What is crawling?

When I talk to customers about Google findability, I almost always start with one word: crawling.
Crawling is the process where search engines like Google search your website with bots (also known as spiders). These bots follow links, read your website code, and store all relevant information in their database.

Bottom line: crawling is how Google your site uncovers.
Without crawling, Google simply won't see your website, so you can't rank.

How exactly does crawling work?

Every search engine sends automated bots onto the web. Once Googlebot reaches your website, it views the HTML code, follows internal links, and collects information about what's on the page.

This process consists of four steps:

1. uncover: Google finds new pages via sitemaps, backlinks, or updates.
2. Processing: the bot reads the code and decides what is important.
3. Save: the information ends up in the search engine index.
4. Evaluate: Google assesses whether the page is relevant enough to show.

Crawling is therefore the first step towards visibility in Google. If this process doesn't go well, even the best content will remain invisible.

Why is crawling important for SEO?

In my work, I often see that companies put a lot of time into content, but forget whether Google even sees those pages.
A well-crawled website is the basis of every SEO strategy.

A site that is easy to crawl has:

• a logical internal link structure,
• a current XML sitemap,
• fast loading times,
• and no unnecessary or duplicate URLs.

Google works with a so-called crawl budget: the number of pages a bot views per visit.
If your website has a lot of unimportant or incorrect pages, that budget can be wasted. I always help customers do that crawl budget smart to distribute over the pages that really matter.

Crawling and structured data

Structured data helps Google better understand what's on a page while crawling.
At Rank Rocket, I use structured data as standard in local SEO projects. For example, for roofing companies that are active in specific locations.

By adding LocalBusiness markup, Google can clearly see where the company is located, what it does, and what region it operates in.
This way, local pages are crawled faster and better, and ultimately more visible in Google Maps and local search results.

How do I improve crawling?

In practice, these are the steps I go through most often to optimize the crawling process:

1. Check Robots.txt
   I always check that no important pages are accidentally blocked.
2. Adding a Sitemap to Search Console
   This way, Google knows exactly which pages are relevant.
3. Improving internal links
   I make sure that important pages are never hidden deeper than three clicks.
4. Clean up dead links
   404 pages or redirects can waste crawl budget.
5. Configure Canonical tags
   They indicate which URL is the original version of a page.
6. Optimizing speed
   A slow site is less likely to be crawled.

When all of this is correct, you'll see the number of pages crawled and indexed automatically increase in Google Search Console.

Crawling into my work at Rank Rocket

At Rank Rocket, I regularly analyse how Google interacts with my clients' websites.
With tools like Screaming Frog, Sitebulb and Search Console, I see which pages are being crawled, where there are blockages and how I can speed up the process.

A good example: with a customer in the construction sector, I saw that only 60% of the product pages were in Google. The cause was an error in the robots.txt file.
After one adjustment, almost the entire site was crawled and indexed within two weeks, and organic traffic increased by 28%.

These kinds of results show how fundamental crawling is. You can write the best texts, but without a good crawl plan, it stays at zero visibility.