4 SEO Stages - Crawling, Indexing, Rendering & Ranking

SEO is like a well-oiled machine with 4 essential gears: crawling, indexing, rendering, and ranking.

We didn't say that.

John Mueller, Google's Search Advocate, said so in a webmaster hangout session.

But we wholeheartedly agree with him.

Think about the last time you searched for something on Google and found precisely the website you were looking for on the first page.

That happened because search engines

• crawled the website, exploring the Internet to find the website that had the content that matched your queries;
• indexed that content by storing and organising it in its massive digital library for easy retrieval.
• rendered the website so search engines and users can see it correctly and;
• ranked the website, deciding where it should appear in search results based on website authority and relevance.

Imagine if Google can’t crawl, index, render, or rank your website; your website is as good as invisible. There would be no traffic, no leads, and, ultimately, no sales.

You don’t want that because your business will be on the line, especially in this digital economy where the competition is fierce.

4 stages of seo

That said, let’s explore each stage of SEO—crawling, indexing, rendering, and ranking—and how to make them work for you.

How search engines work

You’ve probably heard the words “search engines”, “search engine optimisation (SEO)”, etc., over a thousand times, but have you ever wondered why they are so crucial in your marketing strategy?

In a world where 8.5 billion Google searches happen daily (!!) and thousands of websites are created weekly, you must understand how search engines work to stand out.

Search engines are software systems that allow people to find the information they are looking for from the vast amount of information on the Internet using targeted keywords and phrases. They work by crawling hundreds of billions of websites using bots or spiders, organising the content they find in their index, choosing the most relevant ones, and showing them when you type a search query.

Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is optimising your website so search engines can “understand” what your website is about, compare you to other websites on the topic, and showcase you in the search results. As mentioned earlier, it has four stages: crawling, indexing, rendering, and ranking, which will be discussed in detail in this article.

Even though Google is the most popular search engine, it isn’t the only one. Several other search engines have unique features and rules that guide their operations. These include Bing, Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Baidu, etc.

Every search engine is different.

No search engine works the same way as others. Each has a different algorithm and set of factors to rank websites. For instance, Google prioritises mobile friendliness and valuable content, while Bing considers local listens and social media signals. Let’s dig deeper into what makes each search engine unique.

Google: With a market share of 91.62% and 4.97 billion users out of 5.44 billion Internet users, Google is the world's largest and most dominant search engine. It was founded in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page and became a subsidiary of Alphabet, Inc. in 2015. Google’s algorithm constantly evolves to allow for high-quality results for its users.

It uses RankBrain, an artificial intelligence and machine learning tool, to understand the intent behind search queries and deliver results for its users, even if the words aren’t the exact keywords. Google considers quite a wide range of factors when crawling, indexing, rendering, and ranking websites - mobile-friendliness, backlinks, content quality, context, page speed, load times, etc. Also, it keeps updating its algorithm to deliver better results to users. For instance, Google introduced featured snippets in SERPs in 2014 and mobile-first indexing in 2016.

Bing: With a market share of 3.42% and 1.1 billion users, Bing is the second-largest search engine in the world. It is owned and operated by Microsoft. Bing’s interface is more attractive than Google’s, and its algorithm favours social media signals and visual search. For instance, the number of times your content is shared on social media platforms like Facebook can influence your ranking on Bing. It also delivers superior visual capabilities for images and videos compared to Google and favours exact keyword matches, unlike Google.

Yahoo!: Yahoo! has a market share of less than 3% and over 500 million users. Ranked as one of the most popular alternatives to Google, Yahoo! started as a directory of websites in 1994 before it evolved into a full-blown search engine. However, despite several attempts to reinvent itself and become a leading Internet company, Google's stranglehold on the market isn’t letting it. One key advantage Yahoo! has over other search engines is its heavy integration with other Yahoo services such as Yahoo Finance and Yahoo News. This makes it a top choice for financial advisors who need specific, high-quality finance news.

DuckDuckGo: DuckDuckGo has 0.54% of the search engine market share and about 100 million users. It prides itself on being a privacy-first search engine, as it doesn’t store users’ data or personalise search results. DuckDuckGo gathers its results from various sources, including its web crawlers and other search engines such as Yahoo! and Bing.

What to do when migrating your website?

