Crawl depth

Crawl depth is the number of click steps a search engine needs from your homepage to reach a given page. A page at level 1 is one click deep, a page at level 4 is four clicks deep. The deeper a page is hidden, the less often and quickly Google crawls and indexes it.

Why shallow pages score better

Search engines and visitors assign more value to pages that are easily reachable. Pages high in your structure get more internal link strength and are visited more often. Important commercial pages that lie five clicks deep therefore get too little attention.

• Important pages ideally within three clicks
• Deep pages signal low priority to Google
• A flat structure improves your crawlability

How do you make your structure flatter?

Strong internal linking is your most important lever. Link directly from your homepage and main categories to your important pages, and keep your URL structure logical and shallow. A good sitemap helps additionally, but does not replace clear navigation. This way you spend your crawl budget on the pages that matter.

What it delivers for B2B

At Customer Impact we order a site around the pages that produce customers, not around a beautiful tree structure on paper. For B2B companies this means your strongest service and solution pages belong at the top of the hierarchy. Deeply buried content rarely ranks, however well written it is. Visibility begins with reachability.