Enhancing Site Crawlability and Indexability to Strengthen Your Online Visibility Strategy

With millions of websites competing for people’s attention every day, ensuring that your site is easily discovered and understood by search engines is critical. Often overlooked, the process of crawling and indexing is an essential online visibility strategy. Without effective crawling, your web pages won’t be indexed, and without indexing, they cannot rank. 

In this article, our team at Springhill Marketing will guide you through the steps to enhancing your website’s crawlability and indexability. When done correctly, it can help you optimise your SEO strategy and strengthen your online presence.

Web Crawlability and Indexability 101 

Before diving into specific strategies, it’s essential to understand what crawlability and indexability mean. 

• Crawlability is the ability of search engine bots, also known as spiders, to navigate your site. If the bots can easily crawl your site, they can discover all its pages and content.
• Indexability is the next step, where the crawled pages are added to the search engine’s index. Only indexed pages can be found in search results.

Enhancing these two aspects of your website is fundamental to increasing your visibility on search engines such as Google.

How to Boost Your Website’s Crawlability and Indexability 

Now that you understand what crawlability and indexability mean, let’s explore the strategies for making it easier for search engines, such as Google, to crawl and index your site.

1. Accelerate your page loading speed

Not only does a fast-loading website improve user experience, but it also facilitates better crawling. Search engines prioritise pages that load quickly as they are more likely to provide a positive user experience. To speed up your website, you can: 

• Optimise images – compress images without sacrificing quality and choose the correct formats.
• Minimise code – reduce the size of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files to improve loading times.
• Enable browser caching – enable caching so that returning visitors can load your pages faster by storing resources locally.
• Reduce redirects – minimise the use of redirects as they can slow down page loading.

2. Prioritise core web vitals

Google’s Core Web Vitals are essential metrics that measure user experience, directly influencing how the search giant evaluates your site. These include: 

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – ensure your pages load the main content within 2.5 seconds.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP) – improve responsiveness, aiming for less than 200 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – keep layout shifts to a minimum, targeting a CLS score below 0.1.

Regularly monitor these metrics using tools such as Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, or Lighthouse, and make necessary adjustments to enhance performance.

3. Maximise your crawl budget

The crawl budget is defined as the number of web pages a search engine will crawl on your site within a specific period. Optimising this budget ensures that your most important pages are prioritised. To improve your crawl budget, you should: 

• Streamline site structure – ensure your site is well-organised with a clear hierarchy.
• Avoid duplicate content – eliminate unnecessary duplicate pages that waste your crawl budget.
• Use robots.txt wisely – block less important pages (e.g., admin pages) from being crawled.
• Update XML sitemap – regularly update your sitemap and submit it to search engines to guide their crawlers.

4. Boost internal linking

A vital aspect of SEO, internal linking helps search engines understand the relationship amongst your web pages. A robust internal linking strategy can improve crawlability by: 

• Creating a logical structure – ensure that your homepage links to main category pages, which then link to subcategories.
• Avoiding orphaned pages – see that every page is linked from somewhere on your site.
• Fixing broken links – look for and fix broken links regularly to prevent crawl errors.

5. Submit your sitemap to Google

While search engines can find your site on their own, submitting an updated sitemap directly to Google Search Console should be included in your online visibility strategy. A sitemap acts as a roadmap, guiding Google and other search engines to the most important pages within your website and expediting the crawling and indexing process. 

• Why it matters – a sitemap is especially useful for large sites or those that frequently update content as it ensures all pages are discovered quickly.

6. Review and optimise your robots.txt file

The robots.txt file controls how search engines crawl your site. A well-configured robots.txt file can enhance crawlability, but errors can severely restrict it. 

To optimise your robots.txt file, see that it is in the root directory and doesn’t block important resources. Also, avoid using “noindex” in this file.

7. Implement canonical tags correctly

Canonical tags help search engines identify the primary version of a page when there are duplicates or similar content. Misconfigured canonical tags can lead to indexing the wrong pages. Therefore:

• Check for rogue tags – regularly audit your site to ensure that all canonical tags point to the correct pages.
• Use the right tags for international sites – if you have versions of your site for different regions, ensure that each version is correctly tagged.

8. Conduct a comprehensive site audit

Frequent site audits are crucial for identifying and fixing issues that may hinder crawling and indexing. Tools such as Screaming Frog or SEMrush can help with: 

• Checking indexability – ensure that a high percentage of your pages are indexed.
• Identifying errors – use the audit to spot errors such as broken links, duplicate content, or misconfigured redirects.

9. Eliminate duplicate content

Duplicate content confuses search engines, resulting in indexing issues. Use these strategies to handle duplicates: 

• Consolidate URLs – use 301 redirects or canonical tags to consolidate content that exists on multiple URLs.
• Check crawl results – look for duplicate or near-duplicate content that might be wasting the crawl budget and fix it accordingly.

10. Remove redirect chains

Redirect chains occur when multiple redirects point to a destination, which can confuse search engines and waste crawl budget. Using the appropriate SEO tools can help identify and fix these chains by simplifying redirects. This ensures that there’s only one redirect between the original URL and the destination.

11. Address broken links

Broken links lead to dead ends, frustrating both users and search engines. Check your site for broken links regularly and fix them by updating the URL or redirecting them to a relevant page. Alternatively, you can remove the link if it no longer serves a purpose.

12. Leverage IndexNow for fast indexing

IndexNow is a protocol that allows websites to inform search engines of changes in real-time, ensuring faster indexing of new or updated content. It would be wise to use it for significant content changes, such as new product launches or critical updates, to ensure search engines are immediately aware of them.

13. Enhance content understanding with structured data

Structured data helps search engines understand your content better, which strengthens your overall SEO and online visibility strategy. Implement structured data by: 

• Using schema markup – add schema.org tags to your HTML to describe the content more precisely.
• Testing and monitoring – use Google’s Rich Results Test to check your structured data and monitor its performance in Google Search Console.

Help Google Crawl and Index Your Site 

Optimising your website for crawlability and indexability is a vital part of a robust and effective SEO strategy. Implementing these strategies enables you to make your site more accessible to Google’s spiders, leading to better search rankings and greater online visibility. Regularly auditing your site and staying up-to-date with best practices will help you maintain and boost your site’s performance over time. 

Do you want to improve your site’s crawlability and indexability but you neither have the time nor expertise? We at Springhill Marketing can help. Get in touch today, and our team of digital marketing specialists will handle all of SEO’s complexities so you can focus on your business!