What is crawlability?
The second pillar to review when looking to improve your SEO is website crawlability. When search engines such as Google index the entire internet, they use what is called a crawler. The crawlers are continuously “crawling” the internet to index information from each website for the search engine to use when providing search results for a user. To help improve SEO, you want your website setup for the crawlers to easily crawl and gain the correct information about your website.
How can I improve my website’s crawlability?
To help the crawlers, here are five tips to review on your website.
Mobile Friendliness
As the world becomes more mobile based, it is extremely important to have a website that is mobile friendly. Some websites, especially those that were built several years ago, are built for desktop and are not mobile friendly, meaning that design elements and features might not convert well to mobile. Search engines look into these potential issues. Here is a link to a mobile friendliness check for your website – Google Mobile Friendly Test Tool
Site Organization
To help crawlers understand your site, it is important to have good site organization. This means setting up an outline structure that makes it easy for users to understand how to find what they’re looking for. For example, if you have multiple products that fall under one category, it would be a good practice to also have a category page that lists links to the individual product pages.
Fresh Content
Crawlers are looking for websites that are “alive”. Search engines are not looking to direct people to websites that haven’t been updated for months or years. A good way to keep your website “fresh” is to have a blog and post regularly.
Sitemaps
Another way to help the crawlers understand your website and what to crawl is with a sitemap. There are multiple tools that help create and set up sitemaps for your website such as Yoast SEO and Google Search Console.
Broken Links
A broken link is where a hyperlink on your website leads to a nonexisting webpage address. Crawlers will pick up on this issue on your website. Here is a tool to check your website for broken links – Broken Link Check Tool.
Implementing five strategies will help improve the crawlability of your website and improve your SEO. If you want help with implementing these tips on your website, email Josh and we are happy to help.
Want more? You can read our other Four Pillars of SEO posts: Why Relevance Matters to Search Engines, Keywords for Relevance, Crawlability, User Engagement.
References:
SEO Resource Book – 1
SEO Resource Book – 2
Google SEO Resource – 1
Google SEO Resource – 2
