How to Get Found on Google | EP 697

 How to Get Found on Google

1. Make your site ready (sitemap + uncheck the box in settings to not allow search engines) 01:27
2. Sign up for Google Search Console and submit sitemap(s) 02:53
3. Start creating content 06:10
4. Start promoting that content 08:51

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:28 David Blackmon: Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of wp the podcast i’m David Blackmon

00:29 Tim Strifler: And I’m Tim Strifler.

00:35 David Blackmon: Today in episode 697 we’re going to talk about how to get found on google. So i got this brand new website,  i’m so happy i’m in the online digital world now. And how are people going to find me you know, there are billions of websites on the internet so the competition’s kind of stiff and believe it or not, most people don’t do this stuff you know, most people aren’t aware of the steps that you need to take to have the search engines find you. So are we ready to dive into number one,Tim i can go with it or you need to say anything before then?

01:27 Tim Strifler: No go for it.

01:28 David Blackmon: All right,  first thing you’re going to want to do is to make your site ready and what we mean by that, is if you’ve got a brand new WordPress website, you go into the settings of that website there’s going to be a little box there that you’re going to want to make sure that it’s checked until you’re finished building your website that says you know allow search engines to index your website. Basically and if that box is checked when google or bing’s spiders come and crawl your site because that’s what they’re technically called they’re little robots, and they crawl your website and they say “oh this is a fashion website” yada yada whatever it is, if that box is checked, they’re going to say oh they don’t want to be indexed now. And when you’re building it it’s important have that little box checked, but when you’re ready to get found you’re going to want to make sure that box is unchecked and you’re going to want to create a site map and you can use tools like Yoast seo. Uh it’s probably Tim and i have an episode a few back i don’t remember which episode it was but we talked about you know utilizing some of these plugins and stuff to generate a site map and stuff. And it’s pretty easy it’s just letting the search engines know hey here is a map of all the pages that are on my site here’s what they’re for and you submit that, and Tim’s gonna tell you in step two, how you how you submit it.

02:53 Tim Strifler: Yeah and just to uh expand on on what you mentioned about the check box. So if it’s under reading settings so there’s settings and then there’s general writing rating discussion so it’s under reading and it’s search and invisibility. And so if you check it then it’s going to discourage search engines from indexing the site so you want to make sure that’s unchecked once you’re ready for the world to see your site. A little side note, i always leave it unchecked because i never want to forget that it’s checked right because when it when a site’s being built that sort of thing nothing’s linking to it no one knows about it chances are the search engines aren’t going to find it anyways, but you could check if you don’t want anyone to see it and you’re you know intent on that, then you can you can check that so it doesn’t get indexed before you’re ready. Um so the the second thing on your list is to sign up for google search consoles we talked about that a few episodes back if you already have a google account where you have analytics or a gmail or whatever you can add to it and sign up for google search console under that same google account. And google search console essentially is the console that connects your website to google it’s like that uh that hub where google can tell you if there’s crawling errors uh there’s four or four errors what the popular keywords are that people are finding you through that sort of thing so it is the connection between you and your site and google, and so it’s really important that you sign up for google search console and connect it and stuff. So that you can be alerted of things like that when there’s crawlers and stuff like that penalties and it’s also where you submit your sitemap so David talked about you get a sitemap from Yoast or another SEO plugin, and then once you have that sitemap you submit the url into google. A lot of times though you’re going to have multiple sitemaps, you’ll have a page site map, a post site map, if you have custom post types you have a sitemap for those and so you’ll want to submit those separately to google. So you might be submitting five different sitemaps and that just makes sure that google has everything it needs to know here’s all the pages on your site and then also that way it’s not trying to guess and crawl through it. Basically it has a map of your site so it helps it crawl up better and then it the sitemap also contains the last modified date and publish date that sort of thing so that google knows that something gets updated, it can go back and re-crawl and and get the most up-to-date content and adjust its uh accordingly. So um that’s why the site map is so important and not just having it but submitting it to google. Google can eventually find it sometimes but there’s no reason not to submit it just to make sure so it’s kind of like google’s really good at figuring things out when people screw up and forget steps stuff like that because their whole goal is to get the most credible content and the most uh useful content to whoever’s searching for it, and so they are really good at kind of figuring things out when people do missteps but that can just cause things to take longer. You want to set yourself up for success and give google everything that they want you want to do everything right you don’t want to be ranking in spite of doing a bunch of things wrong you want to set yourself up for success to help you rank better.

