Month: March 2024

There is a famous saying in the business world. The customer is the actual boss. This implies that they cannot survive for long without the clients. So you need to figure out how to reach out and appeal to your target customer base. Digital marketing is becoming increasingly important when it comes to reaching out to potential clients. Almost everyone can access the internet nowadays from their smart devices. However, the digital marketplace is crowded with all sorts of vendors competing for the clients’ attention. For your business to stand out, you’ll need to be creative. Learn how to generate leads with live chat and chatbots.

Using Chatbots and live chats on the business website can help you elevate that creativity to another level. This is because the first step towards generating leads is to appeal to clients to take an interest in whatever you have to offer. And that is precisely what live chats and Chatbots will help you with. Read on for more information on how to generate leads with live chat and chatbots.

 

What is Lead Generation?

Picture yourself browsing through the customer relationship management database for the organization. You will find the contact details of a lot of people. All of these people were potential clients who willingly gave you their details since they are interested in what you are offering. 

It is your responsibility to reach out to everyone who left their contact. Any of them could be your next client. The process of following up on potential clients is what we call lead generation. It is a step-wise process that takes place in 3 stages.

Stage one involves creating an interest in the product. Then you leverage the interest you’ve created to acquire contact details from prospective clients in stage two. Finally, stage 3 involves sending the contact details to your sales team.

The sales team is responsible for following up on the prospect and turning them into clients. A lead is any person who has shown an interest in what you have to offer.

 

What are Lead Generation Channels?

There are two channels for generating leads. These are the inbound and outbound lead generation channels. In outbound lead generation, you don’t wait for prospects to approach you. You go after them proactively. This could be through face-to-face communication or ads in the print media, just to name a few. 

Inbound lead generation, on the other hand, focuses on optimizing the content of your website. The optimization intends to provide information that is valuable and attractive to your targets through blogs. Search engine optimization techniques will help you reach out to your targets via blogs. Relying on Chatbots and live chats are some examples of inbound lead generation.

Generate Leads With Live Chat And Chatbots

1. Generating Leads Using Chatbots

Chatbots are not only meant for automating chats. They are very crucial for generating leads too. Prospects are more likely to become customers when they interact with Chatbots on your site. Chatbots and live chats, in general, are suitable for elevating customer satisfaction. Here are some of the ways that Chatbots can generate leads for your business. 

 

• • Automatically Welcoming Visitors to the Site

You can configure your Chatbot to automatically greet people when they land on the site. The Chatbot should then ask if the visitor is interested in knowing more about your services. This conversation is essential because the Chatbot will attend to the visitor’s inquiries instantly. It will forward the question to a live chat operator who’ll assist if it is unable. In other cases, the Chatbot will just ask for the visitor’s e-mail address. An operator will send all the answers to the visitor’s questions afterward.

Chatbots can also welcome first-time visitors by giving them discounts. The Chatbot sends this discount in the form of a promo code to the visitor’s e-mail. The good thing about Chatbots in welcoming visitors is that they collect their contact details. Even if the customer doesn’t return, you have their contacts for further marketing purposes.

• • Assisting in Knowing your Audience Faster

Communication is the backbone of every relationship, even in business. To develop a healthy relationship, you need to know how to communicate with them. Chatbots can help you understand your prospects well by helping to identify their interests and wants. This is so because Chatbots can run engaging surveys on your clients to ascertain how they view your services. Additionally, some Chatbots are also capable of segmenting these people based on their likes. Data from the survey is critical for lead generation. The data will enable you to generate and market content that resonates most with your audience.

• • Generating Leads when Live Chat is Unresponsive

Live chat operators usually have a lot to deal with within a short period. Sometimes they aren’t in a position to attend to a prospect instantly. In such cases, prospects can develop a negative attitude towards the business. They might form an opinion that the business is snobbish towards the clients. You can’t allow this to happen.

A Chatbot is in a position to replace the live chat operator in case they are unable to respond promptly. The Chatbot will inform the prospect of the delay and then provide them with options. The options are generally for the prospect to continue waiting or leave after leaving contact information. In either case, you’ll be able to follow up on the lead later.

• • Engaging Visitors who want to leave

Expect prospects who visit your website to be impatient. If they can’t find what they are looking for, they will leave for your competitor fast. Chatbots can prevent these people from leaving by engaging them. The Chatbots will ask the prospect their reason for leaving. The Chatbot then goes ahead to provide solutions that might persuade the prospect to make a purchase. 

When a Chatbot engages visitors who want to leave, you benefit in 2 ways. First is the lead generation for marketing your services. Secondly, you’ll be able to identify the issues that make prospects leave without making a purchase. Solving these issues will raise the conversion rate of the business. 

 

2. Generating Leads through Live Chats

Messaging has become a pillar of communication in the contemporary world. Your business needs to adapt to this trend by incorporating a live chat into the website. Here are some of the ways a live chat can help the business generate leads.

• • Shortening the Sales Cycle

Asking prospects to leave their e-mails on forms is good for the lead generation process. But it lengthens the process. Why? You may be wondering. Prospects disengage from the shopping process immediately after they leave your site. The sales team is never sure of getting a response from these e-mails. And even if they do, it takes time.

