There’s no doubt about it – we live in the middle of the most competitive business landscape that has ever existed. The internet has totally rewritten the rules of business from top to bottom, and without a quality website presence – and a flood of targeted traffic pushed to your website on a regular basis – you have next to no chance of success these days, regardless of your market or industry.

And while there are a lot of pieces to the puzzle of generating targeted traffic for your website, the first piece you need to square away ASAP is getting your site indexed with Google. If you aren’t focused on indexing with this search giant right out of the gate you’re wasting a lot of time, energy, and effort that your competitors likely aren’t.

Below we run through the ins and outs of what you need to know about indexing, how to submit your URL to Google to get it indexed fast, and how to improve your odds of getting your organic search engine optimization (SEO) efforts off to a red-hot start right out of the gate.

Let’s jump right in!

Why Is It So Important That Google Indexes Your Site ASAP?

The number one reason you need to submit your website to Google as quickly as possible, and get it indexed ASAP, is so that you can start to show up in Google search results to begin with.

Without a website indexed with Google you’ll never show up in any search results, regardless of how relevant your content, your product, or your services might be for any different number of searches.

You see, Google sends little “search spiders” out all over the web to crawl the internet and find new websites, new pages, and pieces of content they can add to their search engine database.

If your site is brand-new (and you haven’t gone through the indexing process) you aren’t even on the radar at Google, and that means that you’re never going to show up in the results.

Of course, you have two choices in front of you when it comes to getting indexed as well:

You can kick back and relax and wait for Google index spiders to find you on their own and eventually add you to their database …

… Or you can speed the process up significantly by choosing to submit URL to Google directly, getting your website indexed ASAP, and then building out the rest of your traffic generation strategy from there.

The choice is easy and obvious or any smart marketer and serious entrepreneur. You want to get this done like yesterday.

Below we run through the step-by-step guide for getting a website submitted to Google, getting it indexed, and building out your SEO efforts just as quickly as humanly possible.

Step – By – Step Lightning Fast Indexing Guide

Am I Indexed Already?

The very first thing you’re going to want to do is actually verify if you have been indexed already or not! Brand-new websites (we are talking about websites that are a week or less old) most likely haven’t been indexed by Google quite yet, but websites older than that generally have 50/50 odds or better that Google search engine spiders have visited them and indexed them in the database.

The easiest way to determine whether or not you have already been indexed is to simply visit Google and punch “site: yourdomain.com” into the search bar. If you pop up, congratulations! You can skip ahead a couple of steps and dive into the traffic generation tips included below. If not, you’re going to need to get to work on indexing first and foremost.

Get Google Analytics Up and Running

Straightaway, though, you’ll want to get Google Analytics up and running for your site. This is a hugely important suite of tools provided 100% free of charge from the folks at Google – basically giving you x-ray vision to better understand exactly what’s going on with your site, each individual page, and all of the traffic that lands on your site moving forward.

There are a couple of different ways to get Google Analytics integrated with your website (depending on how your site is built), but at the end of the day this should be the very first thing you do if you discover that your site has yet to be added to the Google index.

Sign Up for Search Console

The next piece of the puzzle is to sign up for Google Search Console (previously called Webmaster Tools). These tools complement everything that you’ll have access to through Google Analytics in a big way, but the most important tools you want to gain access to this early in the game are the tools that allow you to see how you are appearing in different search results as well as the tools that let you manually submit site maps and submit URL to Google on your own.

Just like Google Analytics, the Google Search Console tools are 100% free of charge and super easy to get started with. If you’re having a tough time getting either of these two free solutions up and running don’t be shy about popping over to YouTube, watching a quick tutorial, and then coming back to this guide.

Square Away Your Content Marketing Strategy

Now that that has been taking care of it’s time to move away from the computer a little bit and instead focus on crafting a content marketing strategy specifically revolving around how you’re going to generate search traffic.

