How can you prioritize the most important pages for search engine crawling with a limited budget?

2 Why is crawling budget important?

Crawling budget is important because it affects how fast and how well your pages are indexed and ranked by the search engine. If you have a high crawling budget, it means that the search engine can crawl more of your pages more frequently, which can improve your visibility and traffic. However, if you have a low crawling budget, it means that the search engine may miss some of your pages or crawl them less often, which can reduce your chances of ranking for your target keywords and queries.

3 How to check your crawling budget?

One way to check your crawling budget is to use Google Search Console, a free tool that provides insights into how Google crawls and indexes your site. You can access the Crawl Stats report under the Legacy Tools and Reports section, which shows you the number of pages crawled per day, the average time spent downloading a page, and the number of kilobytes downloaded per day. You can also see the crawl errors and coverage issues that may affect your crawling budget.

4 How to improve your site structure?

Optimizing your site structure is one of the best ways to improve your crawling budget. This involves organizing and linking your pages in a clear and logical hierarchy that reflects your main categories and subcategories. To help search engine bots find and understand your pages faster, create a sitemap that lists all your pages and submit it to Google Search Console. Additionally, use descriptive and consistent URLs that match your page titles and content. Connect your pages with internal links to guide the bots and users through your site, as well as use breadcrumbs to show the navigation path and the current location of the page. Finally, use canonical tags to avoid duplicate content issues and indicate the preferred version of the page.

5 How to optimize your content?

To optimize your crawling budget, you should focus on improving your content. High-quality and relevant content can increase your crawl demand and ranking potential, while low-quality and irrelevant content can waste your crawl budget and hurt your performance. To get the most out of your content, it is important to use keyword research to identify the topics and terms that your audience is searching for. Additionally, you should make sure to use title tags, meta descriptions, headings, and images to provide clear and compelling information about your pages. Structured data can also be used to add rich snippets and schema markup to enhance your visibility on the search results. Furthermore, it is important to update and refresh your content regularly as well as remove or improve thin or low-value content that provides little benefit.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?