A live chat enables you to engage the prospect when their mind is still focused on discovering the product. The live chat will help you guide the prospect that might lead to a demo. Live chats save time and increase the likelihood of increasing the conversion.

• • Creating Brand Ambassadors 

Not all prospects who visit the website will become your clients in the future. Some have an interest in your products, but they don’t have the means to pay for them. A live chat will help you identify this group very easily. It will enable you to alert the sales team not to put too many resources on them. But don’t dismiss them yet.

They say people never forget how you made them feel. Through a live chat, you can interact with the prospects who are unlikely to purchase and leave them with something beneficial. It can be as simple as outlining the products that they and their peers might find helpful. Some of these people will talk about your services to some of their friends who have an interest. They will inadvertently become your brand ambassadors and create more leads for you. They could have just perused through the website and left were it not for the live engagement.

• • Increasing the visitors to SQL conversion

You are never sure if prospects are looking at all the pages on your website. Those willing to buy likely go to sections like demo requests or the contact form. They aren’t that enthusiastic about doing that. That’s why you need to give them a little nudge through a live chat. Help them get to these sections to increase the chances of making a conversion.

As we said earlier, live chats help identify prospects that are unlikely to buy. The “window shoppers.” Live chats assist in isolating this group so that the sales team can focus more on prospects who are likely to buy. All these increase the visitors to SQL conversion for the website.

 

Conclusion

Chatbots and live chats are versatile that can expand your reach to potential customers. These tools help you to collect information from clients, automate the engagement process to make it faster, and offer assistance to prospects on the spot when they need it. The versatility of these tools makes them beneficial to a wide variety of business operations. The salespeople benefit from them and the customer service, lead generators, marketers, plus more. Try them out today; you won’t regret it.

 

You are now a proud owner of a dynamic and customer-focused small business. You have a well-designed website created as a representation of your business. How then do you manage your website’s progress? How do you inquire about the traffic data?

 

Find out Why Does Your Business Need Google Analytics and how it can help you manage the traffic to your website and how you can find out the traffic numbers on your website. The main aim of Google Analytics is to help business owners deliver a high-quality website to their customers. Google Analytics will provide you with all the required information concerning your website’s statistics. While most people find it quite scary at first, this is not something you should fear.

 

How to measure your Return on Investment should be one of your priorities after investing so much time and money in building your new website. You should be in a position to attract as many leads as you possibly can.

 

Adding Google Analytics to your website is the best way of following up on your website’s progress. Over 10 million websites worldwide have this powerful data-analysis program installed. What are you waiting for? Let’s consider some of the views concerning Google Analytics, shall we?

 

Google describes Google Analytics as one of the tools that provide powerful digital analytics for anyone with a web presence, large or small. On Mashable, it is described as a system that makes it easy for anyone managing a site to track and analyze this data. It goes further to say that Google Analytics is a powerful free tool that can answer various questions for a wide range of users.

 

So, what does Google Analytics do? To put it simply, it helps businesses gain insights into their website’s traffic, where the visitors are coming from, including mediums, channels, referrals, sources, and paid channels, the keywords that attract the most traffic and the most visited pages.

 

This data can undergo deeper analysis to see the page views, bounce rate, sessions, new visitors, returning visitors, and the session duration. That’s not all; you can go further to analyze the exact time of the day that users visit, the browser they use, the device they use to access your website, and the behavior flow.

 

Besides providing you with data, Google Analytics pushes you in the right direction. It shows you what areas you need to fix to attract more prospects, views, and customers. It will even provide you with insights on whether you need to optimize your site\’s on-site SEO, how to make your site more mobile-friendly, and whether your website’s speed requires to be fixed.

 

Reasons Why Does Your Business Need Google Analytics?

Don’t worry if you are a novice where Google Analytics is concerned. Here, we go into detail on the role of Google Analytics in businesses.

1. Trace your website’s audience

The Google Analytics Reports will help you understand in-depth your website traffic. Get to know the information on your website’s traffic at a glance through the Audience Overview report. This type of report provides insight into the characteristics of your users. It avails details of your viewers’ age, demography, cohort, behaviors, interests, and technology they use. Any business owner must understand the kind of audience your website draw.

 

You should be able to understand whether that is the customer persona you are targeting. With this kind of data, you will have a clear and consistent frame of reference backed by plenty of data.

 

 

Insights into your customer Behavior will give you leverage in formulating marketing strategies to increase engagement with them. It will also help you track your business compared to your competitors. In the long run, you will optimize your site’s performance to make it more target-customer-oriented.

• The Customer Acquisition Report in Google Analytics, on the other hand, provides you with information regarding the channels and sources of your website’s visitors. Such sources include social networks, search engines, and campaigns. These reports tell you how much traffic they attract. They basically help you determine marketing tactics that are working and those that are not. This kind of information will determine the kind of content you present to your audience. You will be able to tell which digital marketing channels are the most successful for your business. By tracking the sites responsible for the most referred traffic to your site, you can focus on developing strategies to gain more referrals from them.

