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JOURNAL — 010 · SEO

# Crawl Budget: The Enterprise Problem Small Sites Now Have

AK Areeba Khan, Automation Architect · September 13, 2025 · 4 min read

Facet explosions, pagination and parameter URLs are burning crawls on sites with 800 real pages. How to see it and fix it with robots, canonicals and internal links.

Crawl budget used to be a million-URL problem. Then filters, calendars and tag archives put it on every e-commerce roadmap. Googlebot's time on your site is finite: every crawl spent on /?color=red&size=xl is one not spent on the page that pays you. Log files tell the truth; crawl stats hint at it.

## Local intent is its own game

'Near me' queries run on proximity, prominence and proof — three levers most single-website strategies ignore completely. The map pack is the highest-converting SERP feature in local, and it's won in the profile as much as on the site.

What moves it: complete and honest business profiles, review velocity with responses, consistent citations, and location pages with genuine local substance — not find-and-replace city names.

Service businesses live or die by three map positions. That's a smaller battlefield than national SEO, and a more winnable one.

## Signals an SEO program is failing

1. Traffic grows but the money pages are static
2. Reports lead with rankings for keywords nobody buys
3. New content ships faster than anyone refreshes the old
4. Every recommendation needs a developer nobody assigned
5. The agency can explain activity but never causation

## Content velocity, honestly

Publishing cadence advice is mostly content-farm folklore. What the data from our managed programs shows: four definitive pages a month beat sixteen thin ones — for rankings, links and sanity.

The constraint is insight per page, not word count per week. If a page doesn't contain something a competitor can't copy-paste — data, experience, a named method — it's inventory, not an asset.

Slow is the velocity that compounds. Publish less; make each piece load-bearing.

> SEO is the art of being the obvious answer in public.ALIFY growth practice

## Technical health is the ticket to play

Great content on a site with crawl chaos, template bloat or canonical spaghetti is like advertising a shop with no door. Technical SEO rarely wins rankings by itself — it removes the reasons you lose them.

The recurring offenders across our audits: indexable faceted URLs, orphaned money pages, redirect chains from three redesigns ago, and templates that ship four H1s and a canonical to the homepage.

## Rankings follow satisfaction

Google's vocabulary changes every update; its direction doesn't — toward pages that resolve intent completely. Tactics expire. The job of satisfying the searcher better than the alternatives has never been patched.

Practically: the page that wins a query is the one that ends the search. If users pogo back to results from your page, no schema or keyword density can outvote that behaviour for long.

Write and structure pages to be the last click. It sounds soft; it's the hardest technical target in SEO.

> The algorithm hates shortcuts and loves receipts.Daniyal Sheikh, SEO lead

## Where to start this week

Open Search Console's crawl stats and your coverage report: if 'crawled, currently not indexed' exceeds your real page count, you have a crawl-path problem, not a content problem.

Then keep it honest with a short list:

- Coverage audit: crawl stats, indexed-not-ranked list, orphan report
- Decay queue: pages down 30%+ clicks year-over-year, impressions held
- Cannibalisation check: multiple URLs splitting one intent
- Put the date on the calendar — playbooks without Fridays are just reading

And when the scope outgrows the spreadsheet, that's precisely what our team is for.

## Straight answers

### How is AI used in your SEO work?

For research, gap analysis and drafts acceleration — never as unattended content volume. Every published piece carries firsthand data or experience, because that's the only defensible moat left.

### What's the first month actually look like?

Audit week everything; fix crawl and template issues; map keywords to intents to pages; ship the first refresh of a decaying winner. Month one should feel busy and specific — if it feels like onboarding theatre, ask twice.

### Is SEO dead because of AI search?

Informational clicks are genuinely scarcer; commercial and local intent are alive and buying. Strategy shifts toward bottom-funnel, original data and brand demand — the parts AI answers can't substitute.

SEO ALIFY Journal 4 min read
AK
Areeba Khan
Automation Architect · ALIFY

Builds the workflows that give small teams enterprise leverage. Allergic to manual data entry since 2019.

Keep reading

## More from the journal.

SEO June 12, 2026 7 min read The Founder's Guide to SEO That Actually Pays Most SEO reporting is theatre. Here's how to evaluate SEO like an investment: the three buckets that matter, the timelines that are honest, and the questions that expose bad retainers. Read article SEO October 10, 2025 4 min read SEO After AI Overviews: What Still Works in 2026 Clicks are scarcer and informational queries are eaten first. What the data from 40+ managed sites says about where organic traffic still comes from — and where it's gone for good. Read article SEO October 19, 2025 4 min read Topical Authority: The Cluster Strategy That Compounds Why thirty interlinked articles outrank three hundred scattered ones — the pillar/cluster architecture we build for clients, with the internal-linking maths. Read article
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