When migrating your website (e.g., changing to a new CMS or design), the 4 SEO stages—crawling, indexing, rendering, and ranking—are directly impacted. Google’s bots will crawl the new pages to re-discover your structure. However, without proper redirects and updated sitemaps, indexing could suffer. Rendering issues may arise due to unoptimized elements in the new design, affecting how Google and users see your content. Ranking can temporarily drop if these elements aren't managed well, leading to lower visibility until Google reassesses your site's new version.

A well-executed migration plan ensures minimal disruption to these stages and prevents ranking losses

Also, if your hosting platform doesn't have the necessary updates to fight cybersecurity threats, you need to migrate your website. While you can migrate your website for various reasons, you must do so without losing the visibility, traffic and trust you’ve already garnered. According to IO Digital, a poorly executed migration can hurt your website traffic by at least 80%. To prevent this, below is a list of what you should do before, during and after migration. Before you migrate,

• Audit your website to take stock of what you have. Use SEO tools such as ScreamingFrog, SEMrush, SiteBulb or Google Analytics to crawl your website, identifying all URLs, redirects, potential issues, backlinks, keyword rankings, etc.
• Create a detailed plan. Include all the goals you want to achieve with migration, whether improving your user experience, increasing site speed, setting up the proper redirects, etc. According to HubSpot, 70% of companies that fail to plan their website migrations experience significant drops in traffic and rankings.
• Choose the right time for your migration. Timing can determine whether you will lose or retain the visibility, trust, and traffic you’ve built. Avoid migrating during your business's peak seasons.

Peak seasons differ for every business, so you must study your business for the right timing. For instance, holidays are peak seasons for e-commerce businesses that sell apparel, clothing accessories, toys and games, etc. In contrast, companies such as consulting firms and online education platforms experience reduced traffic during holidays.

When migrating:

• Create 301 redirects to maintain link equity and prevent search engines from indexing your old website. Every old URL should redirect to the new webpage so search engines can crawl, index, render and rank your new website.
• Update your sitemap and internal links. Ensure your sitemap reflects the new changes on your website. Also, review your internal links and ensure they point to your new website. Fix every broken link.
• Preserve your content. Migrating doesn’t mean you should lose your content. Ensure all your high-ranking content moves with you, maintaining the same URL structure as much as possible.
• Before going live with your new website, test it across different browsers and devices to ensure maximum functionality.

After migrating:

• Submit your updated sitemap to search engines such as Google and Bing for proper crawling, indexing, rendering and ranking. You can use tools such as Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster.
• Monitor your website performance using analytics tools such as Google Analytics. Look out for fluctuations in your website ranking and traffic, crawl errors, etc., and fix these issues immediately.
• Inform your audience. Don’t keep mute on your website migration. Use social media, email newsletters, blog posts, etc., to inform your audience that you’ve moved to a new website and how they can access it. Explain why you migrated and the benefits the new website offers. This helps to maintain audience loyalty, which is vital to business progress.

Stage 1: What is search engine crawling?

Search engine crawling

Search engine crawling is the process by which search engines such as Google or Bing send out bots, also known as crawlers or spiders, to explore the Internet and index the content. Think of the Internet as a massive, constantly-changing digital library with loads of information on anything you can ever think of and search engine crawlers as digital librarians organizing the information for users searching for specific keywords. These crawlers follow links from one webpage to the other. If your website isn’t crawled, it will remain invisible.

Can search engines crawl your pages?

Search engines should be able to crawl your page if your website structure is properly set up. This means that;

• your web pages are accessible to search engine crawlers,
• there are no technical barriers, such as server errors or broken links on your website,
• your robots.txt file works appropriately; it tells search engines which pages they can or cannot crawl.

How to get paywalled content crawled.

Paywalled content is content that can only be accessed when payment is made. A paywall is a digital gate that restricts users from accessing the content until payment is made.

Paywalled content isn’t off-limits to search engine crawlers, given that Google introduced a new type of structured data for paywalled content in 2022. You can use tools like Googlebot or a sitemap that previews the content for crawling to ensure the content is visible in search results while maintaining access restrictions.

Search bots don't use search boxes on your website.

