Should You Submit Your Website to Search Engines?

In 2017 and beyond there is no good reason to submit your website to the major search engines. You can and should register your site with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to get diagnostic information from these search engines yet there is no specific need to do this. If your website is live on the Internet and you are doing the usual digital marketing basics like having social media profiles and creating listings in relevant business directories like Yell.com, then the best SEO tip we can recommend is submitting your website to search engines, so that your site will be indexed and can start ranking.

 

There are some simple ways to check whether Google knows about your website:

– Go to Google

– Search for your business name and/or URL

 

Alternatively

– Search for your website with the “site:” operator first

site:www.example.com

* replacing www.example.com with your website address

 

You should see something like this:

 

 

Alternatively, you may see one of the following:

 

 

If the second case is true then Google has not yet indexed your site. This could be due to a technical reason or simply that your site is brand new and Google has not found it yet. If this is the case, drop us a line and one of our SEO team will take a quick look and feedback (likely save you a little time and point you in the right direction).

How to Get Indexed Faster

 

If Google (and Bing) has not yet indexed your site there are a few things you can do to help the search engines find your site.

1. Register with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools – this tells the search engine about your site and gets you some diagnostic information you can use to improve how search engines perceive your site. This is the modern equivalent of submitting your website to a search engine and has a bunch of other benefits.

2. Google My Business – setting up a Google My Business page creates a listing for your business within Google’s infrastructure. This helps improve your SEO and helps ensure Google finds and indexes your site as fast as possible.

3. Social Media – setting up social media profiles with a link to your website will help the search engine discover your site as the public elements of the major social media platforms are all crawled at a rapid rate.

4. Have other sites link to yours – Google recommends that you have other sites link to yours. There are many benefits to having links from relevant and well-trafficked sites, from branding to increased traffic and improvements to your ranking for important keywords.

5. Manual Submission Tools – the submission tools still exist for the major engines as a subset of the Webmaster Tools. Ideally, you would use the methods above but for those of you unwilling or unable – these creaky old options still exist:

Submit your website to Google

Submit your website to Bing

 

But What Is the Best Option?

 

The best option is a combination of the above (well – maybe not #5):

  • Register with Search Console
  • Set up Google My Business pages
  • Set up social media profiles
  • Get links from relevant sites

 

Combining these approaches will get the search engines to prick up their ears and take notice of your website and business. This is what will get you indexed in the best possible way and the least amount of time.

 

Indexed But Not Ranking?

 

Getting Google to know about your site is the first step in improving your visibility in search engines. Yet this does not mean you will rank highly for all your targeted keywords. There are a lot of moving parts to generating visibility and you may need to improve your website, content, local SEO, optimisation and build more authority.

 

 

If you are struggling to get indexed or are just not ranking drop us a line and we can give you some impartial advice and direction on how to get your business in front of customers in organic search.

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2 Responses

  1. Nice article Marcus, I personally never used auto-submitter or anything of that sort, nor I ask anyone to use them. I like the “Fetch as Google” option inside the Search Console and often use that, fetch and render then submit to index. Thanks, for sharing, cheers!!

    1. Hey – glad you enjoyed. And yep. Very little point in submitting a site anymore. Do the basics and they will find you anyway. Worst case use Fetch & Render + Submit to Index in Search Console. 🙂

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