If you want to get a really good idea of how your technical SEO is performing, crawling your website can be extremely useful. By mapping the structure of your website carefully as the web crawlers would, you can find any opportunities for improvement or potential problems. That way, you can make relevant changes to ensure that your SEO is as good as it can be. All parts of SEO are vital in ensuring that your website is performing at its best, but the technical aspect can be difficult for people to get to grips with. With this in mind, we put together a guide to what tools you need to crawl a website for SEO and what improvements you might need to make.

Get the right tools

There are a variety of really good web crawling tools. Finding the right one for you will depend on what you feel comfortable using and how experienced you are. 

For example, if you’re not really sure how SEO works, Sitebulb could be an excellent place to start. While it goes beyond basic crawling, its intuitive interface and visuals provide you with a really good idea of where to start tinkering with your SEO. It also provides comprehensive reports with recommendations you might want to take.

Another one to consider would be Screaming Frog. This is a popular choice with many SEO professionals. It can be personalised to cope with both large and small websites and is a great choice if you want to see whether any of your links are broken, whether your metadata is complete, or need help to identify other technical issues.

These two are by far the most popular, but there are other options you could look at including DeepCrawl, OnCrawl and Botify. Each offers of variety of capabilities, but the two above are often thought to be the first point of call for those looking to improve their technical SEO.

What am I crawling for?

Once you have used your chosen tool to crawl your website, you might need to fix various things. It can be a good idea to work down a checklist, which should include the following points:

• Make sure all essential pages are indexed and crawled. This is vital to ensure that the search engines are actually seeing the content you put out.
• Address any orphan pages- Pages with no internal links are often called orphan pages. These will need to be fixed so that they are more easily crawled.
• Look at indexing and blocked pages- Again, these may need to be addressed to ensure that the crawlers can easily find your content. Some pages may be blocked by robots.txt, or noindex tags, for example.
• Structural issues – Your website should be set out in a way that is hierarchical and pages should link internally to each other. Make sure there is a logical flow to this so that browsers and search engines can easily find their way around your website.
• Address redirects –  If there are any redirect chains and loops that can slow down or frustrate the user experience, they might also hinder the site’s crawlability.
• Internal link audits- Have a look at your internal link distribution, and you should find some ways in which to improve the navigation of your site.
• Check for tags – On page tags such as meta descriptions, headers and titles are vital for SEO. Check whether any of these are missing or duplicate and ensure that they optimise for your chosen keywords. They must also accurately reflect what’s on the page.
• Get rid of duplicate content- If there are any duplicate pages or pages that can confuse search engines by addressing the same keywords as others, it might be worth consolidating these into one page.
• Check your loading speed – You can evaluate these as well as your core web vitals to ensure users are getting the best from your website.
• Make sure your site is mobile friendly- Whether you work on an iPhone, Android or any other operating system, you have to consider that your audience may have their preferred devices. It’s vital that your website adapt seamlessly to a variety of different devices. 
• Look for coding errors – Invalid HTML or broken code could impact your site’s performance and search engine visibility.
• Request a recrawl—You can submit a site map to Google Search Console or request that it crawl individual pages to speed up the index process.

It’s not a one time thing

Hopefully, now you’ll have more of an idea how to crawl a website. By understanding the results of a crawl on your own website you’ll get an idea of how technically healthy it is. However, this is not a one-time-only thing. Once you know how to crawl your website, you’ll need to be doing this periodically to ensure that your website remains SEO healthy.

If you’re wondering how to get help with any aspect of SEO, including crawling your own website, or fixing common problems, please get in touch. We offer a comprehensive package of solutions for busy business owners that allow them to get on with running their business while we take care of the SEO. Contact us today to find out how.