How can you use a website crawler to identify technical SEO issues?

1 What is a website crawler?

A website crawler, also known as a spider or a bot, is a software program that follows the links on your site and collects information about each page, such as the URL, title, meta tags, content, images, headers, status codes, and more. A website crawler can help you discover how your site is structured, how many pages you have, how they are linked, and what kind of data they contain. A website crawler can also detect any errors or issues that might affect your site's visibility and usability, such as broken links, redirects, missing tags, duplicate content, or low-quality content.

2 How to choose a website crawler?

When choosing a website crawler, you need to consider several factors such as the size of your site, the speed of the crawler, the data and reports it provides, and its ease of use and customization. For example, some crawlers have a limit on how many pages they can crawl, so you need to make sure it can cover your entire site or the sections you want to audit. Additionally, some crawlers are faster than others which can save time and resources for large or complex sites. Furthermore, some crawlers offer more comprehensive and detailed data and reports which can help identify and analyze technical SEO issues accurately. Finally, some crawlers are more user-friendly and intuitive than others, allowing you to customize settings and filters to focus on aspects that matter most.

3 How to use a website crawler to identify technical SEO issues?

Once you have chosen a website crawler, you need to set it up and run it on your site. This process can take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours, and once completed, you will receive a report with various data and metrics about your site. This report can be used to identify and categorize your technical SEO issues into four main areas: indexability, content, site architecture, and site speed and mobile-friendliness. For example, indexability issues may include 404 errors, 301 redirects, canonical tags, robots.txt, meta robots, and XML sitemaps. Content issues may involve duplicate content, thin content, missing or poorly optimized titles, meta descriptions, headings, and images, or keyword stuffing or cannibalization. Site architecture issues could include broken links, orphan pages, internal linking, URL structure, breadcrumbs, and pagination. Finally, site speed and mobile-friendliness issues might include slow loading time, large or unoptimized images, render-blocking resources, caching, compression, minification, responsive design or mobile usability.

5 How to monitor and measure your technical SEO improvements?

After resolving your technical SEO issues, you must monitor and measure your improvements and results. To do this, you can use the website crawler you used to identify and fix your issues, or try different tools and metrics. For instance, Google Search Console is a free tool that allows you to observe your site's performance and ranking in Google search. Additionally, Google Analytics can help you monitor and analyze your site's traffic and behavior. Moreover, Google PageSpeed Insights is a free tool that helps you measure and optimize your site's loading speed and performance on desktop and mobile devices. Furthermore, Google Mobile-Friendly Test is a free tool that enables you to test and enhance your site's mobile-friendliness and usability on different devices. And lastly, your website crawler can be used to compare data and reports with the previous ones.

By using a website crawler to identify and fix technical SEO issues, you can improve your site's performance in search engines, provide a better user experience, and keep your site updated. You can then track your progress by monitoring and measuring the improvements and results.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?