How To Optimize Crawl Budget For ECommerce Sites
The crawl budget for that website is the number of pages in a website analyzed by a search engine in a given timeframe. Usually, the crawl budget is sufficient for most businesses and websites as they have pages ranging between a few hundred and a few thousand.
Top e-commerce websites like Apple, eBay, and Amazon usually have tens of thousands of pages, all laden with high-quality multimedia and interactive content elements.
When the volume and weight of pages are so high, it is possible that search engine bots can skip some pages altogether, particularly the ones that are poorly maintained or have technical issues.
This results in lost opportunities while souring the online shopping experience, which can encourage customers to churn.
In this article, let’s find the source of these crawl issues for ecommerce sites and learn how to fix them using specialized tools.
Crawl Budget Issues in ECommerce
Search engine bots prioritize pages that deliver a great user experience—those with updated content, fast loading speeds, and real-time interactivity. In other words, pages that have irrelevant or outdated content, take too long to load, and respond poorly or incorrectly to user inputs get deprioritized.
Search engines interpret these pages as ‘unimportant’ since the -commerce business does not maintain them appropriately. As a result, these pages are pushed to lower ranks on search engine result pages (SERPs) or, in some cases, deindexed entirely.
There are many reasons why this can happen with large ecommerce sites:
- High-volume product pages: Different categories and configurations can quickly increase the pages an e-commerce SEO team needs to manage.
- Dynamic content: When unoptimized, dynamic content, whether interactive forms or helpful chatbots, can slow pages down. This affects page speed and, hence, rank.
- Duplicate content and thin pages: Sometimes, teams update pages by making a copy and forget to unpublish the older page. Test pages or templates that are live and indexed for search engines can also exist.
- Poor site architecture: The pages should be filed according to their category within the right hierarchies. Broken links and internal redirects should be avoided at all costs.
Consequences of Crawl Budget Issues
Keep in mind that every e-commerce website has different kinds of crawl issues. Some can suffer from technical issues such as broken links, and others can be affected by large images, leading to slow loading speeds.
Advanced site audit tools like high-performance SEO crawlers can help more accurately detect the extent of website issues. After this section, We looked into how to use such specialized tools to build thorough and efficient ecommerce SEO audit workflows.
As the severity of the misconfigurations varies from one ecommerce site to another, so does the price e-commerce businesses pay for them. The three broad ramifications that ecommerce teams could face are:
- Important pages unindexed: This happens when search engine bots think some pages are unimportant to the audience. The organic traffic for these pages will drop to zero.
- Outdated content in search results: Insufficient crawl budget means the pages will be crawled less frequently, which can give the audience past, irrelevant information in the search results.
- Reduced SEO performance: Search engines penalize sites with multiple or severe crawl issues with reduced rankings and decreased competitiveness on certain keywords.
How Advanced Crawlers Can Solve Crawl Budget Issues for ECommerce Sites
The core reasons for crawl budget issues in bug ecommerce sites are technical issues and suboptimal content.
Technical issues include broken links, internal redirects, inefficient sitemap, and deleted/incompatible media files. Similarly, content issues can range from outdated product information to duplicate pages and missing meta details.
Fixing all these misconfigurations and errors begins with identifying them quickly and accurately.
With their comprehensive features and high performance, advanced crawlers go through hundreds of pages in a second, scanning them for potential SEO threats. They use new algorithms to optimize server resources to pinpoint errors cost-effectively.
Even with the complex site structures and multimedia-laden product pages, these high-performance SEO crawlers can generate audit reports rapidly.
After getting the detailed reports on what needs to be done, it is essential to segment the pages depending on their priority. Some pages, such as category pages or the home page, need to be optimized pronto.
While assigning pages (for improvement, edits, etc.,), it can be beneficial to list the action items for team members. This will streamline the process and help avoid misunderstandings, duplication of efforts, and silly mistakes.
Teams can leverage generative AI tools to quickly write meta details or new product descriptions, speeding up content optimization. Moreover, these tools can intelligently automate tasks such as updating alt-tags and suggesting URLs in bulk.
Large e-commerce websites can find it advantageous to run frequent audits with advanced SEO crawlers to stay on top of maintenance issues. It is always ideal to fix errors and misconfigurations before search engine bots see them.
This proactive approach ensures that all the important pages are updated and indexed by the search engines, delivering a delightful experience to the audience.
Wrapping up
Search engines allocate a specific crawl budget for all websites, including large e-commerce platforms. The pages are scanned and ranked based on their usefulness to users and the kind of experience they provide.
When pages are outdated in content or have technical issues, search engine bots classify these pages as unimportant and spend that crawl budget on other pages.
An unoptimized crawl budget can lead to poor ranking or deindexing of essential pages and may incur an SEO penalty, affecting the domain’s overall ranking.
Advanced SEO crawlers help solve this problem by rapidly analyzing e-commerce websites and generating comprehensive audit reports. These reports reveal the various areas of improvement on different pages, which can optimize how search engines crawl through the website once fixed.
Teams can also benefit from building dedicated workflows around this to streamline the process of updating product pages and fixing on-site technical issues. Additionally, leveraging large language models (LLMs) can speed up the content refurbishing processes. Incorporating the best LLMs can further enhance your eCommerce site by improving the natural language processing of user queries, resulting in better search functionality and user experience.
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