Crawling
Crawling is when a search engine, such as Google, sends out a bot to crawl through your website code and content. The aim is to ensure the website is relevant for users in terms of technical aspects and content. It also picks up whether you offer a good user experience.
These bots look out for several things including a good site structure and proper coding practices. It also checks for bad SEO practices. This crawling process determines whether your page should be indexed on the search engine.
Search engines will rank your website if it meets the requirements. These include fast page speeds, a good XML sitemap, and several other page elements. Any crawl errors may slow your website down and even lead to your site not appearing in organic search results.
This will severely affect your site’s visibility and prevent customers from finding you online. This is one of the reasons you need to ensure your site is crawlable with the help of a technical seo agency like PWD.
Indexing
Once the bots have crawled the entire structure of your website, the search engine will determine whether it will be indexed in their database or not. If your site is indexed, it will show up more easily on the search engines results page (SERP).
Ranking
Search engines conduct indexing to provide relevant data to search queries. Whenever you type in a query into the search bar, the indexed websites with the most relevant and useful information relating to the query will appear.
Searchers usually only click on the top results. So, if your site is not there, it is unlikely that your target audience will find it.
If the bots find multiple errors while crawling your site, you could be penalised with a lower search engine ranking or even be omitted entirely from the search results. So, it is vital to make sure your website’s technical SEO is up to scratch!