13 Steps to Improve Your Website's Crawlability and Indexability

Introduction

Optimizing your site's crawlability and indexability is often overlooked, but it's fundamental to your visibility in search engines. Here are 13 practical steps to achieve this.

1. Improve Page Loading Speed

Speed is an important ranking factor:

• Optimize hosting and server
• Minimize CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
• Compress images (WebP, AVIF)
• Leverage browser caching
• Reduce unnecessary redirects
• Remove unused third-party scripts

2. Measure and Optimize Core Web Vitals

Essential metrics to monitor:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): < 2.5 seconds
• INP (Interaction to Next Paint): < 200 ms
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): < 0.1

Recommended tools: Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse

3. Optimize Crawl Budget

Google allocates a "crawl budget" to each site:

• Create a clear page hierarchy
• Eliminate duplicate content
• Use robots.txt to block unimportant pages
• Implement canonicalization
• Monitor crawl statistics
• Regularly update your XML sitemap

4. Strengthen Internal Link Structure

"Internal links are super critical for SEO" — John Mueller, Google

Recommended Architecture

Homepage
  └── Categories
        └── Subcategories
              └── Product/Article Pages

Best Practices

• Avoid orphan pages
• Fix broken links
• Use natural anchor text
• Limit links per page (< 100)
• Use dofollow links for internal linking

5. Submit Your Sitemap to Google

The sitemap is a roadmap for crawlers:

• Place it in the root directory
• Include all important pages
• Update it automatically
• Submit via Google Search Console

6. Update Robots.txt Files

Manage bot traffic efficiently:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /admin/
Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

Common errors: incorrect placement, misuse of wildcards, blocking essential resources.

7. Check Canonicalization

Canonical tags tell Google the primary version of a page:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://yoursite.com/main-page" />

• Avoid tags pointing to obsolete pages
• Use language-specific canonical tags for international sites

8. Perform a Site Audit

Indexability Rate

Formula: indexed pages / total pages

A rate below 90% signals issues to investigate.

Audit tools: Screaming Frog, Semrush, Ahrefs, Oncrawl, Lumar

9. Check for Duplicate Content

Common causes:

• Session IDs in URLs
• Redundant content between pages
• Pagination issues
• www and non-www versions

10. Eliminate Redirect Chains

Redirect chains harm SEO:

Page A → Page B → Page C → Page D (bad)
Page A → Page D (good)

Tools: Screaming Frog, Redirect-Checker.org

11. Fix Broken Links

How to Find Them

• Google Search Console (404 errors)
• Google Analytics (not found pages)
• Screaming Frog (complete crawl)

Solutions

• Redirect to a relevant page
• Update the link
• Remove the link if not relevant

12. Use IndexNow

Protocol that instantly notifies search engines of changes:

Use cases:

• New articles
• Product updates
• Price changes

Caution: Use wisely, avoid over-submission.

13. Implement Structured Data

Supported Formats

• Schema.org
• JSON-LD (recommended)
• Microdata

Implementation Steps

1. Identify content type
2. Mark up with appropriate schema
3. Test with Google's testing tool
4. Monitor in Search Console

Benefiting Content Types

• Blog articles
• E-commerce products
• Events
• Recipes
• FAQ

Conclusion

Crawlability optimization is an ongoing process. Start with the basics (speed, structure) then progress to advanced techniques. This approach improves not only your SEO visibility but also user experience.

Need a complete SEO audit? Contact me to improve your visibility.