With nearly 1.14 billion websites on the internet, many of which each have dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of web pages, there’s a huge amount of information out there. None of this just magically appears when you search for someone on Google. Before Google can show you any results, it has to have those web pages crawled and indexed. Obviously, going through so much information is a huge amount of work.

You might assume that Google has limitless resources to crawl every page right away when they’re published or updated. However, it can be a little more complicated than that. Various issues on a website can make it harder for Google to crawl its pages, which can eat away at the website’s crawl budget.

Many people aren’t aware of what a crawl budget is and how it can affect their website. If you want to know more about how you can help your website be efficiently crawled and indexed, ENX2 Marketing can help.

What is a Crawl Budget?

Google can’t take forever to crawl all the pages on your website. Instead, you have a crawl budget, which is the number of pages Google can crawl in a certain amount of time. Google only spends a certain amount of time crawling pages, and once your time is up, it moves on whether or not it’s finished with all your pages.

Of course, if pages don’t get crawled, they don’t get indexed. If your web pages aren’t showing up in the SERPs, it’s possible that they didn’t get crawled or indexed. However, while getting your pages crawled or indexed to bring in traffic, how frequently your website gets crawled isn’t a ranking factor.

How much time Google spends crawling websites varies. How big your website is and how frequently you update it can affect how often Google crawls it. Fortunately, for many smaller websites, like those with fewer than 1,000 pages, it’s likely that you won’t have many problems getting your site’s pages crawled. While crawl budget often isn’t a major problem for smaller websites, you could have issues that make it harder to be crawled, and you can also make changes that help it get crawled more efficiently.

How to Optimize Your Crawl Budget

Many of the steps you can take to get the most out of your crawl budget are also actions that can help improve your SEO and website overall. If you haven’t already prioritized these tasks, now is the time.

Improve Site Speed

No one has time to wait for a web page to load, including Google. When you have a limited amount of time for Google to crawl your web pages, you don’t want to leave it waiting for everything to load. The slower your website is, the less content Google can get through during your website’s allotted crawl budget.

Even if Google has enough time to crawl a slow-loading page, that doesn’t mean users will be willing to wait. Site speed is an important ranking factor, and faster websites provide a much better user experience.

Get Rid of Low-Value Content

The last thing you would want to happen is for Google to crawl your website, but only get to pages that don’t really matter. There are more low-value web pages that do nothing to help a website or users than you might realize. Duplicate content can occur easily without you realizing it, and some websites may also have thin or spammy content they can do without.

Ensuring that all the pages on your website are necessary can help prevent your crawl budget from getting wasted on low-value content. If you go through your website’s content and there are pages that won’t provide anything to users, consider if you really need them.

Block Pages from Getting Crawled

Sometimes, having pages that you don’t want to have crawled and indexed is unavoidable. While you don’t want these pages to be crawled, you might still need them. Fortunately, you can keep them and block them from being crawled. Adding a “noindex” meta tag lets you keep these pages without worrying about them being crawled.

Include Internal Links

You want to make it as easy as possible for Google to access your other pages when it crawls your website. To do this, you need to include internal links. Adding links to your other pages allows Google to find these pages easily and quickly. If you have any orphaned pages, these need to be fixed.

Not only do you want a menu where you can find links to all your web pages, but you want to include these links in your content as well. This will help Google and users find important pages.

Create a Sitemap

Having an up-to-date sitemap of your website available provides Google with a straightforward guide to your web pages. Sitemaps outline all the pages on your website and where different pages lead to.

Optimize Your Site with ENX2 Marketing

All of the work you need to do to optimize your website for search engines is likely more than you can handle on your own. If you already have too much going on or these skills aren’t in your wheelhouse, there’s no need to worry about how you can do it all. At ENX2 Marketing, we have a skilled team experienced in all aspects of digital marketing who can do it for you.

How to Get the Most Out of Your Crawl Budget