How does website crawling work for SEO?

Website crawling refers to the process where search engines scan websites for content in order to index it in their databases.

This allows them to understand what each website contains and how relevant it is for users.

Let’s take a closer look at what crawling actually is and why it matters for you as a website owner.

Why do search engines crawl websites?

Website crawling is a continuous process.

This happens because search engines are constantly working to find and present the most relevant pages to users when they perform a search.

To do this, search engines need insight into the content of each website and where to position these pages organically on the SERP.

What do crawler bots look for?

When crawler bots visit a website, it’s similar to having guests over at your house.

In such cases, you usually want everything tidy and organized — the same principle applies when bots visit your website.

Here are a few useful steps to make your website “presentable” for bots:

Create a logical structure with internal links

First and foremost, it’s essential to keep a logical structure throughout the website.

There should be internal links between pages where it makes sense. If the site has many subpages, make sure the most important pages are never more than a few clicks away from the homepage.

Use sitemaps to guide search engines

Sitemaps can be a helpful tool for organizing a website and keeping subpages up to date.

For example, sitemaps can be submitted to Google Search Console, where crawlers can get a full overview of all the pages on your site — especially beneficial for large websites with many subpages.

In this context, Robot.txt files can be used in conjunction with the sitemap to indicate which pages should not be crawled.

Help search engines with schema markup

Schema markup is another way to make it easier for search engines to understand what kind of content is on your website.

Essentially, schema markup helps structure various types of data, which can then be presented to search engines and improve their understanding of your content.

Don’t forget mobile-friendliness

Last but not least, Google now uses a mobile-first indexing approach, which means that only mobile-friendly versions of websites are used for indexing and ranking — regardless of the device a user searches from.

Because of this, a website’s mobile-friendliness is crucial to ensure it gets crawled properly and can achieve better rankings on the SERP.