Where’s my new website?

So you’ve built a brand new website, made it pretty, and filled it full of great content and information about your business. Then, you go and type it into Google to see it live. And… Nothing. You can’t find it. Your site couldn’t hide better if it was the child of Where’s Wally and Carmen Sandiego. Don’t worry–you aren’t alone! In this article we’ll cover some reasons why you might not be able to find your new website.

A new website takes time to index

Indexing is the process of adding a website to Google’s database. If Google doesn’t know the site exists, they can’t show it to people. This process takes time, so you might not be able to find your website from a Google search for a little while. Google also ranks new sites lower than existing sites, so it could be that your site isn’t high enough in the results yet. The rankings will naturally improve over time as long as you follow SEO best practices.

You can still find your site directly

Thankfully, if you’re having trouble finding your new site through a Google search, you can still access it by typing in the full URL directly. Often, you’re also able to type that URL into Google and get your site to show up that way, although that isn’t much use to someone who’s looking for it. In the meantime, you can wait–or invest into Google ads to at least show up as an ad in the search results.

Why is there even a wait at all?

One reason why your brand new site won’t show up instantly is because of the sheer number of websites and pages that exist. There is an estimated 1.5 billion websites that currently exist and over 1 quadrillion individual pages. That’s more than 10 times the amount of all the money that exists in the world! A million isn’t even a drop in the bucket when you’re dealing with quadrillions, though a million dollars would still be nice to have!

Search engines like Google process this sheer volume of sites through crawling and indexing. “Crawling” is when a web “spider” goes through websites searching for new information–like the existence of your new site. Once Google’s itsy bitsy spider finds your site, the site is indexed, or read over to make sure that the site has quality content and the information the crawler is looking for. If you’ve registered your site in Google Webmaster, you can request it to be indexed manually, but it will still take some time to appear in the results, especially when it’s brand new.

Isn’t there a way to speed up the process somehow?

While you can’t really do anything to speed up the indexing process, there is something you can do to make your site appear sometimes in the search results while you wait. Get an AdWords account and run some ads on Google. AdWords is still a good idea when your site is indexed as it has shown to be an effective tool for increasing revenue when done well, but it can be a huge boost to those first few weeks when you aren’t showing up in searches.

However, the ads can drain your budget quickly if you’re unfamiliar with the platform and don’t know how to use it’s many tools. Google offers free training you can go through to learn the basics, or you can always get the help of our knowledgeable team to manage the accounts on your behalf! We also have a certified Google Ads team here at Back9. Find out more on our article 9 Key Reasons to use Google Ads, or get in touch today!