has been in the performance marketing industry for over 25 years and is the co-founder of Numero Uno Web Solutions.

Adrian has been involved in virtually every facet of direct and digital marketing from copywriting and graphic design to database management and production.

A BA graduate of York University, Adrian has volunteered as a mentor with his alma mater's Career Mentorship Program for students with disabilities and has been a director for public real estate investment trust.

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