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Beyond Keywords: Leveraging Technical SEO To Boost Crawl Efficiency And Visibility

Technical SEO isn’t optional in 2025. Learn how to boost crawl efficiency, and future-proof your site for LLMs and AI-powered search.

Beyond Keywords: Leveraging Technical SEO To Boost Crawl Efficiency And Visibility

For all the noise around keywords, content strategy, and AI-generated summaries, technical SEO still determines whether your content gets seen in the first place.

You can have the most brilliant blog post or perfectly phrased product page, but if your site architecture looks like an episode of “Hoarders” or your crawl budget is wasted on junk pages, you’re invisible.

So, let’s talk about technical SEO – not as an audit checklist, but as a growth lever.

If you’re still treating it like a one-time setup or a background task for your dev team, you’re leaving visibility (and revenue) on the table.

This isn’t about obsessing over Lighthouse scores or chasing 100s in Core Web Vitals. It’s about making your site easier for search engines to crawl, parse, and prioritize, especially as AI transforms how discovery works.

Crawl Efficiency Is Your SEO Infrastructure

Before we talk tactics, let’s align on a key truth: Your site’s crawl efficiency determines how much of your content gets indexed, updated, and ranked.

Crawl efficiency is equal to how well search engines can access and process the pages that actually matter.

The longer your site’s been around, the more likely it’s accumulated detritus – outdated pages, redirect chains, orphaned content, bloated JavaScript, pagination issues, parameter duplicates, and entire subfolders that no longer serve a purpose. Every one of these gets in Googlebot’s way.

Improving crawl efficiency doesn’t mean “getting more crawled.” It means helping search engines waste less time on garbage so they can focus on what matters.

Technical SEO Areas That Actually Move The Needle

Let’s skip the obvious stuff and get into what’s actually working in 2025, shall we?

1. Optimize For Discovery, Not “Flatness”

There’s a long-standing myth that search engines prefer flat architecture. Let’s be clear: Search engines prefer accessible architecture, not shallow architecture.

A deep, well-organized structure doesn’t hurt your rankings. It helps everything else work better.

Logical nesting supports crawl efficiency, elegant redirects, and robots.txt rules, and makes life significantly easier when it comes to content maintenance, analytics, and reporting.

Fix it: Focus on internal discoverability.

If a critical page is five clicks away from your homepage, that’s the problem, not whether the URL lives at /products/widgets/ or /docs/api/v2/authentication.

Use curated hubs, cross-linking, and HTML sitemaps to elevate key pages. But resist flattening everything into the root – that’s not helping anyone.

Example: A product page like /products/waterproof-jackets/mens/blue-mountain-parkas provides clear topical context, simplifies redirects, and enables smarter segmentation in analytics.

By contrast, dumping everything into the root turns Google Analytics 4 analysis into a nightmare.

Want to measure how your documentation is performing? That’s easy if it all lives under /documentation/. Nearly impossible if it’s scattered across flat, ungrouped URLs.

Pro tip: For blogs, I prefer categories or topical tags in the URL (e.g., /blog/technical-seo/structured-data-guide) instead of timestamps.

Dated URLs make content look stale – even if it’s fresh – and provide no value in understanding performance by topic or theme.

In short: organized ≠ buried. Smart nesting supports clarity, crawlability, and conversion tracking. Flattening everything for the sake of myth-based SEO advice just creates chaos.

2. Eliminate Crawl Waste

Google has a crawl budget for every site. The bigger and more complex your site, the more likely you’re wasting that budget on low-value URLs.

Common offenders:

  • Calendar pages (hello, faceted navigation).
  • Internal search results.
  • Staging or dev environments accidentally left open.
  • Infinite scroll that generates URLs but not value.
  • Endless UTM-tagged duplicates.

Fix it: Audit your crawl logs.

Disallow junk in robots.txt. Use canonical tags correctly. Prune unnecessary indexable pages. And yes, finally remove that 20,000-page tag archive that no one – human or robot – has ever wanted to read.

3. Fix Your Redirect Chains

Redirects are often slapped together in emergencies and rarely revisited. But every extra hop adds latency, wastes crawl budget, and can fracture link equity.

Fix it: Run a redirect map quarterly.

Collapse chains into single-step redirects. Wherever possible, update internal links to point directly to the final destination URL instead of bouncing through a series of legacy URLs.

Clean redirect logic makes your site faster, clearer, and far easier to maintain, especially when doing platform migrations or content audits.

And yes, elegant redirect rules require structured URLs. Flat sites make this harder, not easier.

4. Don’t Hide Links Inside JavaScript

Google can render JavaScript, but large language models generally don’t. And even Google doesn’t render every page immediately or consistently.

If your key links are injected via JavaScript or hidden behind search boxes, modals, or interactive elements, you’re choking off both crawl access and AI visibility.