06:10 David Blackmon: Next thing you’re going to want to do once you’ve got your new website launched and all the pages submitted, you’re going to want to start creating content. This is probably going to be the most important thing that you can do to get found in search engines. Uh well you know they want to know that what you are what you’re doing and they judge that based on content that you produce on your site. So if you just write a little “hey i’m joe i’m a plumber” you know, whatever in this town, and you never produce anything again you know google’s not going to index you as often as someone who is producing content on a regular basis. And the benefit of having search engines constantly crawling your websites is in their minds they think you’re an authority in your niche or industry because you’re producing content in that niche. So it’s huge and can be really really big for you it does take a lot of work and you do need to kind of set yourself up for it because it’s just a lot of work but the benefit and the value that it’s going to give your business long term is going to be massive. It was the biggest mistake that i made many years ago when we started this little company Aspen Grove Studios and for whatever reason you know as i was learning WordPress and as we were you know i i’m a firm believer in documenting your journey and it was my way of kind of documenting our journey, so as we would learn um new tricks and you know and it was for user acquisition we wanted to you know kind of get start collecting emails and stuff. And um you know so that we could build an audience and whatnot and i just started producing content on our website and i will tell you it has paid huge for us because our organic search it’s our biggest thing is organic search still to this day and it’s it’s a lot and we just recently took a huge leap you know in global rankings. Why i have no idea i wish i was a SEO guru and i could tell you why i went from 29 000th ranked website in the world to 25 000. you know and it doesn’t normally happen like that uh but it’s it’s happened here in the last month and i don’t really know what it’s about it’s because google knows who i am they found me because i did these things that we’re talking about.

08:51 Tim Strifler: Yeah absolutely, and the the next step once you are creating content is to start promoting that content. So uh google obviously they they want to give the most relevant credible authoritative useful content to whoever is is typing in in keywords on google. Right, um however in order to be authoritative and credible uh google needs to to know who you are and have some uh you need to have some clout with them basically and part of the way you do that is getting your content noticed. Right, so if you create content and just do nothing maybe over time that content will start ranking but if you start promoting that content maybe you’re sharing it on uh social media and you’re sharing it uh in facebook groups without spamming of course and then maybe you’re promoting it to your email list if you have one and people start seeing it and they start commenting they start sharing it uh they start linking to it those are all things that google picks up on and says “hey people seem to like this content people are trusting this content enough to share it and link to it and read it and comment it therefore we should probably start showing this to people”, that are searching for this type of content. And so by promoting that content you are basically building that trust for google to be able to rank you and so that’s a really big part of the equation that sometimes you see people kind of not they miss a step and they don’t talk about this step but it’s really important one of the biggest things that google loves again is something a lot of people talk about. Neil Patel to his credit does talk about quite a bit and that’s having a brand google loves brands because brands are trustworthy if if a company has a lot of brand power people know that company, they know they recognize that company they trust that company well that google’s like boom like ranking number one elegant themes right one of the most trusted names in WordPress they have so much content marketing they can write an article on anything and it’s going to rank because google knows them and trusts them because of their brand they have a long time long term brand that has been built up over over a decade and a half. So um if you promote that,  if you create really great content you promote that content then the search engine it’s gonna follow. And so one of the things that that we recommend doing is if if organic google search is your your strategy you need to make it a long term strategy, and you need to create content promote that content and just forget about google for the time being, because google does take time and it’s slow focus on building your brand. Focus on creating awesome things focusing on promoting it focus on getting traffic other sources right getting people to link to you and stuff like that not for search engine purposes but for traffic purposes, because when you do that you’re going to get traffic in the short term but then that’s also going to help you in google in the long term.

12:32 David Blackmon: Man this is a long episode, Tim hey this is this is value right here i think this is something that we’re passionate about, so yeah we definitely you know, um yeah we’re passionate about it. Tomorrow we’ve got another great episode um the most important thing you need to know when trying to close a web design client it might not be what you think it is, so come check us out tomorrow, Tim until tomorrow we’ll see you then

12:58 Tim Strifler: Take care bye-bye