It’s important to get your site indexed in search engines before the official launch. Here’s why.

Are you planning to launch a new website? If so, your first step to acquiring traffic should be to get your website indexed on search engines like Google. Indexing your website on search engines will allow your target audience to find you for relevant search queries sooner than later.

In this article, we will look at the many reasons why getting your website indexed as quickly as possible is important, and how to do it.

Search engine indexing refers to the process where a search engine (such as Google) organises and stores online content in a central database (its index). The search engine can then analyse and understand the content, and serve it to readers in ranked lists on its Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Before indexing a website, a search engine uses “crawlers” to investigate links and content. Then, the search engine takes the crawled content and organises it in its database:

Search engines like Google use “crawlers” to explore online content and categorise it. These crawlers are software bots that follow links, scan web pages, and gain as much data about a website as possible. Then, they deliver the information to the search engine’s servers to be indexed.

This process can happen automatically, but you can and should speed it up by manually indexing your website.

Learn more about Search Engine Optimization services[1] at VIMAR.

There are many good reasons to get your site indexed in search engines or specific pages before the official launch.

Launches mean big ad spending, and you’ll want the customers you are paying to gain exposure to find you easily. If the new product or category pages are not indexed, consumers will need to go through your home page or search functionality, adding extra steps to your conversion funnel. New sites can take weeks to get fully indexed. At that point, the “newness” of your company has already started to wear off, and any advantage you have from fresh ad campaigns will not be as effective.

Google Search Console offers multiple ways[2] for website owners to notify Google of a new website and ensure that the most important pages are crawled and indexed. You can start by submitting a sitemap and creating a robots.txt file.

You can also ask Google to crawl your URLs[3] with the URL Inspection tool[4]. They note that indexing can take up to a week or two.

Google crawls Twitter extremely often and quickly. Tweeting out a link to your website or webpage will help Google automatically find your website and index it quicker.

Twitter’s Help Center[5] notes that:

“Keep in mind that the words you write in your Twitter profile or public Tweets may be indexed by Google and other search engines, and cause your profile or Tweets to come up in a search for those terms.”

In 2015[6], Google began indexing tweets to show in search results.

If you have a Twitter account and you see tweets showing up when you Google your name, try tweeting the link out and see if Google crawls your tweets[7] to your website.

You’ll also want to check a few things before the search engines arrive at your website to help ensure they index your most important pages.

1. Your robots.txt should disallow duplicate pages, site search results, and parameter-based URLs like variants.
2. The sitemap is listed in robots.txt and inside Search Console and only features self-canonicalized URLs.
3. Once you leave staging, the meta robots tag has been updated to encourage indexing and following by using “index, follow.”
4. You don’t have code other than metadata and resources to load the page inside the head of your site – that means excess scripts, plugins, tracking tools, etc.
5. Test a spider as Googlebot or Bingbot, and see how it crawls your website. There are a ton of options, including free ones.
6. Test “live URLs” in Search Console to ensure they render properly, and there are no errors.
7. You have internal links to help guide the spiders to your most important pages within content, the main website navigation, and breadcrumbs.

Indexing your website before or on launch manually can sound difficult, but it’s doable and should be done. Don’t risk losing publicity for your website.

If you don’t index your website before launch, it could be a few weeks before consumers find you in search engines.

We are a creative digital marketing agency with true passion and experience. Our goal is to help you grow your business and brand through the power of digital marketing.

All our efforts are focused on increasing our customers’ sales and promoting their brand. We do this by improving website design and search engine visibility, generating interest on social media, and implementing cutting-edge marketing strategies.

If you would like to learn more about digital marketing and how it could help transform your business, you can book a free consultation[8] call with our team today.