My new website is live, why am I not top of Google?

After launching your new website, you’ll notice that when you do a Google search, you won’t instantly see your website in the listings. Google crawls the internet all the time for new content, but even Google themselves don’t give an exact timeframe of when it will be.

There are lots of individual signals that the Google bots test for, and there is no set timeframe that Google give to initially index your site – the time taken can vary. The time it does take may vary based upon factors such as;

• Popularity of the site (Whether it has any links to it)
• Whether the content is Crawl-able (Server Responses and Content type)
• Site structure (how pages interlink)
• Age of your domain name

It is possible for a site to be crawled/indexed within 4 days to 4 weeks. In some cases, it may take longer.

How can you ensure that your site starts ranking?

During the build of your new website, your Digital Agency should ensure that they are taking simple steps to help your website rank, with all of our sites, our aim is to make your website coding lightweight, and design the website to conform with the latest Google algorithm.

Here is a quick list of the things we check for (there are lots of things, these are just a few):

• Have concise, well written content
• Have a simple user journey through your website
• Having internal and external links
• Check server response times are good (advanced)
• Add a sitemap to your website and verify it on Google Webmaster Tools
• Add META details to your website
• Submit your website to Google through their URL submitter

What might be stopping your website ranking on Google?

If best practices aren’t followed, it’s easy to for your rankings to slide, or not be ranked at all. If you’re struggling to achieve a good Google ranking, consider checking the following:

• User experience and journey – if it’s bad, Google won’t be happy
• Slow site speed
• Slow server response times
• Badly setup DNS records
• Badly written code
• robot.txt poor setup
• 301 redirects or badly setup linking

These are all factors that can contribute to poor website rankings. We’d recommend checking these things first, if you don’t know how, we can help. Just get in touch with a member of our team and we can run a completely free SEO audit that will help highlight potential flaws in your SEO.