By Laia Cardona, on 27 May 2022
Crawl budget is a very important metric in SEO, as well as one of the elements that can help optimize and position a web page. Despite its importance, it is not a frequently discussed topic when talking about SEO.
What Is a Crawl Budget?
Crawl budget is a metric used to indicate the number of times a search engine crawls the web pages of a site within a given period of time.
The purpose of the crawl is to rank web pages in search results based on the quality, performance, and consumption of data by users. This means that the more careful and updated the content of a web page is, the more likely it is to be crawled frequently.
Why Is Crawl Budget Important in SEO?
The positioning of a website within search engines and, consequently, organic traffic seem to be associated with the number of times its pages have been crawled.
Considering that for a brand it is essential to appear among the first results, the crawl budget becomes an important metric to take into account in any digital marketing strategy. This means offering a good user experience and providing updated content for Google or any other search engine to crawl the pages frequently.
How to Optimize the Crawl Budget of Your Website
To understand the crawl budget, you can use Google Search Console. If you need to improve it, you can do it in the following ways:
Eliminate duplicate pages: If you are using different URLs to reach the same product or service, it is important to eliminate one of them so that Google can index it.
Eliminate damaged links: With Google Search Console, you can search for internal and external links that result in some kind of error, are damaged, or lead to a website that no longer exists.
Use valuable web pages: The links used should lead to a page that provides valuable information for the user, is updated frequently, and receives a constant flow of traffic.
Use internal and external links: In an SEO strategy, you should link internally to other content on your website so that users stay within your site for as much time as possible. In addition, you should also include external links and develop a link building strategy so that websites with high authority link back to yours.
In addition to everything listed above, which helps Google and other search engines crawl your website frequently, it's important to carry out a good SEO strategy that takes into account everything from the keywords and images to titles or meta descriptions.