Your website’s crawl budget is the number of times and the rate at which Google’s crawlers traverse your site, being determined by a complex mix of technical and non-technical factors.
Crawl budget is an important ranking factor because it indicates how much time Googlebot spends crawling your site to understand and index its pages.
The more time that Googlebot spends crawling your site, the better your rankings will be. If a bot visits a page once and finds lots of great content that it wants to index, it will keep coming back for more updates.
But if Googlebot comes to your site, can’t find anything useful or valuable, or can’t even locate any content at all, then it will stop visiting your site as often. That is why improving the crawl budget of your site should be one of the main goals for every SEO campaign.
What is a crawl budget?
It may be a new term for you, but the crawl budget of your site is very important to the overall visibility and health of your website.
Crawl budget is essentially a measure of the number of pages that Google will crawl on your site during their visits. Every website has a crawl budget, even if they don’t know it. It’s not something that you can set and forget, because it will change over time as Google updates its algorithms and priorities.
So how do you improve the crawl budget of your site?
Have a clean architecture
If you create a site with lots of internal links connecting all of your content together, then you will make it easy for Google to crawl from one page to another. According to some of the premium SEO services in New Zealand, a well-structured site with internal linking will improve the user experience too, which will help to reduce bounce rate by keeping readers on your site for longer.
Create a Sitemap.xml File
A sitemap is an XML file that lists out all the URLs on your site. Google will use this to find new pages and index them quickly, boosting your crawl budget. Some CMSs create this automatically, but if yours doesn’t, I recommend using an SEO plugin like Yoast to generate a sitemap for you.
Reduce Duplicate Content
Google can penalize sites with duplicate content because it doesn’t know which version to index. If you have multiple pages or posts that contain near-identical content, Google may view these as duplicates and penalize them in search results.
Internal Factors:
1) Page and Site Architecture: Page architecture plays a vital role to improve crawl budget.
You should maintain a proper navigation structure for crawlers to find the main pages of your site easily.
2) Duplicate Content: Search engines can’t crawl duplicate content so you should avoid creating duplicate content at any cost because it will reduce the efficiency of your site.
External Factors:
1) Backlinks: Backlinks also affect crawl budget and it is important to build backlinks from authoritative sites to improve your crawl budget.
2) Server Speed: Server speed also affects crawl budget because crawlers spend more time on fast loading websites as compared to slow loading websites.