How Often Should You Perform Technical Website Crawls for SEO?

Website crawls are important for maintaining strong technical SEO. This case study from FOX.com shows the benefits of a ramped-up web crawling cadence.

Any seasoned SEO professional will tell you how important website crawls are for maintaining strong technical SEO.

But here lies the better questions – how frequently should you perform website crawls?

And how often are they actually performing them?

In this post, we’ll discuss what SEO publications suggest as a “best practice” web crawling cadence and the actual rate SEO pros are performing them.

Then, I’ll demonstrate the benefits of a ramped-up web crawling cadence by sharing a case study from FOX.com.

What’s a Website Crawl, Anyway?

Using specialized tools such as Screaming Frog or DeepCrawl, you can take a look “under the hood” of a website – much like a mechanic does when inspecting cars.

But instead of inspecting the mechanical parts of a car, you are inspecting the optimizable elements of a website – including the quality of its metadata, XML sitemaps, response codes, and more.

When something isn’t working as expected in SEO, it’s up to you to diagnose the problem and find the solution to fix it.

What Are the Industry Experts Saying About Website Crawl Cadence ‘Best Practice’?

Industry publications seem to be in agreement that “mini” technical audits should be conducted on a monthly basis and “in-depth” technical audits should be conducted on a quarterly or semi-quarterly basis.

However, there is little chatter specifically discussing the “optimal frequency” for performing website crawls:

• “Part of your ongoing SEO strategy includes regular audits to allow you to find and fix issues quickly (we recommend quarterly).” – Erika Varagouli, SEMrush
• “It’s good practice to do an automated scan once a month. This will be often enough to bring up major issues, like any on-page errors in the form of broken links, page titles and meta-data or duplicate content. – Digital Marketing Institute
• “I perform an SEO audit for my clients the first month, monthly (mini-audit), and quarterly (in-depth audit).” – Anna Crowe, Search Engine Journal

A website crawl and technical audit are not the same thing (thank you for the clear separation of the two, Barry Adams).

However, it’s fair to assume that these publications would recommend running a website crawl at least as frequently as they run mini-audits on a monthly basis.

Read more: searchenginejournal