This content marketing strategy should include:

• The kinds of keywords you’re going to target with your search engine optimization campaigns
• The kind of content you’re going to create to go after those keywords
• How you are going to get the attention of your audience with this content
• How often you are going to be publishing your content, and what your content release schedule will look like

… As well as where all of this content is going to come from!

It may have been possible to fly by the seat of your pants and still do really well with Google traffic 10 years ago (and especially 15 years ago), but that’s not the landscape any longer.

You are going to be up against very stiff and very seasoned competition that knows how to game the system and how to leverage Google index rankings to flood their sites with traffic while yours get choked out. Square away your content marketing strategy before you publish anything on your platform. Think about what your goals are, who your target audience is, and where you’re going to publish your content, too. Use these foundations to build out your content library (little later) and you’ll be off to the races in no time!

Get a Blog Going ASAP

Now that you have your content marketing strategy down, understand who your ideal audience is and what kind of content they want most it’s time to get down to the brass tacks of actually pumping out that original content.

It’s never a bad idea to craft up 10 or 15 blog posts (filled with evergreen content) that you can “preload” into your website, publishing the first five posts or so to lay down a foundation and then drip feeding the other 5 to 10 posts every couple of days (or according to your content release schedule).

Not only does this help to “prime the pump” for your website a little bit but it also helps you to buy some time to craft new content and adjust on the fly as you get feedback from your new audience.

You don’t necessarily have to go crazy with multi thousand word pieces every time you upload, but you do want your content to be:

• Written for humans above all else (not for search spiders)
• Crafted to deliver a high amount of value
• As “evergreen” as possible or as topical as possible
• Sprinkled with keywords that you are targeting specifically

Stick to those fundamentals and your content will help you grow faster than you would have expected.

Use Smart Internal Linking

Another big piece of the puzzle you’ll want to get right when you are indexing is setting up Smart internal linking structures.

A lot of people focus all of their search engine optimization efforts on making sure that anchor text for outgoing links are really optimized without paying any real attention whatsoever to the internal linking structure of your own website.

That’s a huge mistake.

Create a clear hierarchy of how your site should be navigated, structure your URLs intelligently, and always – ALWAYS – build your site to be used by humans first and foremost rather than optimizing for Google index spiders.

If your internal linking structure comes off as inauthentic or less optimize for humans and more optimized for robots Google will actually punish you, shuffling your site to the back of the line when it comes to search engine traffic – and possibly even delisting you.

Promote Your Content on Social Media

The more eyeballs you can get on your content the more successful you are going to be, and you want to try and create content that can be promoted on social media – content crafted specifically to catch like wildfire on these traffic generation machines.

The kind of content that really does well on social media is almost always:

• Contrarian
• Unique
• Concise

… And delivered in “bite-size” chunks that can be easily digested and shared.

The idea here is to get your content to rise above the noise and have every opportunity to “ride the wave” of social media. You don’t even necessarily have to go viral in the traditional sense to still get a lot of traction out of social media, traction that can do a lot more for indexing than even manually submitting websites to Google yourself!

Build a Sitemap for Google to Index

A site map is really nothing more than a single file that gives Google (and other search engines) information about the “lay of the land” for your website – the pages that your website includes and how they are interconnected with one another.

This is hugely important for the Google index and something you’ll want to have set up and running just as soon as you start adding content to your pages.

You can build your own sitemap.XML file (if you want to go the “old-school” approach) or you can use any different number of online tools, plug-ins, and even the Google XML Site Map Generator to do the heavy lifting for you.

At the end of the day, though, this absolutely has to be done when you have some content up and running.

Research shows that when a site lacks a site map it takes Google (on average) 1375 minutes to find that site, crawl that site, and then go through the indexing process.

With a site map in place, though, that number drops to just 14 minutes – and that’s without manually choosing to submit URL to Google directly!

Index with Other Search Engines, Too

While Google is the undisputed “king of the ring” when it comes to search engine traffic, it’s important to make sure that you are getting indexed with other search engines as well.

