How to Use Google’s Crawl Budget to Boost Your Site’s SEO

I’ve consulted with hundreds of business, and I’ve answered thousands of SEO questions.

When I sit down with a new client, I always ask about their goals.

Most of the time, I hear the same ones:

“I want to optimize my content for keywords.”

“I want to rank higher on Google.”

“I want to drive more traffic to my site.”

But there’s a much more fundamental need that every SEO needs to address.

Think about it. What is SEO?

It’s an obvious question but bear with me.

SEO is optimizing your site for search engines, right? That means it’s important to consider how search engines interact with your site.

This is a building block of SEO, but it doesn’t get as much air time as keywords or rankings even though it should.

There are many factors that affect how search engines treat your content.

Crawl budget is one of those factors.

If you understand crawl budget, you can use some techniques to make sure your site gets crawled effectively.

That means you’ll have better SERP results and better SEO overall.

Don’t worry––there’s nothing too technical here. It’s easy for anyone to pick up, and it can give you a serious SEO advantage.

What is crawl budget?

In the past few years, the term “crawl budget” made its rounds in SEO circles. Lots of people speculated about what exactly it meant, but there was never an official definition.

Until January 2017, that is.

That’s when Google’s Gary Illyes published a blog post that defined specifically what crawl budget is.

According to Illyes, what people call “crawl budget” is actually considered to be two parts in Google’s eyes.

Those two parts are crawl rate limit and crawl demand.

Here’s how Google defines crawl rate limit:

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