 

• Real-time Behavior Reports on Google Analytics will help you note what is happening on your website when they are actually taking place. It gives you an overview of the number of people on your site right now, the pages and events they interact with, and the goal conversions that have occurred. With this kind of report, you can continuously monitor the effects of new campaigns and site changes on your traffic. Real-time Behavior reports in Google Analytics are crucial in time-specific content marketing. You get insights on when more visitors visit your site. This way, you know when to push content to your blog to give it a boost and increase exposure. It also plays a role in showing you the engagement level of your content. You may want to think of something else if you notice people bouncing off the content too soon. The fact that you can view your visitor’s Behavior in real-time analytics means that you can get details about what is working and what isn’t.  

 

2. Keeps you up with Google’s Search Engine Changes

One way Google makes sure it provides the best possible search results for every user is by updating its search algorithm. Since its inception, Google has undergone a lot of changes and updates. Usually, these updates penalize websites that try to rank highly using cheap dirty tricks instead of providing useful information to website visitors.

Google Analytics is an effective method of enabling you to stay in the game. This is by tracking increases and decreases in your traffic from search engines and other signals that show if your website has been affected by an algorithm update.

 

3. Shows you the status of your website

Now that you have gone through thick and thin to come up with your business’s website, you need to be in a position to know whether your website needs any form of improvement. You want to know how well each page contributes to your ultimate goal: attracting new customers.

 

With Google Analytics, you can tell how well each page of your website contributes to lead generation. From this, you will know which pages require optimization. Because it can show you exactly how long people spend on your page, you will know where to modify it. You may need to work on your copy and incorporate videos and pictures on the page if people only spend a few seconds on it. You can go even further and customize your pages for a higher effect.

Google Analytics will tell you if a critical page is getting less traffic when it comes to tracking traffic. This way, you can adopt ways that will attract more traffic. Ultimately, you will be able to improve your results and create more business.

 

4. You will know the level of mobile-friendliness you need to achieve

It is no secret that most users in the present times use their mobile phones and tablets to access various sites. Does this affect your site? Definitely, the implication here is that when creating your website, you need to make it mobile-friendly so that many users are comfortable accessing your site from wherever.

 

 

But you already have a website in place. How do you tell that your site is mobile-friendly enough? How do you know where to improve? Google Analytics comes in handy in such situations. This tool can show you the statistics on how much traffic you receive from mobile devices.

 

If most of your visitors access your site through mobile devices, this explosion in mobile traffic means that your website must cater to the mobile user.

 

Now that you fully understand why your website needs Google Analytics, how about we look at some of the components of this particular feature that will make all the difference in attracting leads and converting them into sales?

 

• Google Analytics Reports

This will be what will push you in the right direction when it comes to making important business decisions based on a huge amount of real data points. These reports will provide you with information concerning your audience’s Behavior, whether it is demography details, age, or even the devices and technology they use to access your site.

 

• Segmentation

Segmentation is mandatory to understand the behavior of various users on your website. Google Analytics has this feature as it shows data based on certain criteria. It tells you how different groups of people interact with your website. Additionally, you get to compare the performance of the segment to the performance of the entire site.

 

• Goals Setting

Most of the successes in businesses take place because there have been goals that were set prior. With Google Analytics, businesses can set goals to keep track of specific URLs. You can set goals to track the number of users that spend a certain amount of time on your site. This allows you to track both customer engagement and how fast your customer service provides support.

 

• Custom Alerts

Trying to continuously keep a tab of massive fluctuations on your site will mean that you have to manually track your site 24/7. What if there was a way you could do this without engaging manually? That there is a tool that can keep a tab and send a custom notification if a change triggers one of your custom alerts? Well, that’s Google Analytics for you.

 

High-volume keywords have the allure of generating more traffic to your website. So, it’s very tempting for small business owners to focus more on them when developing their SEO strategy. Still, small businesses are finding it hard to have better rankings in search engines. Long-tail keywords can help you unravel this mystery.

Using less competitive but more specific long-tail keywords to target your content has a powerful effect. They will help you get past the noise so that you can access the most qualified clients. This article will provide a definitive guide that will help you how to find long-tail keywords.

 

Long-Tail Keywords

Let’s talk briefly about long-tail keywords before we guide you on finding them. Generally, content creators use general keywords to increase their reach. This means they focus more on search phrases that have a high search volume. Long-tail keywords are the complete opposite. This is because they are more specific, so they have a low search volume. Only a fraction of internet users relies on them for search purposes. 

Long-tail keywords may have a low search volume content. It’s easy to think that they offer little value for this reason. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. The low search content makes long-tail keywords less competitive, so you can rank easily if you use them. The specific nature of long-tail keywords is also an advantage. It assists in targeting clients who are more likely to make a purchase. Long-tail keywords, therefore, improve the conversion rates of the website even if it’s new. 

 

The Effect of Long-Tail Keywords

Consider the case where people are searching for hiking shoes. A small or medium-sized business will find it challenging to rank for that search. More prominent firms have better resources that make them stand out in such rankings. This doesn’t mean that small or medium-sized companies can’t compete at all for these clients. Using a long-tail keyword such as “hiking shoes for children” can help small or medium firms to rank on the first page of the search results.

