It has cost you blood or treasure or both to write and publish these new pages on your website. Maybe you’ve had to slog through local search results before, figuring out what might help you gain a foothold and taken the time to get it done. After all, wouldn’t it be a shame if you didn’t see an SEO benefit for weeks or months? Wouldn’t it be a double shame if 10 more seconds of work saved your pages from weeks or months of invisibility?
My suggestion is simple: every time you create a new page (or post or similar resource), immediately go into Google Search Console and request indexing. That’s it*.
(*Of course, you’ll need to have Search Console installed – formerly known as Webmaster Tools. It’s free and should be quick for your site staff to set up.)
Google is good at picking up new content when it doesn’t. You could expect Google to crawl and index your new page immediately. It often does, but often your site isn’t accessed for a long time. The delivery route is unpredictable.
Here is a recent example from one of my clients. A few months ago we put together a few pages on fairly specialized services. Nothing fancy, but these types of sites are the coin of the kingdom for him and most of my clients, and they always serve us well. I routinely check Search Console to see what’s on the web, so about a month later I checked the new pages and found that they weren’t even indexed. I didn’t see anything that would explain why Google ignored the page, so I requested indexing in Search Console.
What happened? Google indexed the page later that day and it started ranking immediately for various relevant terms and soon even got a few clicks.
Neither the problem nor the solution were accidental. We uploaded a couple of sites that day, all of which had the same issue. Here’s a mug shot of another site from the same batch.
As you might have guessed, our XML sitemap was cleaned up and submitted to Search Console, we had prominent internal links pointing to the new pages, and the site is quite mature and frequently spied on by Google without it being in the Crawlability or indexing problems have occurred in the past. However, it was a month before Google picked up these pages, and at the time it seemed that it was only because I requested indexing.
Lest you think that this particular article was just an anomaly, below is an example from another site where we created a new page just a few weeks ago. This time I didn’t wait to see if Google would automatically fetch the page. Rather, I asked for indexing a few minutes after creating the page (in the afternoon). It showed up in search results the next day.
These results may look flimsy, and they are, but they’re always flimsy at first, and the pages just keep getting bigger as time goes by. Here’s what a similarly “niche” site turned up for that first customer after about 6 months of stewing.
Here’s a crunchier example from another client in a completely different industry.
What does all this mean for your local rankings? A few takeaways:
1. The indexing requirement can determine whether you start ranking next month or this week. Maybe you’re doing well on business, and maybe you’re in no hurry. On the other hand, time is perhaps of the essence: if your business is new, or you’re in a seasonal industry, or in a very specialized niche, or you’re desperate for business, or if your website has been inactive for a long time, these can Days or weeks make the difference.
2. These newly indexed pages you can single-handedly pull into the local 3-results. As I always say, most local SEO is just organic SEO in disguise.
Depending on how specialized your service or product is, you might even get a local one-box result.
3. At least the page will be indexed earlier, even if visibility and traffic take a while. You may not get immediate impressions and clicks, and you probably won’t if the search volume for the term or family of terms you’re targeting is very low. But at least you’ll shorten Google’s gastrointestinal tract and your wait time. The sooner you get the page indexed, the sooner you’ll either be able to rank or collect data that you can use to get there.
4. The indexing requirement can be offset (to some extent) by using a website builder that creates websites that Google often finds difficult to crawl or index. I don’t want to name specific platforms but if your site was built on a platform that rhymes with fix or pear face, then Google may already be slowly picking up some of your pages. So not only should you request indexing of new pages when you create them, but you should probably roll call your existing pages as well. I would start with the Pages report (aka Coverage in Search Console) and request indexing for all slowpokes.
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Not every side will set the world on fire, but each can become a top performer over time, and you never know exactly which ones will light up, and you never know exactly when. Even a few solidly performing pages can add up to real visibility, traffic, and revenue. So, love to Pete, just take an extra moment to make sure Google receives the page you created. You’ve already put in the work. It will cost you 10 seconds to send it by registered mail.
If you add 103 new pages and don’t want to rot in your chair requesting indexing of each one, just pay your nephew a nickel for it.
I hope you try it now and let me know what happens. I would also like to know if you do any kind of test (even a quick and dirty one) or put new sites to the timer and share your splits. Leave a comment!