Search boxes are website features where you can enter queries searching for specific content. Search bots don’t interact with websites like humans do, so they don’t use these search boxes. Instead, they follow the links embedded in your content and website sitemap to discover the content on your website. This is why you must have a well-structured internal linking strategy.

Internal link building (see Navigation & Architecture)

Internal link building is the art of embedding links from one page to another on your website within your content. If done rightly, it serves as a roadmap for search engine crawlers to understand and discover your website’s structure. We will talk more about this in the Navigation & Architecture section.

How to tell search engines to crawl your pages

You don’t have to wait for search engines to find your content; you can give them a nudge by;

• Submitting your updated sitemap to search engines using tools such as Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster.
• Auditing your robots.txt file to ensure you didn’t accidentally block search engines from crawling essential web pages.
• Fixing every crawl error such as server errors (500 errors) and broken links (404 errors) immediately.
• Updating your XML sitemap and regularly using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to improve your website’s load speed.
• Using appropriate metatags and structured data.
• Requesting search engines to crawl specific pages using the URL Inspection Tool.

Robots.txt file

The robots.txt file is a text file that tells search engine crawlers which pages they can crawl and which are off-limits, such as the admin pages.

What is a crawl budget?

A crawl budget refers to the number of pages search engines will crawl within a timeframe. The crawl budget is affected by website size, load speed, linking strategy, etc. Also, if you have a large website, you must regularly optimise your crawl budget to ensure the most critical web pages are crawled.

Sitemap

Your sitemap is an XML file containing all the URLs on your website. It serves as a table of contents for your website, helping search engines understand its structure and increasing the chances of crawling every webpage.

Navigation & Architecture of your website

The navigation and architecture of your website refer to how organised and connected your web pages are for both human users and search engine crawlers. They are the backbone of your user experience and SEO.

Remember how frustrated you get when you shop at a poorly organised supermarket where cereals are scattered throughout the store and frozen foods are next to toilet supplies? That’s how frustrated search engines and users get when navigating your website is challenging.

According to Forrester Research, a good website design can boost conversions by 200%. Websites such as Amazon, Netflix, AirBnB, and Apple are good case studies of proper website navigation and architecture.

The critical elements of a good website structure include;

• All pages on your website are accessible within 3 - 4 clicks.
• A clear hierarchical structure, e,g. homepage - main categories - subcategories - individual pages.
• Good internal linking.
• Simple and descriptive URLs to reflect the page’s content, e.g. www.shoesforall.com/womens-shoes/party-shoes instead of www.shoesforall.com/category/subcategory/product?id=246
• Mobile-first optimisation.

Errors that crawlers dislike

Crawlers encounter several errors when navigating websites, which can cause them to stop crawling your pages. The most common types are the 4xx and 5xx errors.

4xx

This shows that a page couldn’t be found (404 errors) or access is forbidden (403 errors).

5xx

5xx errors are server problems, indicating internal issues or that your website is temporarily down.

Stage 2: What is search engine rendering?

Rendering in SEO

Rendering is the process of search engines converting your website's HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into a visual representation to understand how the page will function for users and how to display all elements correctly.

Why is rendering important to SEO?

Rendering helps search engines to understand and index your content. It is important to SEO because:

• It ensures that your content is visible. If your website isn't correctly rendered, search engines won't be able to index the content, and your website won’t show up in search results.
• It improves user experience. A well-rendered website ensures all elements are easily accessible and user-interactive, increasing your visibility in search results and conversions.
• With 58% of all website traffic from mobile phones, rendering enhances your website’s mobile-friendliness. You will miss out on valuable website traffic if the mobile versions aren’t correctly rendered.

How long for Google to render your page?

The time it takes for Google to render your page depends on many factors, ranging from site speed to page complexity. Google doesn’t render a page immediately after it is crawled. First, it fetches the CSS, JavaScript and HTML content and queues it for processing. Later, it revisits the page and processes the content. This can take a few hours to a couple of weeks. However, here is how you can optimise the rendering process;

• Use server-side rendering (SSR) to pre-render your content and speed up Google’s process.
• Minimise your use of JavaScript. Remove unnecessary code to accelerate the rendering process. Fix all JavaScript issues.
• Optimise your pages for faster load times.
• Optimise large images and resources using high-performance but low-size formats such as WebP for fast load and enhanced performance.
• Finally, regularly monitor your website performance for insights into your rendering process and areas for improvement.

