Recently deployed a new website?
With so many people and companies launching websites, chances are you either recently did — or you’re about to. Probably the first thing you did after launch was search for your own site in Google. And it wasn’t there. That’s the most common question we hear from clients within the first 24 hours of a website going live:
Why doesn’t my website show up when I Google it?
A fair question, but more complex than it looks. There’s a process called propagation — usually 24 to 48 hours — that it takes the web to pick up a newly launched site (or an update to an existing one). But there’s more to understand than just waiting it out. Let’s define a few concepts first.
What is Google? A search engine — a program that indexes the web and returns results for a query. Other search engines include Yahoo!, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.
What is a SERP? Short for Search Engine Results Page — the page you see after running a search in Google.
How does a search engine find my website? Search engines crawl the web and index items in a database that correspond to keywords, which are later returned to a user searching for those keywords.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? The methodologies and code-based strategies that increase your site’s relevance for a given set of keywords.
What’s the backbone of those strategies? The more relevant your website is to the keywords people actually type in when searching for your product or service, the higher a search engine will push you up the SERP — increasing your visibility, and by extension, your traffic.
So how do you become more relevant? Relevance comes from delivering content that closely matches the words people use when searching for what you offer — in short, use the same words your customers use. That raises the next question: how do you know what words people are actually searching for? Look at similar websites offering similar products or services, and take notes: what are you typing to find this result? What do the top ten results have in common in terms of content? Benchmarking against competing sites is one of the most reliable ways to get better at search optimization.
Giving you a single, simple answer here would only tell half the truth. Gaining visibility and improving your rank on search engines like Google comes down to two things: time and strategy.