What is a Website Crawl and Why Do You Need One?

What is a website crawl? A crawl is technical audit of your site. During a website crawl, a crawler, spider or bot scans your website to see how optimized it is. It’s important to remember that even the most professional-looking websites can have issues. A crawl will help you to understand these issues and how to fix them.

So you want to audit your site to find out how to better optimize it? The first step is to make sure it’s crawlable. Some aspects to ensure this is accessibility, site architecture and available robot.txt file that is properly formatted. A robot .txt file acts a map or guide for the robots that are going to crawl your site. These are just a few pointers to ensure your site is accessible.

If your site is crawlable, you are ready to move forward with the process! I like using Moz for my website crawls. In Moz, I’ll put my website, wait a few minutes and I receive a report. The report tells me in details any issues that were detected on the site and ways to fix them.

Moz will categorize the issues on your site. The critical issues are ones you should prioritize fixing. I would definitely look into what the issue is and think about how it can be impacting your site. Some other categories are warnings, redirects and meta data issues.  The crawler can also detect issues with your content such as if you have duplicate content.  

Some of these warnings like a Meta Noindex can prevent indexation of the page. When. a page is indexted, it means it is available in the results. It’s imperative to focus on having as many pages indexed as possible. 

Some other issues the Moz crawler will detect are missing descriptions or H1’s and missing or invalid H1’s. It will also notify you if the title is too long or description is too long or short. 

A website will always have issues. It is key to come up with a plan to focus on and fix the issues most impacting your site. Don’t overwhelm yourself with trying to make it perfect, rather come up with a  roadmap that will help you better optimize it.

If you’d like to learn more how a crawl can benefit your website, please reach out to bayrockdigitalmarketing@gmail.com to learn more!