Good things come to those who wait. This phrase rings true in many ways, and search is no exception. After your new website is launched, you’re excited and ready to see it show up in a search. But, like all good things, this can take a while. But rest assured, your new website, that you put so much work into, will soon be indexed by search engines like Google. Let’s take a look at this more closely.
How Does Google Search Work?
You may not know that when you search using Google, you are exclusively searching the Google index, not the entire Internet. How does your site get indexed by Google? Software called bots or spiders crawl through numerous web pages, gathering and classifying information and adding it to Google’s index. For your webpage to reach Google’s index, the spiders must be able to crawl and read the information on your website. Watch this video from Google for more information.
You’ve probably heard of the Google algorithm but may not know what it is exactly. In short, Google uses an algorithm to match your search query to the vast number of pages it has on file. Google’s algorithm considers more than 250 factors, including keywords, titles, alt tags, and content tags. It also considers a website's ranking and measurement of each page’s status based on the amount of relevant traffic from other sites.
How are Websites Ranked?
There is no magic formula to use that will make your website rank at the top of a Google search. But, optimizing these items below will increase your probability of success in the ranking process. As part of our process while building your new website, we work together with you on these items.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Optimizing your website for search includes adding keywords, titles and headings to your pages and ALT text, titles and descriptions to your images. This helps make your pages visible to search engine indexing programs. SEO tips that you need to know. Read Google’s SEO Started Guide to learn more.
Quality Content
Consistently adding relevant, quality content to your website will keep the search bots looking at your page and, over time, could lead to higher rankings. This would include adding landing pages, posting blogs, updating photos and videos, and adding new events. Provide rich content that will be useful to your visitors.
Keyword Selection
Selecting the right keywords can be important to your website ranking. Consider what keywords are important to your industry and use them in your content. Do your research! With a new site, it will be easier to build rankings using keywords with lower levels of competition before moving on to more popular keywords with a higher level of competition. It is VERY important to avoid keyword stuffing. Do not overuse keywords or use other shady tactics to try to trick search engines.
Google My Business
Set up your free Google My Business listing. It’s a quick and easy way to get your business ranked in local search. Once you have your GMB account and listing set up, follow these 4 tips for optimizing your Google My Business Listing.
Link Building
Look for backlink opportunities and ask relevant websites to link back to your site. Start by visiting your social media pages on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or other networks and ensure that they all link back to your website. Then connect with relevant sites in your industry and ask them to link to your site. Follow these 10 link building strategies to get started.
Structured Data with Schema.org
Why do you need structured data? Marking up your products, events, news posts, reviews, job postings and more with structured data in the Schema.org vocabulary makes your site able to be understood by search engines. Search engines no longer have to guess that a services page is a service page, you can now tell them.
How Long Until My Website is Found on Search?
It’s impossible to give you an exact time frame for how long it’ll take your new website to appear on Google. Your site could get indexed by Google within a matter of days, weeks or months.
Why? If your website domain is less than six months old it is considered a new site. Search engines can see this as less trustworthy than older websites that have been verified. Adding your website to Google Search Console and taking other steps such as adding sitemaps will help rankings increase over time.
What Can You Do Now?
You can’t force Google to rank your new site immediately! But you CAN continue to add rich content, optimize any new content for SEO, include relevant links, and update your Google listing often. Be patient, it will happen! Have questions? We are happy to help you, just reach out.
