FAQ: Our new website just launched. How long before we’ll see it in Bing and Google search results?

Great question! The short answer is, “it varies.” No one can pinpoint an exact date and time for you but you’ll find the web industry agrees that it seems to take as few as 4 days and up to 6 months for a site to be crawled by Bing and Google and attribute authority to the domain.

Bing recommends webmasters using the Submit URLs to get their web content indexed as soon as they published or updated it online. Webmasters can Submit URLs to Bing programmatically through the Submit URL API or using the Submit URLs feature in the Configure My Site section in Bing Webmaster Tools.

Google says that if your site or page is new, it might not be in our index because we haven’t had a chance to crawl or index it yet. It takes some time after you post a new page before we crawl it, and and more time after that to index it. The total time can be anywhere from a day or two to a few weeks, typically, depending on many factors. Read up on this.

How can you help things along?

Another great question! When you publish a new blog post, site page, or website in general, there are many factors that determine how quickly it will be indexed by Google.

There are several tasks you can complete to give your site a leg up on showing up on search engines like Google sooner.

1. Make sure your Robots.txt file is set up correctly.
2. For WordPress sites, make sure you’ve turned off your indexing blocker.
3. Connect your site with Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools)-it’s a free service.
4. Integrate Google Analytics with your site-it’s free, too.
5. To help with local visibility, set up your free Google My Business listing.

Those listed above are quicker tasks to help with near term visibility in search rankings. There are a number of more time- and skill-intensive activities you can employ to provide broader, more long term organic search visibility.

1. On-page SEO – things like the page title, focus keyword/phrase, meta description, header tags, alt tags… See the Ultimate SEO Copywriting Cheat Sheet here.
2. Backlinks – legitimate links from other websites back to your website.
3. Quality Content – thoughtfully written copy that incorporates relevant search key terms and is useful to your visitors. Here are 5 Quick Tips for Today’s Web Readers.

If you’re worried about how your website is showing up in search engine results, it might be time for a website audit. Here’s what you can expect from an SEO-focused audit.