How do you audit your site structure and crawlability regularly?

1 Use a crawler tool

The first step is to use a crawler tool, such as Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, or Moz, to scan your website and identify any issues or errors that might affect its structure and crawlability. A crawler tool can help you find broken links, redirect chains, duplicate content, orphan pages, missing or incorrect meta tags, and other problems that can hurt your SEO and user experience. You can also use a crawler tool to generate a visual map of your site structure and see how your pages are linked and organized.

2 Analyze your site architecture

The next step is to analyze your site architecture and see if it follows the best practices for SEO and usability. Your site architecture should be simple, intuitive, and hierarchical, meaning that your pages should be grouped into relevant categories and subcategories, and that each page should be accessible from the homepage in no more than three clicks. You should also use descriptive and consistent URLs, breadcrumbs, and navigation menus to help users and search engines understand your site structure and find your content easily.

3 Optimize your internal links

The third step is to optimize your internal links, which are the links that connect your pages within your website. Internal links are important for SEO because they help search engines discover and index your pages, distribute your link authority and relevance, and guide users to more information or actions. You should use internal links strategically and naturally, linking to relevant and valuable pages that match the context and intent of your content. You should also use descriptive and varied anchor texts, avoid overloading your pages with too many links, and fix any broken or irrelevant links.

4 Check your robots.txt and sitemap

The fourth step is to check your robots.txt and sitemap files, which are the files that tell search engines how to crawl and index your website. Your robots.txt file is a text file that specifies which parts of your website you want to allow or disallow for crawling, such as directories, pages, or resources. You should use your robots.txt file carefully and avoid blocking any important or crawlable pages or resources. Your sitemap file is an XML file that lists all the pages and URLs of your website, along with some metadata, such as last modified date, priority, and frequency. You should use your sitemap file to help search engines find and index your pages faster and more accurately. You should also update your sitemap file regularly and submit it to Google Search Console and other search engines.

5 Monitor your crawl budget and errors

The fifth step is to monitor your crawl budget and errors, which are the metrics that indicate how often and how well search engines crawl your website. Your crawl budget is the number of pages that search engines can and want to crawl on your website within a given period of time. Your crawl budget depends on various factors, such as your site size, speed, popularity, and quality. You should optimize your crawl budget by improving your site performance, removing or fixing low-quality or duplicate pages, and using canonical tags, noindex tags, or robots.txt directives to control what you want to crawl or not. Your crawl errors are the issues or problems that prevent search engines from crawling or indexing your pages, such as 4xx or 5xx status codes, DNS or server errors, or blocked resources. You should monitor your crawl errors regularly and fix them as soon as possible using Google Search Console or other tools.

6 Test and measure your results

The sixth step is to test and measure your results, which are the outcomes and impacts of your site structure and crawlability audit and optimization. You should test and measure your results using various tools and metrics, such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, Core Web Vitals, ranking reports, traffic reports, conversion rates, bounce rates, and user feedback. You should test and measure your results before and after making any changes to your site structure and crawlability, and compare them to see if you achieved your goals and improved your SEO and user experience.