Long-tail keywords help you access niche markets. A person using the search phrase hiking shoes may be looking to buy or just research the shoes. You never know their intention. But if they use a phrase like hiking shoes for painful joints, then it is plausible that they are looking to buy one for this purpose. That’s how long-tail keywords improve conversion rates.

 

How To Find Long-Tail Keywords

Choosing the right keywords should not be overwhelming, even though it’s not that easy too. The critical thing to note is a single formula for finding long-tail keywords doesn’t exist. What works for you might fail for another website. You need to try out every strategy until you get what is right for your business. Some of the techniques that you can deploy to help you find what works for you include:

 

1. Find your Unique Selling Proposition

This strategy is fundamental because it is the foundation for finding long-tail keywords. You need to start by thinking about the unique qualities of your products or services. You also need to understand your market. What kind of people are you dealing with? Why do you think they should you over your competitors? Answers to these questions will generate unique qualities. Keep them in mind because they are essential when finding the right long-tail keyword for you.

 

2. Determine the Needs of your Targets

You need to find out what your customers need and want before moving forward. The salespeople can help you figure this out. Alternatively, any person who interacts with customers in your organization can provide some insight into customer needs. Some of the questions that will assist you in determining the needs of clients include:

1. What factors do potential clients consider before they accept what you offer?

2. What are some of the problems that clients need you to solve?

3. What are these problems that customers encounter?

Create a list of answers to these questions. They are essential for the research process.

 

3. Research

Knowing your customer’s needs and your unique selling propositions isn’t enough for generating what will work for you. Obviously, at this point, you’ve already contemplated some search phrases from clients. You need to confirm that they are the exact phrases clients will use in their search engines.

How do you do that? Through conducting research. The research will not only help you confirm the usage of the phrases. It will also reveal some phrases worth considering and some of the phrases that your competitors rely on.

The first approach in researching understands the client’s intent. This involves brainstorming what stage of buying a client is and what the client hopes to find when using such phrases. This will help you develop content that answers those questions for the keywords.

Don’t ever make the mistake of producing content that doesn’t resonate with a particular keyword, even if it is easy to rank. Doing that will only annoy clients because they won’t find information that addresses their website’s needs. The clients will write you off.

 

Keyword Research Tools

Another alternative to finding the best long-tail keywords is relying on tools. There are various keyword tool options that you can use to generate what works for your website. Some of the popular tools out there include:

• HubSpot Content Strategy

This tool is very versatile. It will help you optimize your website’s content, plan your SEO strategies, and measure your ROI. This tool helps you find keywords by providing suggestions that are relevant, competitive, and popular. The tool monitors your content over time to ensure that it is still relevant. It will inform you when you need to make changes from time to time to boost rankings.

• Answer the Public

With Answer the Public, you’ll need to come up with a seed keyword first. The software generates common questions from social media blogs and forums regarding the seed keyword. It then provides suggestions of long-tail keywords based on the questions. The software also has a “versus” feature that compares the ranking of various keywords on particular platforms. This will enable you to choose the right keyword for your content depending on the platform you’d like to use.

• Keywords Finder

The tool is great because anyone can use it. It doesn’t matter whether you are a beginner or a professional at finding long-tail keywords. The software’s clean interface has a quick search feature that generates long-tail keywords relevant to your content. It also pairs the keywords with an SEO difficulty score so that you can select what will boost your site’s rank for a given phrase.

You’ll have to pay for Keywords Finder to use it. This shouldn’t discourage you from using it since after paying, you can access advanced features that are excellent for rank tracking, analyzing, and filtering results. 

•  Word tracker

Keyword tools may generate suggestions that are difficult/irrelevant to your content. Word tracker will never give you such headaches. The tool focuses on developing relevant long-tail keywords from Google, Amazon, and YouTube. Word tracker provides files of data that are organized which makes them easy to read and understand.

Word tracker has a niche explorer feature. This feature helps you track keywords that are trending in your industry. It can really help people who are new to finding long-tail keywords get relevant suggestions for their content.

• Use How

How uses long-tail keyword research to fuel its operations. The company that owns this site has powerful algorithms. The algorithms find long-tail keywords, which the company uses to generate hyper-targeted content for better rankings. You can learn from this methodology to boost your fortunes. Browse how and other sites that the parent company owns for ideas. Any keyword that this site uses has favorable search volumes, and they are likely to attract advertisers to pages that use them. 

So what is the point of using keywords how when they will rank better with the same phrases? Well, sites like how to use cheap freelancers to generate their content. Their content rarely provides the value that clients were hoping for. Post-panda google no longer favors such content. So just get the long-tail keywords from the site and use them to target high-quality content for better ranking.

 

Conclusion

The competition for ranking is becoming stiffer day by day for small and medium-sized businesses. Using long-tail keywords could be the saving grace for these firms. In general, the competition from using long-tail keywords is manageable, while the conversion rates are higher when compared to generic keywords.

