4 Ways to Make Your Site More Crawlable for Search Engine Bots

If you build it, they will come… eventually.

The fact is that search engine crawl bots will eventually crawl your website, assuming you haven’t added it to the “do not crawl” list.

So perhaps you’re wondering why you should put in the extra work to get it crawled?

There are ways to make your website even more crawlable, which means more pages will be crawled and indexed and appear on SERPs. In this post, we’ll share with you four ways to achieve this, most of which can be achieved with relative ease.

So let’s dive in!

1. Submit Your Sitemap to Google

Once your website is live, it can take some time for Google to add it to its regular crawl rotation. The same can be said even if your website has been live for awhile but content was added or updated recently.

The good news?

You can submit your sitemap to Google to speed up the process.

Once you find your sitemap, you just have to submit the file to Google Search Console. It’s a pretty painless process with a significant pay off.

2. Improve Your Internal Linking Structure

There are a few methods that crawl bots use when crawling through your website. Just like water, though, they take the path of least resistance.

An internal linking structure is how you link from one page on your website to another page on your website. For example, a navigation link from your homepage to the “About Us” page, or from one blog post to another.

A “good” internal linking structure will direct customers from pages at the top of your website structure to those lower in the funnel. A “bad” structure will lead visitors, and crawl bots, in endless circles.

3. Improve Site Speed and Page Load Times

A common misconception is that crawl bots crawl every page of every website.

The truth is that search engines have too much ground to cover. They only crawl a percentage of each website on any given crawl.

So how can you ensure that more of your website is crawled for search engines?

One way is to improve site speed and decrease page load times.

The faster your website loads, the more pages it can crawl. This will mean greater visibility on SERPs.

How can you increase site speed?

The first step is to audit your site for any common loading issues. There are plenty of free tools that exist, including PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, and GTmetrix.

These tools will help you to identify problems and opportunities for improvement:

Improving your site speed will also be of great benefit to your website users and your overall performance metrics.

4. Audit Your Site for Duplicate Content

If you haven’t told search engines to disregard any pages on your website, then Google will crawl your site as it sees fit. This can cause issues if you have duplicate content pages on your website.

Duplicate content is content that exists in more than one place on the internet. That may mean it exists on two more pages of your site, or it exists on your website and on another website on the internet.

There are many reasons that duplicate content is a no-no for website owners.

When it comes to SEO, though, the problem with duplicate content is that search engine bots don’t always have the ability to determine which page is more relevant to a search query.

This means that any duplicate content on your site may be excluded from SERPs entirely.

The solution is simple: find duplicate content on your site and correct it.

Tools such as Ubersuggest enable you to find duplicate content pages that exist on your website. You can then create redirects or merge content to remove the duplicity.

If you suspect plagiarism from your site, you can use tools like Copyscape to find your content on other websites. You then have a few options for addressing it, ranging from reaching out to the site owner to asking Google to remove the plagiarized content under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Do you have additional tips for making your site more crawlable for search engine bots? Share them in the comments section below.