Why isn't my new website showing up in Google search?

When it comes to getting exposure for your business's website, nothing compares to Google search. With over 8.5 billion searches performed each and every day, and Google perfecting the art of delivering high quality, relevant search results, there is no better place for a business to try to find its customers.

And, because business owners also use Google in their personal lives, they understand the importance of the platform and want their business to show up in first place of search results as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, most businesses are disappointed when becoming aware of the reality of what it takes to rank well in Google.

Here's an email we received recently from a client:

A common misconception when launching a new website is that the minute it is "live" users will start finding it. Unfortunately, it's not that easy. No one will be automatically notified - not even search engines like Google. In fact, you could deploy a new website and if you don't do anything with it, it's very possible the site receives 0 real visitors for months.

But, there are a few things that you CAN do to help Google find and index your site more quickly, and eventually turn into a consistent audience channel for your website.

1 Submit your website to Google

There's a good chance that Google will eventually find your website on their own - usually through links to your website on other sites. But you can actually submit your site to Google directly and tell them to index your site.

Google has actually created a site just for this called Google Search Console. It's free and just requires that you can verify ownership of the site either through your domain's DNS settings or by uploading a file onto the site.

Once you've verified ownership, you can submit your website's sitemap that Google will use to crawl and index your site, and then start adding your webpages to its search result pages.

2 Review your site's technical SEO

Technical search engine optimization (SEO) refers to adding or optimizing certain page elements that are crawled and referenced by search engines. A few of the most common of these elements are the page's title, the page's description, loading performance and mobile responsiveness.

Hopefully, when your site was developed, the developer had this components in mind and at least added basic values for titles and descriptions and optimized page speed and responsiveness. If not, you may need to get your hands a bit dirty and dive into the source code yourself or hire a developer.

Fortunately, there are multiple tools that you can use that will crawl your site and tell you how well your site is optimized for technical SEO. Before getting your hands too dirty, try scanning your site on SEO Site Checkup to see how well your site is currently optimized.

3 Create new content

In our opinion, the best thing that you can do for your website to improve its search rankings in the long term is to create new, high quality content. This could be some form of blog, case studies, news articles, or really anything that might be relevant to your business that you could write about.

If search engines like Google index your site and find content, they will index that content and display it when users perform relevant searches. Then, if the quality is high, it will continue to display your page and even move it up in search rankings.

Don't be nervous about "high quality" content. What makes content "good" quality isn't necessarily how perfect the grammar is, but rather is the content original? Is it complete in thought (think longer-form content)? Do the people who visit stay on the page for more than a few seconds indicating that they're actually reading the content?

In the long run, the content on your website will be a much greater factor to your site's SEO than technical components.

4 Install Google Analytics on your site

Once submitted your site to Google, checked and optimized the technical components of your site's SEO and started creating content, make sure to install Google Analytics onto your site so that you can actually track your site's search and visitor performance.

Google Analytics will provide more than you need for metric tracking - including tracking items such as sessions (users visiting your site), where users who visit your site come from, what pages they visit the most, and more.

When you have the time, take 5 minutes here and there to learn more about your website in your Google Analytics account. This will help you to dive deeper than just the basic metrics and will give you valuable information that you can use to take your website to the next level.