My website is live, what now?

Your website is online. You can type in the address and there is your business, with your words, your photos and your contact details. That feels like the finish line, and understandably so: weeks of work went into it.

It is the start, though. A site that is live is a shop that is open. Whether anyone walks in is a separate question, and that is what this article is about.

Being online and being found are two different things

Google does not know you exist. It has to come across your site first, then read it, then decide where you belong among all the other sites covering the same ground. Only once those three steps are done can you show up in a search.

In the meantime your site is not useless. People who already know your name find you straight away, you can put the address on your invoices, in your email signature, on your van. That works immediately. This is about the other kind of visitor: someone who does not know you yet and is searching for what you do.

What Google has to do first

1. Find you. Google arrives through a link from another site, or because you tell it about your site yourself. Without one of those two it can take weeks before it happens to pass by.
2. Read you. It fetches your pages and looks at what they are about: your headings, your text, your page titles.
3. Place you. It compares you with every other site on the same subject. How crowded that field is decides how easy or hard this becomes.

That last step is where the time goes. On "plumber Brussels" you appear far sooner than on "plumber", simply because there is less competition.

How long does this really take?

Honest answer: longer than everyone hopes.

• A few days to a few weeks before your site appears in Google at all. You can speed this up, see below.
• Two to six months before you reliably rank at the top for your own business name and your region.
• Six months to a year or more for broad search terms that big players have been working on for years.

That is not a weakness of your website. It works this way for everyone. A site that went live last week has no history yet, no visitors and no other sites pointing to it. Those three things get built up, and building takes time.

Search engine optimisation is not a switch you flip. It is the sum of small things that only becomes visible months later.

What you can do yourself in the first few weeks

These are the steps with the most return, in the order we would do them ourselves.

• Tell Google your site exists. Through Google Search Console you announce yourself and can have your pages fetched. That easily saves weeks.
• Create a Google Business Profile. Free, and for a local business often the fastest result of all. You appear on the map and in the panel on the right when people search for your name.
• Ask for your first reviews. Start with customers you already know and who are happy. Five genuine reviews do more than a year of waiting.
• Make sure your details match everywhere. The same business name, the same address and the same phone number on your site, your business profile and in any directories you appear in.
• Write what people actually search for. Not "our services", but the words your customers use when they call you. Put those in your headings.
• Get others to link to you. Your trade association, a supplier, a customer showing off a project. Every link is a vote.

And if you would rather not wait months

Then advertising is the other track. Where search engine optimisation builds your position slowly, advertising buys you visibility right away. You are above the search results tomorrow, even if your site only went live last week.

It is not a replacement. Stop paying and the visits stop. But as a bridge, or to test which words bring in customers, it is exactly the right tool. We wrote a separate piece about it: advertising for your business, where to start?

In short

Your site is live, and that genuinely counts for something. Expect Google to need a few months to take you seriously, help it along in the meantime with the points above, and consider advertising if you need customers sooner.

Stuck somewhere, or not sure whether something is set up properly? Send us a message and we will take a look.