The cost-per-click for high search volume phrases is normally higher than for low search phrases. Therefore, your business will not incur huge costs when relying on them. These small costing can make a huge difference in the operation of your firm. So, start the process of generating long-tail keywords for your firm’s benefit today. 

 

Everybody loves “hacks.”

People keep finding hacks to make life easier. So, today I am going to share a legitimate SEO hack that you can start using right away. 

Create a Robots.txt File to boost your SEO effectively! This small yet powerful text file, also known as a robot’s exclusive protocol, plays a vital role in guiding search engine bots. Although every website has a robots.txt file, it’s often overlooked. Designed to communicate with search engines, this file is an essential SEO tool that can significantly enhance your website’s performance.

Robot.txt file is one of the best methods to enhance your SEO strategy because:

• • It is easy to implement
  • Consumes less time 
  • Does not require any technical experience 
  • Increases your SEO

 

You need to find out the source code of your website, and then follow along with me to see how to create a robots.txt file that search engines would love.

 

What is a robots.txt file?

 

Robots.txt file is a simple text file that webmasters create to instruct web robots or web crawlers how to crawl pages on your website. Robots.txt file is a per of REP (robot’s exclusive protocol), a standard that regulates how robots crawl the website, access the index content, and serve that content to the users online. The REP also has meta robots or site-wide instructions for how search engines should treat the links such as “follow” and “unfollow”.

Robots.txt file indicates web crawlers which part of the website they can crawl and which part is not allowed to access. These crawl instructions are specified by “allowing” or “disallowing” for all user agents. Robots.txt file allows you to keep specific web pages out of Google. It plays a big role in SEO.

Search engines regularly check a site’s robots.txt file to see if there are any instructions for web crawling. These instructions are called directives.

 

Why robots.txt file is important for SEO?

From the SEO point of view, the robots.txt file is very important for your website. Using these simple text files, you can prevent search engines from crawling certain web pages from your website, they guide search engines on how to crawl sites more efficiently. It also tells search engine crawlers which web pages not to crawl.

For example, 

Let’s say Google is about to visit a website. Before it visits the target page, it will check the robots.txt file for instructions.

There are different web components of the robots.txt file. Let’s analyze them:

• • Directive – it is the code of conduct that the user-agent follows.
  • User-agent – it is the name used to define specific search engine crawlers and other programs active online. This is the first line of any group.  An asterisk (*) matches all crawlers except the Adsbot. 

 

Let’s understand this with three examples:

1. How to block only Googlebot

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /

2. How to block Googlebot and Adsbot

User-agent: Googlebot

User-agent: Adsbot

Disallow: /

3. How to block Adsbot

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

• • Disallow – it is used to tell different search engines not to crawl a particular URL, page, or file. It begins with a “/” character and if it refers to a directory then it ends with a “/”.
  • Allow – it is used to permit search engines to crawl a particular URL or website section. It is used to override the disallow directive rule to allow the crawling of a page in a disallowed directory.
  • Crawl-delay – this is an unofficial directive used to tell web crawlers to slow down web crawling.
  • Sitemap – it is used to define the location of your XML sitemaps to search engines. Sitemap URL is a fully qualified URL. A sitemap is a better way to indicate the crawlers which file Google can crawl.

 

Let’s understand this with the following example,

Say that Google finds this syntax:

 

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

This is the basic format of a robots.txt file.

Let’s understand the anatomy of the robots.txt file – 

• • The user-agent indicates for which search engines the directives are meant.
  • “Disallow” directive in robots.txt file indicates that the content is not accessible to the user-agent.
  • The asterisk (*) after “user-agent” means that the robots.txt file applies to all the web crawlers that visit the website.
  • The slash (/) after “disallow” tells the crawlers not to visit any pages on the website.

 

But, why anyone would want to stop web robots from crawling their website?  After all, everyone wants search engines to crawl their website easily so they increase site ranking.

This is where you can use the SEO hack. 

If you have a lot of pages on your website, the Google search engine will crawl each of your website pages. But, the huge number of pages will take Googlebot’s a while to crawl. If the time delay is more it may hurt your website ranking. That’s because Google’s search engine bots have a crawl budget. 

 

What is a crawl budget?

The amount of time that Google spends crawling a website is called as “site’s crawl budget”. The general theory of web crawling says that the web has infinite space, exceeding Google’s ability to explore and index each URL available online. As a result, there are limits to how much time Google web crawlers can spend time crawling any single website. Web crawling gives your new website a chance to appear in the top SERPs. You don’t get unlimited crawling from Google search engines. Google has a website crawl budget that guides its crawlers in – how often to crawl, which page to scan, and how much server pressure to accept. Heavy activity from web crawlers and visitors can overload your website.

To keep your website running smoothly, you can adjust web crawling through the crawl capacity limit and crawl demand.

The crawl budget breaks down into two parts-

1. Crawl capacity limit/crawl rate limit

Crawl rate limit monitors fetching on websites so that the loading speed doesn’t suffer or result in a surge of an error. Google web crawlers want to crawl your site without overloading your server. The crawl capacity limit is calculated as the maximum number of concurrent connections that Google bots use to crawl a site, as well as the delay between fetches. 

