In the SEO industry there is a triangle called; Ranking, Indexing, and Crawling.

Ranking and indexing are famous and common idioms in the SEO language. But not a lot of us know a lot about crawling.

In this article, we are going to answer the following questions: What is Crawl Budget Optimization? Why does the digital marketing agency pay a great deal of attention to it?  And how does it affect your SEO?

What is the crawl budget in SEO?

Crawl Budget is to identify a number of concepts and systems that Google’s Search engine uses to give attention to your website, through its search engine’s crawlers like bots and spiders.

If Googlebot doesn’t love your website; you will not have the chance to index it.

How do I increase Google Crawling Rate?

It is not enough to impress Googlebot, and you do not have to wait for Google to crawl your website; so here are some steps to increase your Google Crawl Rate:

1- Update your content frequently:

Add different pieces of content, such as Articles, Blogposts, Videos …etc.; to attract Googlebot.

Websites with regularly updated content, have a better chance to be noticed.

2- Provide content via the blog:

Do not add too many web pages, add a blog then add your content there to reduce the cost. It also allows you to update your content regularly.

3- Avoid Duplicate content:

Google Search Engine has the ability to identify duplicate and copied content.

In fact, this practice is very harmful; your website will drop down in ranking, or it will be removed from the search results.

Duplicate content tells Google that your website has no value.

4- Add sitemaps:

Sitemaps help Googlebot discover your website. Actually, it is one of the most important steps, and very helpful.

It will help you also prioritize your web pages, so they can be crawled faster.

5- Optimize your images:

Optimized images have a better chance to be shown on search results because Googlebot is not like us; it cannot recognize the images without optimization.

To optimize images, add tags and descriptions to your images. And do the same with videos.

6- Server response:

Google gives attention to your website speed, so you should improve it, and not make your visitors wait for so long to download the web page.

7- Avoid black hat SEO:

Google now is smarter than before; so you should avoid all the SEO Black Hat tactics.

Black Hat SEO is; a tactic to trick Google to rank high on search results; such as Keyword Stuffing.

8- Ask for Social Share:

Ask your visitors to spread the word and share your content on social media platforms. It helps Googlebot in crawling and index your content faster.

9- Use Robots.txt:

You don’t have to index every piece of your content, especially when you have a large website; with too many web pages, for example, you don’t have to index backend folders.

Using Robot.txt stops Googlebot from crawling unwanted pages. But be careful when using it.

10- Be careful of your website loading time:

You have to be careful of your website loading time; because crawlers have so limited time and budget, to check and index your website.

I’m sure; you don’t want the crawlers to spend all the time and budget checking unwanted PDF files for Example. It’s called crawl budget optimization.

11- Be aware of broken links:

Internal Broken links refer to pages on your website that can’t be accessed.

12- Internal link structure:

You should set up your internal links correctly, to make search engines recognize your web pages easily.

Why should you care about Crawl Budget Optimization?

Crawl Budget Optimization is a very important thing you should care about; because as a website owner, you want Search engines to find and index your pages, especially when you add or update a web page.

As we mentioned above; you do not want the crawlers to spend the entire budget checking unwanted files; and ignore the important parts.

How do I check my crawl rate on Google?

You can use Google Search Console to measure the crawling budget:

1- Sign in to Google Search Console.

2- Choose the website.

3- Go to the command “Crawl” then “Crawl Stats”.

4- You will find the number of pages Google is crawling every day.