Google is so important for many of us to get our small business websites ranking, however it’s also a major mystery for most of us too! How do I get ranked? Can Google even see me? How do I know if Google can find my website?
A Google Search Hack
There is one quick and easy way to see if Google is currently finding and listing your website pages in it’s directory. It’s as simple as doing a Google search!
In the Google Search Box – use site: website domain
For example when I was just starting out this blog, I did a check to see which pages had been crawled by google. This is what I enter when I am doing checks.
It’s also a fantastic way to see the way Google is displaying your page content in it’s organic rankings. You can see if any additional SEO tweaks to your pages are needed. I saw that for some of my pages I had missed adding a meta description which meant the excerpt was coming through not that nicely at all! So was a great opportunity for me to easily see some pages I wanted to update.
Now you know if you are being found or not, it’s time to move into a better analytical tool which is FREE and will actually help your website be found.
Google Search Console
The best way to see how your website is actually performing on Google is to use Google Search Console.
If you haven’t signed your website up yet, go ahead and do it right now!
It gives you detailed information on your website health, what errors are appearing on your site and gives you the opportunity to request a re-crawl of your website when changes have been made. Of course, these are not instant, but better than waiting for Google to find you all on it’s own! It also measures your traffic and gives you an overview as to who is coming in to your site and from where.
You can see what people are searching that gets them landing on your website. This is helpful to make sure people are hitting your website for relevant searches. It also tells you what your average position on Google is – which is handy as it saves you from having to click through page by page to see where you might be sitting in the search results! (Hand up if you’ve done this before, haha I have!)
You will want to submit a sitemap to Google to basically tell it about all of your webpages and how it can find them all.
Think of the sitemap like a map at the zoo – you get in the front gate but have no idea where to go next! Without your map you might miss an area of the zoo (website). By having a map (sitemap) you know exactly how to get everywhere and see everything.
Google is great and give you lots of tools to learn how to use Search Console for free – check out their YouTube series below.
We hope this helps you know whether Google can find your website or not. Keep posted for more tips for your side hustle!