The crawl capacity limit varies depending on 

• • Crawl health 

if your website responds quickly for some time, the crawl rate limit goes up, which means more connections can be used to crawl.  If the website slows down, the crawl rate limit goes down and Google bots crawl less.

• • Limit set by the website owner in the Google search console

A website owner can reduce the web crawling of their site.

• • Google’s crawling limit 

Google has so many machines, but they are still limited. Hence, we need to make choices with the resources we have. 

 

2. Crawl demand

It is the level of interest Google and its users have in your site. If do not have huge followings yet, then Google web crawlers won’t crawl your site as often as the highly popular ones. 

Here are three main factors that play important role in determining the crawl demand:

• • Popularity

Popular URLs on the Internet tend to be crawled more often to keep them fresh in the index.

• • Staleness

Systems want to recrawl documents frequently to pick up any alterations.

• • Perceived inventory

Without any guidance, Google web crawlers will try to crawl almost every URL from your website. If the URLs are duplicates and you don’t want them to be crawled for some reason, this wastes a lot of time on your site. This is a factor that you can control easily.

 

Additionally, site-wide events like site moves may boost the crawl demand to re-index the content under new URLs.

Crawl rate capacity and crawl demand together define the “site’s crawl budget”.

In simple words, the crawl budget is the “number of URLs Google search engine bots can and wants to crawl.”

Now that you know all about the website’s crawl budget management, let’s come back to the robots.txt file.

If you ask Google search engine bots to only crawl certain useful contents of your website, Google bots will crawl and index your website based on that content alone.

“you might not want to waste your crawl budget on useless or similar content on your website.”

By using the robots.txt file the right way, you can prevent the wastage of your crawling budget. You can ask Google to use your website’s crawl budget wisely. That’s why the robots.txt file is so important for SEO.

 

How to find the robots.txt file on your website?

If you think finding the robots.txt file on your website is a tricky job. Then you are wrong. It is super easy.  

This method can be used for any website to find its robots.txt file. All you have to do is to type the URL of your website into the browser search bar and then add robots.txt at the end of your site’s URL. 

One of the three situations will happen:

1. If you have a robots.txt file, you will get the file just by typing www.example.com/robots.txt, where the example will be replaced by your domain name.

For instance, for www.ecsion.com/robots.txt  I got the robots.txt file as follows:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /wp-admin/

Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

Sitemap: https://ecsion.com/sitemap_index.xml

If you find the robots.txt file you need to locate it in your website’s root directory. Once you find your robots.txt file you can open it for editing. Erase all the texts, but keep the file.

2. If you lack a robots.txt file, then you will get an empty file. In that case, you will have to create a new robots.txt file from scratch. For creating a robots.txt file you must only use a plain text editor such as a notepad for androids or a TextEdit for Mac. Utilizing Microsoft word might insert additional codes into the text file.

3. If you get a 404 error, then you might want to take a second and view your robots.txt file and fix the error. 

Note: if you are using WordPress and you don’t find any robots.txt file in the site’s root directory, then WordPress creates a virtual robots.txt file. If this happens to you, you must delete all the texts and re-create a robots.txt file.

 

How to create a robots.txt file?

You can control which content or files the web crawlers can access on your website with a robots.txt file. Robots.txt file lives in a website’s root directory. You can create a robots.txt file in a simple text editor like a notepad or TextEdit. If you already have a robots.txt file, ensure you have deleted the text, but not the file. So, for www.ecsion.com, the robots.txt file lives at www.ecsion.com/robots.txt. The Robots.txt file is a simple and plain text file that follows the REP (robots exclusive protocol). A robots.txt file has many rules. Each rule either blocks or allows access for a given web robot to a specified file path on that site. All files will be crawled unless you specify.

Following is a simple robots.txt file with 2 rules:

1. User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /nogooglebot/

2. User-agent: *

Disallow: /

Sitemap: https://ecsion.com/sitemap.xml  

This is what a simple robots.txt file looks like. 

Let us see, what that robots.txt file means:

1. The user agent named Googlebot is not allowed to crawl any URL that starts with http://example.com/nogooglebot/
2. All the other agents are allowed to crawl the entire website.
3. The website’s sitemap is located at https://ecsion.com/sitemap.xml  

Creating a robots.txt file involves four steps:

1. Create a file named robots.txt 
2. Add instructions to the robots.txt file 
3. Upload the text file to your website
4. Test the robots.txt file 

Create a file named robots.txt

Using the robots.txt file you can control which files, or URLs the web crawlers can access. Robots.txt file lives in the site’s root directory. To create a robots.txt file, you need to use a simple plain text editor like notepad or TextEdit. Use of text editors like a word processor or Microsoft will be void, as it can add unexpected characters or codes which cause problems for web crawlers. Ensure that you save your file with UTF-8 coding if prompted during the save file dialog. 

