Why doesn't my site show on Google
It's been a crazy couple of months in the business world as many of us start the year wanting to get ahead of the curve and notch off a few tasks that got put off in 2016. For a lot of people that has meant starting new businesses and creating websites to help publicise their new idea. We love working with entrepreneurs and business people that are just starting out - they are absolutely full of enthusiasm and excitement that becomes infectious along the creative journey. However, with that enthusiasm comes a tendency to look for immediate results and an expectation that sales and growth happen straight away. We totally get it - when you start a company you have a sense of belief that on day one orders and sales will come walking through the door (or flying into your email), but as most of us in business can attest, there is alot of hard graft in getting a company going - and creating a business venture is no different. So today we want to answer one of the most common questions we get from new business owners the day of, or day after, we put their website live - "I just searched google, why isn't my website showing?"
Why isn't my new website appearing in searches?
I suspect as you read this some of you will have a knowing chuckle at this point....most of us have probably been in this position. As customers and consumers, when we search for something on google, it shows it to us straight away - so naturally our assumption is that when OUR website goes live, it'll get shown to everyone else straight away as well! Unfortunately - that's not quite how the internet works. To use the Yellow Pages analogy I've thrown on this site a few times, if you were to open a store halfway through the year and get a new landline, that landline wouldn't appear in the hardcopy version of the Yellow Pages straight away... the Yellow Pages would need to find out about your new number, then have it printed in the next version of the book. The internet works the same way - just alot faster. When a website is put live, Google doesn't know about it immediately, so it can't automatically put it into search results. Rather, search engines regularly crawl the internet sniffing out new pages and new content to add to their results. Your site won't register with a search engine in any form until that search engine finds it on one of it's crawls.
How often does Google crawl sites?
How often Google crawls sites varies alot. For a big news outlet, Google will potentially be crawling the site every few minutes or seconds, whereas for a local business the time between crawls can be days - meaning new sites and changes to websites can take a painful amount of time to appear. There are a few things you can do to speed up this process:
- Install Google Analytics on your website. It's a tool you'll get use out of anyway if you like data, but at the very least it will give Google a direct insight into your site changes.
- Sign up for a Google Webmaster account - this will give you the ability to tell Google directly that you want it to have a look at your site.
- Make sure your site has a sitemap and that you submit it to Google and other search engines (through Webmaster tools for Google). A sitemap is basically a directory of your site.
- Ask Google to 'fetch' your site for indexing. Again, this can be done through your Google Webmaster account.
Doing the above will get Google to acknowledge your site quicker - and within days you should be able to search for the name of your website and find it. What won't happen overnight though is the site hitting the top of the search list for important search terms in your industry. As an example, we recently put Gramma Consulting live - if you search for "gramma consulting" that site now appears in the first few search results, but if you were to search "american university rowing" it's still a long way from the top of the list. That's pretty normal... and as a business owner you should expect it will take months to move up the ranks in particular search terms - and to get that movement you'll need to put in a bit of work as well.
But I want to hit the top for certain search terms now!
If you realise the value of a google search, you'll want to hit the top of the results of the keywords in your industry...and you'll want to do it fast. So how can you do that? We tend to say one thing outright - there is no guarantee of hitting the number one spot in Google (and anyone telling you they can get you there fast is probably doing something that will damage your site rankings long term). What you can do is give your site the absolute best opportunity to move up the rankings you can through doing some organic search engine optimisation (basically saying the right things in the right places on your site). We help our clients with this for a $150 per month fee, or offer a lower rate to give you access to a search engine optimisation tool that will help you monitor your own SEO if you want to give it a go yourself. Either way we're always happy to have a chat - get in touch with [email protected].
And last of all - there is a cheats way to get onto that search list quickly - but like everything these days it costs. Google Advertising can shortcut your journey onto the result list for your major keywords, but you do have to pay for it, and when you stop paying, your result drops off the search results page. That said, given it will only costs you hundreds, versus the thousands you can end up paying in conventional advertising, it can definitely be worth the investment. As always, we're happy to help out here as well!
All in all, when your web designer puts your site live, cut them a little bit of slack and don't expect to Google for your company 5 minutes after it goes up and expect to see your site in search results! You'll get there eventually, and if you employ a few SEO techniques well, you might even be able to hit the top of some search lists in your industry.
