You’ve just launched your brand new website, you do an excited Google search and… it’s not showing up!
Don’t panic! It’s totally normal for a new website to not show straight way. Here’s why…
Google is an incredibly powerful and smart tool, but it can be a little slow. If your beautiful new website is not appearing in Google searches for your business name it's likely because Google hasn't indexed your website yet. When Google has indexed a website, it means the website has been found by the Google crawler bots, and added to their list of Live websites. A process that can take anywhere from just 4 days, to six months!
When you publish a new blog post, site page, or website in general, there are many factors that determine how quickly it will be indexed by Google. For example, site popularity, whether the content is crawlable, and your overall site structure.
As of Mar 21, 2022, there are currently over 1.93 billion websites online. While there is no final or concrete answer, Siteefy calculates, approximately 175 new websites are created every minute… that’s around 252,000 new websites created every day worldwide [Stats from April 2022]. This means that even for a super computer like Google, it can take a while to find them all.
Here are a some techniques from my research which can help with getting your website to appear quicker for searches of your business name.
Connect Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a powerful tool that is used to track search queries that have triggered your website, and has an area where you can submit a site map. Submitting a site map gives Google the most up to date list of URLs for your new website and allows it to index it quicker. When you book a Website Design and Build Package with me, I take care of this process for you.
Get your Google Business Profile live and verified
Google Business Profile profiles will often take priority over standard Google results especially if someone is typing in a business name. Make sure your Google Business Profile is set up, optimised and verified. I have a How To guide here. If you’re struggling with the verification part, try submitting a site map through Google Search Console first, wait a few days, then create a Google Business Profile profile from scratch. This might offer faster verification options, rather than the postal option.
Get social!
A well connected website through multiple links from other sites on the web is a huge benefit to being found. Think about the amount of inbound links pointing toward your website, and the amount of website traffic you're generating. If you’re actively promoting your services, products or Blogs on social media or direct mail you are increasing the amount of people landing on your website, and in turn showing Google that you have good domain authority (Domain Authority is a search engine ranking score that gives a measure of how successful a site is when it comes to search engine results).
What else helps Google find you?
It will be frustrating when you've just invested in a new website and you can't find it! But these things always take time. What I've outlined above will certainly help speed up this process in the beginning – but in the long term, having quality word content on your website written by a professional SEO copywriter, and continually developing and adding new valuable content to your website via Blogs, and promoting what you offer regularly, is your best way to consistently being found online.
Getting your website Live is the first step – now the real work (and fun) begins!
If you'd like to chat more about getting your website found online, please get in touch!