Robots.txt rules and format:

• • Robots.txt file must be named robots.txt.
  • Every site can have a single robots.txt file.
  • Robots.txt file must be located in the website’s root directory.  For example, to control crawling on all the URLs of your website https://ecsion.com,  the robots.txt file must be located at https://www.ecison.com/robots.txt. It can’t live in the sub-directory. (for example, at https://ecsion.com/pages/robots.txt ). 
  • Robots.txt file can be applied to the sub-domains or on non-standard ports. 
  • Robots.txt file is a UTF-8 encoded text file that includes ASCII. Google may ignore characters that are not part of the UTF-8 encoding, rendering robots.txt rules invalid.

 

Add instructions to the robots.txt file

Instructions are the rules for web crawlers about which part of the site they can crawl and which part they can’t. when adding rules to your robots.txt file keep the following guidelines in mind:

• • Robots.txt file consists of one or many groups.
  • Each group has different rules and directives, one instruction per line. Each group begins with a user-agent line that defines the target of the group.
  • A group gives the following instructions to the user-agent:
  • Who the group applies to (the user-agent)
  • Which files, URLs, or directories the agent can crawl?
  • Which files, URLs, or directories the agent cannot crawl.
  • Web crawlers process the groups starting from the top to the bottom. A user agent can match only one instruction set, which is the first, most specific group that matches a given user agent. 
  • By default, a user agent can access any URL, or file on your website unless it is blocked by the “disallow” rule.
  • Rules are case-sensitive. For example, disallow: file.asp only applies to https://www.example.com/file.asp, but not https://www.example.com/FILE.asp. 
  • “#” marks the beginning of a comment. 

 

Upload the robots.txt file

After saving your robots.txt file to the computer, you might want to make it available for the search engine crawlers. How you upload the robots.txt file to your website completely depends on your server and the site’s architecture. You can search the documentation of your hosting company or directly get in touch with them.

Once you upload the robots.txt file, perform a test to check whether it is publicly accessible or not.

Test the robots.txt file 

For testing your robots.txt markup, open a private browsing window in your web browser and navigate to the location of your robots.txt file. 

For example, https://www.example.com/robots.txt 

if you find the contents of your robots.txt file, you can proceed to test the robots.txt markup.

There are two ways offered by Google to test the robots.txt markup:

1. Robots.txt tester in search console 

This tool can be used for robots.txt files which are already accessible on your website.

2. Google’s open-source robots.txt library 

It is also used in Google search to test the robots.txt file locally on your computer.

Submit the robots.txt file

After uploading and testing your robots.txt file, Google’s search engine crawlers will automatically start utilizing your robots.txt file. There’s nothing much you need to do. 

 

Conclusion

We hope this blog has given you an insight into why robots.txt files are so important for SEO. So, if you seriously want to improve your SEO, you must implement this teeny tiny robots.txt file on your website. Without it, you will be lagging behind your competitors in the market.

 

 

A search engine provides easy access to information online, but Google web crawler/web spiders play a vital role in rounding up online content. Search engines organize the online content based on the web pages and the websites visible to them. Moreover, they are very essential for your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Google’s web crawlers scour online data and feed results to the machine so that they can be indexed for relevance on SERPs. If you want your site to appear on search engine rank pages, you must give Google bots something to crawl.

In this article, we talk about 

1. What is a Google web crawler? 
2. How does Google search work?
3. How do Google robots crawl your website?
4. Why Google web crawlers are important for SEO?
5. What are the roadblocks for Google web crawlers?
6. How to improve web crawling?

 

What is a Google Web Crawler?

Google web crawlers also referred to as Google bots, Google robots, or Google spiders are digital bots that crawl across the world wide web (www) to discover and index web pages for search engines such as Google, Bing, etc. Google doesn’t know what sites exist on the internet. Google search engine bots have to crawl websites and index them before they deliver the right pages for the right keywords, and phrases people use to search a page.

 

Let’s say, for instance, you go to a new store for grocery shopping. You might walk down the aisle and look at the products before you pick out what you need.

 

Likewise, search engines also use Google web crawlers as their helpers to browse the internet for web pages before storing that page data to use for future searches.

 

How does Google search work?

To better understand the Google web crawlers, firstly you must know how Google search generates web page search results.

 

 

Google follows three main steps to generate these search results:

1. Crawling

Google web crawling means the search engine using Google robots to find out new content through a network of hyperlinks. The networking starts from an unknown page or through a sitemap.

2. Indexing 

Once a page is found, Google tries to understand what it is about and stores that information into a gigantic database known as Google index. This process is called indexing.

3. Ranking 

When a query is entered into the Google search box, Google finds the highest quality answers and then ranks them by the order of relevance, and finally serves them as a list called Search engine rank pages. The pages that appear on this list are highly ranked based on whether they offer the best answers while considering other ranking factors such as language, location, and devices.

 

How do Google robots crawl your website? 

When you launch a new website, Google web crawlers will discover it eventually. The bots crawl through the texts, images, videos, and more. If you want Google web crawlers to find and index your site quickly, you must follow these three easy steps:

• • Create a sitemap is a map that provides directions to the web crawlers for crawling. A Sitemap is uploaded to your root directory.
  • Use Google webmaster tools to submit your website.
  • Ask Google to index your website  Search engines try to crawl every URL which comes in its way, so if a URL is a non-text file such as a video, or an image, it will not read that file if it doesn’t have any relevant filename & metadata. 