Be sure that you submit your website to Google, Bing, Yahoo, and any other search engine that you want to be sure you’re able to pull traffic from – including some of the niche search engines that may have to do specifically with your market or your industry.

Use Aggregator Platforms to Boost Your Profile

Another great tip to boost your Google index speed is to submit your content directly to major aggregating platforms like Reddit, Medium, and other platforms with a huge online presence.

Google (understandably) spends a tremendous amount of time scanning, crawling, and indexing new content added to these aggregator websites.

Google knows that these are some of the hottest platforms on the planet, provide some of the most relevant and timely information (which is exactly what they want to share with their search engine users), and makes it a priority to index content on these platforms ASAP.

Don’t be shy about stepping in front of the spotlight that these aggregators provide you, giving you a big bump not only in organic traffic (especially if people choose to engage with your posts) but also helping you speed up the indexing timeline, too.

Plaster Your Links Everywhere and Anywhere

Of course, it’s not a horrible strategy to simply plaster your website links anywhere and everywhere you can to get more backlinks, “link juice” and attention.

Obviously you don’t want to become a pest and turn off your audience by spamming them over and over again. But there’s absolutely no reason whatsoever that you shouldn’t be doing everything you can to get the attention of your target audience by directing them to links to your content that can really help.

These back links are going to push you a flood of traffic all on their own, but it also help you to get indexed faster as the search engine spiders crawl other platforms that have your links, too.

Use Search Console to Spot Crawler Errors and Fix the Issues

Remember those Google Search Console tools we recommended you sign up for a little earlier in this guide?

Well, one of the coolest features of the Search Console is the ability for it to determine if your site is being indexed accurately or if Google search engine spiders are having errors that are hindering it from getting you on the platform to begin with.

You’ll be able to find this kind of information by going to the left side of the user panel, hitting the SETTINGS button, navigating to the CRAWL STATS section, and then going to OPEN REPORT.

From here you’re going to have access to a whole bunch of different reports that can tell you how your site is indexed, when your site was last indexed, if there were any crawl errors and what they were, as well as a whole host of other details to better troubleshoot your site moving forward.

You can even find information about whether or not you are providing Google users helpful and relevant details and if that’s positively influencing (or negatively influencing) your position in search results.

There’s a lot of power in the Search Console you’ll want to capitalize on for sure. Don’t sleep on these tools, but really spend time to master them and you’ll watch as your organic traffic shoots right through the roof!

Have a Plan for New Content (Or Content Refreshes)

If there’s one thing that Google absolutely despises, and one thing that’s going to cripple your search engine results more than maybe anything else, it’s allowing your website to become stale and to grow old.

Google loves – LOVES! – fresh and engaging content that is timely, relevant, and useful for their users.

When Google reindex a site they are coming back through to see what has changed, if anything.

If your site is returning old and what Google perceives to be outdated information that hasn’t been refreshed in a while, the odds are good you’re going to get reshuffled a little lower in the search engine rankings.

If, on the other hand, you always have something new for a Google reindex site crawl you’re going to see your search engine results improve – but you’re also going to be able to armor your position in the search engine rankings and protect against competitors that want to steal your spot.

Have a plan to refresh and add new content on a consistent basis.

Don’t allow your site to grow stale!

Closing Thoughts

At the end of the day, there really is a lot of work and a lot of effort that goes into indexing and getting your site ranking highly for lucrative keywords in Google (and every other search engine out there).

It’s enough to make anyone’s head spin – and that’s with a calculated, strategic plan and step-by-step info like what we highlighted above.

The last thing you want to do is try to fly by the seat of your pants, hoping that it’s enough to submit a website to Google for indexing without any real plan or strategy to capitalize on that later down the line.

Use the info we highlighted above to shortcut the amount of time it takes to get indexed, use every Google reindex site crawl to your advantage to improve your search engine results, and continue to pump out relevant (and valuable) content for your audience and the rest will take care of itself.

Best of luck going forward!