What does the term crawl budget mean within seo?
Introduction
If you’ve ever talked to a seo consultant at length about your website, well you’ve probably already heard the term “crawl-budget” crop quite a few times.
At first you might think it’s something to do with the budget you’ve placed on your digital marketing project- but that would be wrong, it’s slightly more technical than that.
That’s why this week we have gathered a few of our seo geeks, and we asked them to explain what a seo budget actually is in some detail.
So, what exactly is a crawl budget and why is it important?
Google has a rather clever piece of software called Googlebot, now it’s Googlebots job to crawl the web and find new work that has been added.
Now this is a very laborious job, but thankfully automated programmes do much of the work, nevertheless, even computers have to sometimes budget how much work they do.
This is why many leading seo experts believe crawl budgets are assigned to different websites.
An important website, like say for example a leading manufacturer of cars is likely to have a high crawl budget.
This means Googlebot is likely to want to spend more time on such a site, making sure it figures out changes, or new pages that have been added.
A less important site, say a website that reviews new cars, but is not a market leader, well such a site may have less of a crawl budget.
Why are crawl budgets important?
You need Google to notice new work that you add, also changes that you have made to your website.
Otherwise your seo consultant could be adding work that Google doesn’t recognise. So, basically to be rewarded for your seo efforts, well you have to efficiently use your websites crawl budget.
How can I efficiently use Google’s crawl budget?
First things first, you can’t just ask Google for a larger crawl budget, that’s because Google controls how much of your website it wants to crawl.
But it’s through by many seo experts that Google will allocate a greater crawl budget the more important your website becomes.
So, if your website has a load of good quality backlinks, really good content marketing then Google is likely to think that you have carried out good seo on your website, and is therefore more likely to improve the time it takes crawling and indexing work on your website.
However, our seo experts believe that the methods noted below can also increase your chances of Google improving the crawl rate of your website.
And it’s worth remembering that a better crawl rate can mean more of your websites get’s indexed, which means your more likely to have more pages and blog posts within Google that people can land on in order to find your website.
Make sure you have a good site map
Make sure that either your seo consultant, or website designer implements a detailed and up to date version of your websites site map.
Fix any broken links that your site has
Sending Googebot to a page that has a broken link, is like sending Googlebot down a dead end road, this will waste your crawl budget, and may mean new work doesn’t get added, or gets delayed in being added to Google’s index.
Make sure your website is crawlable
It’s important that your agency ensures that your website is crawlable, this means if there are any no-index tags, that these are removed. No-index tags mean that the page they are assigned to wont be indexed, this is obviously not good for seo, so make sure your website designer hasn’t left any no-index tags on your site that should be removed.
Make sure that your website loads quickly
Your seo agency should ensure that your website loads quickly, if it doesn’t load quickly it may be worth the business swapping hosting companies.
Fast websites often get rewarded, because people prefer a website to load fast, plus it’s also better for when Googlebot loads your website and crawls and indexes it.
Make sure that you partner with the right seo agency
Our best advice would be to make sure that you take the time to employ the right seo agency.
Making sure that Google can correctly crawl and index your website is important, but there are also other 200+ ranking signals that Google will consider. So it’s important that you employ a seo expert to work on your website, and make sure white hat seo is being implemented.
