What is Google Crawl Budget and is your website SEO optimised for it?
We all know how crucial SEO (search engine optimisation) is for our business websites, don’t we? After all, we all want our websites to rank higher in search, especially Google search, so our sites can be found by more people and drive more traffic to them. Let’s explore what your Google crawl budget means to your website and SEO.
Right, so if SEO is all about optimising your site for the search engines, it’s very important to also think about how the search engines interact with your website. That’s a very basic consideration that is often overlooked. After all, Google (and other search engines) has made no secret of the fact that its sole purpose in life is to give its users the best possible search experience. If your website’s SEO is geared to helping the search engines achieve their goal, then you’ll reap the benefits.
Give Google what it wants
While there are numerous factors affecting how search engines deal with your website, if you want to optimise your website for the Google search engine, then you need to take the Google ‘crawl budget’ into consideration. If you understand the Google crawl budget, you’ll be able to take the necessary actions to ensure your website is crawled effectively by the Googlebot.
What is a Google crawl budget?
According to a definition published by Google earlier in 2017, a Google crawl budget is comprised of two parts, namely:
- Crawl rate limit, and
- Crawl demand.
Together, crawl rate limit and crawl demand determine the crawl budget as “the number of URLs the Googlebot can and wants to crawl”. And when it comes to your business website, there’s no better outcome than having the search engines wanting to crawl all your pages!
1. Crawl rate limit
Google’s crawl rate limit prevents the Googlebot from overloading your website and slowing it down by making too many requests for it. Therefore, if your website’s speed is slow, the bot will not want to slow it down even more, so it will back away from crawling it too much. That’s not good.
However, if your website is fast and able to quickly respond to requests from both search engines and human visitors at the same time, the Googlebot will take that as a good sign and crawl your website more.
So it’s important to test the speed of your website, in particular, load times and the number of HTTP requests it’s dealing with. Load time needs to be short – as far below 2 seconds as possible. Any slower and Google is likely to pay less attention to it. Your website should also have as few HTTP requests as possible. Having a low number of HTTP requests will enable the Googlebot to make more requests and crawl your website more.
2. Crawl demand
As far as crawl demand goes, Google rates fresh, popular website content as having a higher crawl demand. Yes, we’re back to the old topic we’re constantly talking about – good-quality, fresh content that people want to access.
Your call to action
So, what’s the call to action here? Speed up your website and make sure your content is fresh and desirable, and Google’s crawl budget for your website will also increase. How do you do that? Well, here are 3 things you can do to speed up your site.
- Declutter – keep the design of your website simple. The more ‘stuff’, no matter how good-looking or trendy they might be, you have in your design the longer it will take for your site to load. Make it a point to compress the file size of images in particular – and if you have any images that just look pretty but don’t really add anything to a viewer’s comprehension of your material, get rid of them.
- Make sure all of your pages work properly – you do not want visitors (humans or search engines) getting ‘404 errors’.
- Clean out duplicate content – duplicate content is not good for SEO because search engines don’t like to find duplicate content (and neither do humans, for that matter). If your site contains multiple pages with largely identical content tidy it up. Duplicate content is just a waste of everybody’s time.
Now, what about crawl demand? It stands to reason that you want your website to be popular. That’s also important to the search engines, especially Google. You want people to want to come to your site and stick around on it, and share links to it with their own networks. If you can increase the popularity of your website, the search engines will sit up and take note, and give you a higher crawl budget. So you need to be popular – and here are 3 ways to achieve this:
- Add fresh content – people want fresh content, and so does Google. The fresher the content on your site, the more people will be interested in it (and share it with others). So keep adding new, high-quality (i.e. value adding) content.
- Update existing content – keep revisiting your content to ensure it is up to date. When a search engine sees your website’s content is constantly changing (as in improving – not simply changing for the sake of changing), it will re-crawl your site.
- Add new pages – it’s highly unlikely that a popular website will stay the same – it’s far more likely that visitors will have questions that trigger a response from you in the shape of new information on new pages. As your website grows it attracts the attention of the search engines. Of course, the additional pages need to be full of fresh, quality information (and don’t forget the points above about ensuring new pages and their content don’t slow down your website).
Speed and quality for a greater crawl budget
When all is said and done, the Google crawl budget is all about quality and speed. So those are the two things you should also focus on when it comes to your website’s SEO. Just remember, what Google and every other search engine wants is to give its users the best, most relevant search results. And that’s really what you want too, isn’t it? After all, the sole purpose of your website (irrespective of whether you’re offering a product or service) is to attract visitors to what you’re offering and convert them into loyal customers.
If you’d like to find out more about how to optimise your website for Google’s crawl budget, talk to the SEO specialists at Auckland digital marketing company Net Branding. Our full-service digital marketing offering includes the design of websites that are optimised for search engines and the development of content marketing strategies that are proven to deliver results. We’re just a phone call or click away – so get in touch with us today.
