Why Is a Well-funded SEO Crawl Budget Such a Big Deal?

The web is vast, and your site is merely a speckle. That makes a well-funded SEO crawl budget important. It ensures search engines can access and index all your important pages, thus improving visibility, ranking, and performance.

An SEO agency helps boost your website's potential with a well-funded crawl budget. This guide discusses why you must prioritize your crawl budget, highlighting the following:

• Get crawled easily by Google bots
• Improve rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs)
• Promote your products or services to your online customers

Are you ready to optimize your crawl budget?

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What Is an SEO Crawl Budget?

A SEO crawl budget is the number of pages that search engines like Google can crawl on a site at a particular time. Search engines compute a site's crawl budget depending on the crawl limit and demand.

• Crawl limit or host load – this is the number of times bots can crawl through a website without encountering any issues. It also refers to how much crawling a site can handle.
• Crawl demand or crawl scheduling – refers to the number of URLs worth crawling or recrawling depending on the popularity and freshness of a page.

A site must be well optimized for bots to crawl through it efficiently. Any issues with SEO (on-site, off-site, and technical SEO) can affect crawlability and waste SEO crawl budgets.

Before fixing SEO errors, check your website's crawl budget. You can do this through the Crawl Stats in Google Search Console. The Crawl Stats show the number of pages on your site that Google crawls daily. For example, if the stats show 30 pages per day, that means your monthly crawl budget is 900 pages if unchanged.

Compare your crawl budgets monthly and see whether or not Google has increased it. Improved crawl budgets mean your optimization efforts are showing, and your pages are becoming more indexed and accessible to your users.

Why Is an Optimized Crawl Budget Important?

Your SEO crawl budget should be enough to allow effective crawling. This means your site must be optimized and free from errors or other issues. Crawl budget is not just about crawling through pages. It also applies to any document on the web, like CSS files, JavaScript, PDF files, and mobile pages. All the more, you should optimize your SEO crawl budgets.

     1. Gets Your Site Crawled Easily By Google Bots

Bots crawl and try to understand as much as they can about your pages. You want these bots to move around quickly to index as many pages as possible. Every time you add another page or update an existing page, bots should pick these up quickly so you can get your content to your audience.

If you are wasting your crawl budget by overlooking your SEO, however, search engine bots will not efficiently crawl through your site. These bots may linger on irrelevant or outdated pages and leave your essential pages unindexed. So, save your crawl budgets and let bots crawl and index your site with these tips:

• Add an XML sitemap. A sitemap is a file containing all the pages you want Google to index. An XML sitemap makes it easier for bots to search and index data. It is highly recommended for large sites with many pages,
• Improve internal links. Add links to show bots how your pages are interconnected. Doing so helps bots discover all your pages and display them in search results.
• Update your content regularly. Every time you add something new to your pages or create a new page, you encourage bots to crawl through them and index them. This increases crawl demand and enables Google to raise your crawl budget.

     2. Improves Your Site Rankings on SERPs

Your site’s rankings and visibility are related to what and how often search bots crawl your site.  When Google overlooks your content, or it frequently misses relevant URLs due to your unoptimized budget, you will find it very hard to rank.

If you have a large site with hundreds of pages, optimizing your crawl budget can also increase the ranking of less relevant pages. Therefore, when you optimize your crawl budget, you also enhance your SEO and ranking on the SERPs.

Smaller websites that want to rank a few landing pages do not need to worry about crawl budgets.  Small sites have only a few pages and are not at risk of reaching their crawl budget limits; thus, using a sitemap and proper indexing would be adequate.

Remember the following techniques:

• Improve page loading times. A faster-loading site lets Google crawl more pages quickly. Improve loading times by optimizing images, minifying CSS and JavaScript files, reducing HTTP requests, and improving browser caching.
• Remove broken links. These links refer to pages that no longer exist, sending signals to Google that you have outdated pages, negatively impacting rankings. Removing these links makes crawling easier and faster.

     3. Promotes Your Products and Services to Your Audience

Your well-optimized crawl budget improves the visibility of a business. Therefore, your customers can easily find your products and services online. If you have an ecommerce website with hundreds of landing pages, pay close attention to where your crawl budget goes.

Ecommerce sites build multiple landing pages for their products, one for every city, state, or region they serve. These sites often enhance their landing pages with new products and remove ones that become out-of-stock.

All these lead to duplicate pages, like product pages classified as low-value-add URLs by crawlers, which negatively affect crawl rates, wasting crawl budgets. It is also possible that Google may increase or decrease crawl budgets at any time.

Thus, ecommerce sites can quickly max out their crawl budgets unless these underperforming and duplicate pages are fixed. Here are some tips to do it.

• Remove duplicate content with 301 redirects. This code permanently removes duplicate pages and transfers all ranking authority to your relevant or new page. A web developer can help you add a 301 redirect and fix duplicate content.
• Use canonical tags. Canonical tags show Google which page is your relevant or main page, and all other similar pages are duplicate ones. Compared to a 301 redirect, canonicalization does not transfer page rank to the new page, and the duplicate pages continue to be accessible on your site.
• Promote relevant pages with internal links. A good internal linking structure shows the interconnectedness of your pages to help bots understand your content and rank you higher. A higher rank on SERPs improves visibility and extends authority in your industry.

Summing Up

A well-funded SEO crawl budget unlocks your website's full potential. Google bots can easily crawl through your pages to rank them, which improves exposure to your products or services. Master technical SEO strategies to build a crawlable, efficient, and high-ranking site.

Do you want to know how your crawl budget affects your page rankings? Contact Digital Authority Partners today.