Stage 3: What is search engine indexing?

Serach engine indexting

Indexing refers to the process by which Google stores and organizes your website content in its database, which is called an index. As such, it can easily pull it out in search results when users enter queries relevant to your content. Indexing is the third stage in the SEO process, after crawling and rendering, and is crucial to your visibility on search engines.

What is the Google Index?

The Google Index is a massive database where Google stores all the information it has gathered about websites after crawling them for easy retrieval. It contains billions of web pages, where Google can easily pull out information for search queries instead of scanning the entire web. A study by the World Wide Web Size Project shows that Google has hundreds of billions of web pages in its index, which is still growing.

Can search engines index your pages?

All things equal, search engines should be able to index your pages. This means your webpages should have no technical barriers, be accessible to search engine crawlers, have a properly configured robots.txt file, have a solid internal linking strategy, etc.

How to tell search engines to index your pages?

Using the Google Search Console and submitting your sitemap, you can inform Google that your web pages exist so they can be indexed.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is an SEO tool that allows you to monitor and optimise your website’s performance in search results. It also updates you about indexing errors and other performance metrics. You can request that a webpage be indexed or check if a URL is indexed correctly. Using the Search Console can increase the chances of your content getting indexed.

Submitting your sitemap

Your sitemap serves as a roadmap for search engines, guiding them to the pages to crawl, render, index and rank. It contains the links to all the essential web pages you want your users to access. You can submit your sitemap through Google Search Console and include it in your robots.txt file.

How long for Google to index your pages?

The time Google takes to index your page varies, depending on factors such as page authority, website structure, frequency of updates, etc. What matters is that you optimise your website for better performance and fix all issues immediately so Google will index your pages faster. The easier you make it for Google to crawl, render, and index your pages, the faster your website will rank in the SERPs.

Stage 4: What is search engine ranking?

Ranking in SEO

As the final stage in SEO, ranking refers to the position your website occupies in search engine results pages (SERPs) when users enter queries that match the keywords on your website. The higher your ranking, the higher your chances of getting more visibility, traffic, and sales. This is why many businesses strive to be on the first page of Google.

How does a search engine rank you compared to competitors?

Search engines use a combination of different factors to rank you, but Google mainly uses the E-E-A-T - Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness—criteria to determine how to rank websites.

• Experience: Do search engines and users find it easy to navigate your website? Is your website fast to load?
• Expertise: How well does your content match the queries users search for? Do you optimise your content for SEO? How skilled are you in the subject matter?
• Authority: Do other websites link to your site? Does one web page link to another on your website? Are you an authority in your niche? Have you established thought leadership? Do you link to other relevant websites, too? Is the hosting platform credible?
• Trustworthiness: How well-optimized is your website for search engine bots to aid crawling, rendering, indexing and ranking? Do you have the necessary credentials? Is your website secure for users? Are you transparent about your content sources?

How to improve your ranking a.k.a. how to SEO?

Improving your ranking won't happen overnight, but if you do it correctly, you’ll get results in no time. You can do this using a combination of on-page, off-page and technical SEO strategies.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO means optimising your web pages to improve their search engine ranking. It includes content SEO, which means using the relevant keywords in your content, the proper meta descriptions and title tags, optimising your website load speed, ensuring your website is mobile-first, following Google’s EEAT criteria, etc.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to activities done outside your website to improve its ranking. This includes link-building and social media marketing. The higher the quality and quantity of your backlinks, the more authoritative Google perceives your website to be and ranks you accordingly in search results.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to actions taken to optimise your website's technical aspects so search engines can crawl and index it properly. This includes fixing broken links and faulty redirects, updating your robots.txt file and sitemaps, optimising your site speed, ensuring your site is secure, etc.

Bottom line / Conclusion

You’ve learned how the four stages of SEO—crawling, rendering, indexing, and ranking—work and what to do at each stage to increase website performance.

Now is the time to take action.

But we understand that navigating this complex SEO journey alone might be challenging.

You need a guide to put you through every step of the way, or better still, someone to do the long haul and take the burden off you.

And that’s why we are here.

Secure your spot for an SEO consult, and let’s work together to transform your website into a powerful traffic and sales magnet.