 

Google search engines crawl the websites by passing between the links on the web pages. If your newly launched website doesn’t have links connecting your pages to others, you can ask Google search engines to crawl a website by submitting your URL on Google Search Console. Web crawlers act as an explorer in the new land. They are always hunting for discoverable links on pages and index them once they understand their features. 

 

Remember, Google website crawlers only sift through public pages on sites, they can’t crawl through private pages. Private web pages where the search bots can’t reach are labeled as “dark web”. Google robots or crawlers, while they are on the page, gather useful information about the page, and then the web crawlers store these pages in their index. Google search algorithm helps to rank your website high for the users. 

 

Why Google Web Crawlers are important for SEO?

 

 

SEO helps to improve your website for better ranking. SEO efforts are designed to help a site gain online visibility. For ranking your website higher on SERPs, it is important for your pages to be searchable and readable for Google web crawlers, Google bots, Google robots, or say Google spiders. Crawling is the first way Google search engines look for your pages, but frequent and regular crawling helps them display changes made on your website. Since crawling goes beyond the beginning of your search engine optimization campaign, you can consider web crawler behavior as a proactive measure for helping you appear first on the SERPs and improve your UX.

Without web crawlers to scour online data and verify that the content exists, all SEO efforts will be unproductive.

 

Crawl budget management 

The amount of time that Google spends crawling a website is called as “site’s crawl budget”. The general theory of web crawling says that the web has infinite space, exceeding Google’s ability to explore and index each URL available online. As a result, there are limits to how much time Google web crawlers can spend time crawling any single website. Web crawling gives your new website a chance to appear in the top SERPs. You don’t get unlimited crawling from Google search engines. Google has a website crawl budget that guides its crawlers in – how often to crawl, which page to scan, and how much server pressure to accept. Heavy activity from web crawlers and visitors can overload your website.

To keep your website running smoothly, you can adjust web crawling through the crawl capacity limit and crawl demand.

 

The crawl budget is determined by-

1. Crawl capacity limit/crawl rate limit 

Crawl rate limit monitors fetching on websites so that the loading speed doesn’t suffer or result in a surge of an error. Google web crawlers want to crawl your site without overloading your server. The crawl capacity limit is calculated as the maximum number of concurrent connections that Google bots use to crawl a site, as well as the delay between fetches.

The crawl capacity limit varies depending on :

 

• • Crawl health

    If your website responds quickly for some time, the crawl rate limit goes up, which means more connections can be used to crawl.  If the website slows down, the crawl rate limit goes down and Google bots crawl less.

  • Limit set by the website owner in the Google search console

    A website owner can reduce the web crawling of their site.

  • Google’s crawling limit

    Google has so many machines, but they are still limited. Hence, we need to make choices with the resources we have. 

2. Crawl demand

It is the level of interest Google and its users have in your site. If do not have huge followings yet, then Google web crawlers won’t crawl your site as often as the highly popular ones. 

Here are three main factors that play important role in determining the crawl demand:

• • Popularity

Popular URLs on the Internet tend to be crawled more often to keep them fresh in the index.

• • Staleness

Systems want to recrawl documents frequently to pick up any alterations.

• • Perceived inventory

Without any guidance, Google web crawlers will try to crawl almost every URL from your website. If the URLs are duplicates and you don’t want them to be crawled for some reason, this wastes a lot of time on your site. This is a factor that you can control easily.

Additionally, events like site moves may increase the crawl demand to re-index the content under new URLs.

Crawl rate capacity and crawl demand together define the “site’s crawl budget”.

 

What are the roadblocks for Google web crawlers?

There are a few ways to block Google web crawlers from crawling your pages purposely. Not every page from your website should rank in search engine rank pages, these crawler roadblocks help to protect sensitive, redundant, irrelevant, or useless pages from appearing for keywords.

There are two types of roadblocks for crawlers:

• • Noindex meta tag 

It stops the Google search engine from indexing and ranking a particular web page. You should apply the noindex to the admin pages, internal search results, and thank you pages.

• • Robot.txt file

It is a simple text file placed on your server which tells Google web crawlers whether they should access the page or not.

 

How to improve web crawling?

How long does it take for the Google search engine to crawl a website? It depends on the number of pages your website has and the quality of hyperlinks. To improve the site crawling you have to:

1. Verify that your website is crawlable

Google accesses the web anonymously and will be able to spot all the elements of your web page only if everything is in order. The first thing you should do to improve your web crawling is by verifying that search engines like Google can reach your website’s pages.

2. Create a solid homepage

If you ask Google to crawl your page, start from your homepage, as it is the most important part of your website. To encourage Google web crawlers to crawl your website thoroughly, make sure that your home page contains a solid navigation system that links to all key sections of your site.

3. Beware of links that violate the guidelines

You can improve your site crawling by linking your web page with another page that Google web crawlers are aware of.