Fix it: Expose your navigation, support content, and product details via crawlable, static HTML wherever possible.

LLMs like those powering AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity don’t click or type. If your knowledge base or documentation is only accessible after a user types into a search box, LLMs won’t see it – and won’t cite it.

Real talk: If your official support content isn’t visible to LLMs, they’ll pull answers from Reddit, old blog posts, or someone else’s guesswork. That’s how incorrect or outdated information becomes the default AI response for your product.

Solution: Maintain a static, browsable version of your support center. Use real anchor links, not JavaScript-triggered overlays. Make your help content easy to find and even easier to crawl.

Invisible content doesn’t just miss out on rankings. It gets overwritten by whatever is visible. If you don’t control the narrative, someone else will.

5. Handle Pagination And Parameters With Intention

Infinite scroll, poorly handled pagination, and uncontrolled URL parameters can clutter crawl paths and fragment authority.

It’s not just an indexing issue. It’s a maintenance nightmare and a signal dilution risk.

Fix it: Prioritize crawl clarity and minimize redundant URLs.

While rel=”next”/rel=”prev” still gets thrown around in technical SEO advice, Google retired support years ago, and most content management systems don’t implement it correctly anyway.

Instead, focus on:

  • Using crawlable, path-based pagination formats (e.g., /blog/page/2/) instead of query parameters like ?page=2. Google often crawls but doesn’t index parameter-based pagination, and LLMs will likely ignore it entirely.
  • Ensuring paginated pages contain unique or at least additive content, not clones of page one.
  • Avoiding canonical tags that point every paginated page back to page one that tells search engines to ignore the rest of your content.
  • Using robots.txt or meta noindex for thin or duplicate parameter combinations (especially in filtered or faceted listings).
  • Defining parameter behavior in Google Search Console only if you have a clear, deliberate strategy. Otherwise, you’re more likely to shoot yourself in the foot.

Pro tip: Don’t rely on client-side JavaScript to build paginated lists. If your content is only accessible via infinite scroll or rendered after user interaction, it’s likely invisible to both search crawlers and LLMs.

Good pagination quietly supports discovery. Bad pagination quietly destroys it.

Crawl Optimization And AI: Why This Matters More Than Ever

You might be wondering, “With AI Overviews and LLM-powered answers rewriting the SERP, does crawl optimization still matter?”

Yes. More than ever.

Pourquoi? AI-generated summaries still rely on indexed, trusted content. If your content doesn’t get crawled, it doesn’t get indexed. If it’s not indexed, it doesn’t get cited. And if it’s not cited, you don’t exist in the AI-generated answer layer.

AI search agents (Google, Perplexity, ChatGPT with browsing) don’t pull full pages; they extract chunks of information. Paragraphs, sentences, lists. That means your content architecture needs to be extractable. And that starts with crawlability.

If you want to understand how that content gets interpreted – and how to structure yours for maximum visibility – this guide on how LLMs interpret content breaks it down step by step.

Remember, you can’t show up in AI Overviews if Google can’t reliably crawl and understand your content.

Bonus: Crawl Efficiency For Site Health

Efficient crawling is more than an indexing benefit. It’s a canary in the coal mine for technical debt.

If your crawl logs show thousands of pages no longer relevant, or crawlers are spending 80% of their time on pages you don’t care about, it means your site is disorganized. It’s a signal.

Clean it up, and you’ll improve everything from performance to user experience to reporting accuracy.

What To Prioritize This Quarter

If you’re short on time and resources, focus here:

  1. Crawl Budget Triage: Review crawl logs and identify where Googlebot is wasting time.
  2. Internal Link Optimization: Ensure your most important pages are easily discoverable.
  3. Remove Crawl Traps: Close off dead ends, duplicate URLs, and infinite spaces.
  4. JavaScript Rendering Review: Use tools like Google’s URL Inspection Tool to verify what’s visible.
  5. Eliminate Redirect Hops: Especially on money pages and high-traffic sections.

These are not theoretical improvements. They translate directly into better rankings, faster indexing, and more efficient content discovery.

TL;DR: Keywords Matter Less If You’re Not Crawlable

Technical SEO isn’t the sexy part of search, but it’s the part that enables everything else to work.

If you’re not prioritizing crawl efficiency, you’re asking Google to work harder to rank you. And in a world where AI-powered search demands clarity, speed, and trust – that’s a losing bet.

Fix your crawl infrastructure. Then, focus on content, keywords, and experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). In that order.

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Featured Image: Candy Shapes/Shutterstock

Category SEO
Carolyn Shelby Principal SEO at Yoast

Carolyn Shelby is Principal SEO at Yoast, the world’s most popular WordPress SEO plugin, with over 13 million active installations. ...