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Submit Website to Google: The Pros and Cons

Once you’ve designed a site and its content, the next step is to submit website to Google. If your new website has yet to be indexed, it’s a great idea to consider submitting it for review. For first-time site owners, there are considerable benefits to indexing, as we explore in this guide.

It’s important to note that Google (and other search engines) don’t rely on manual submissions for indexing. The most used method is site crawling, where computer algorithms check through sites for new links and new content. If crawlers find anything different from their existing archives, they add the new pages to their index.

There’s an excellent chance that Google will wind up finding your site on its own without you having to submit anything. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some benefits associated with making a manual submission. Let’s take a look at some of the most apparent benefits of submitting your site to Google.

The most significant benefit of manually submitting your sitemap to Google is that it helps crawlers do their job more effectively. With a manual submission, you’re directing the algorithms straight to the new content on your site. This process helps make your content more discoverable by the crawlers rather than finding the content themselves.

The faster crawlers can find your new content, the quicker they will be able to index the new content. Meaning, the faster your updates will be added to help improve search engine rankings. Manual submissions also ensure that your site’s content is added to relative rankings accurately.

Another benefit of taking this process into your own hands is that it helps improve your organic search listings. When users look for content related to your site, their results will be the most current information. For example, you’ll have all of your site’s links listed accordingly per search listing, like your homepage, products, and more.

It’s important to remember that search engines are the primary source of traffic for many websites. Without traffic, your site won’t get enough views, gain an authority ranking, and make you money.

By ensuring your site is crawled efficiently, you’re off to the races when it comes to getting discovered by potential customers. This is another benefit that directly affects new websites or new pages you’ve added to your site. The faster you can get ranked, the more people you’ll be able to attract to put you ahead of the competition.

As a site owner, one of the most important things you have access to is a list of metrics. These metrics can give you fantastic insights into your site’s traffic, such as where people are visiting from, their countries, and more. Using this information, you can get a clearer idea of whether your content reaches your target audience.

Interestingly, when you create sitemaps, you will also receive sitemap reports that contain these valuable metrics. You’ll be able to look at keyword searches, traffic reports, and other data points to make site improvements.

Making a manual sitemap is a phenomenal way to keep Google apprised of any updates that you make on your site. One of the best ways to maintain a high position on search engine result pages (SERPs) is to ensure your content is fresh.

As you make updates throughout the year, Google will be automatically alerted when your content is modified. And with regular updates, you’ll be able to ensure you’re meeting the needs of your visitors more effectively. This process can result in higher SERP rankings, boosting the popularity of your site.

Some industry-leading professionals advise against submitting a manual request for a crawl. With all of the benefits associated with manual crawls, you might be wondering how it can be a bad thing.

In reality, it’s not so much that manual crawling is bad. It’s just that it prevents you from seeing some types of valuable information.

No doubt, manually submitting your site to Google gets the job done faster. However, it prevents you from seeing the valuable results of a natural crawl, which can benefit site owners. In other words, when you submit an XML (or any other) feed, you’re interrupting the natural crawling process. 

As a site owner, it’s important to know the ins and outs of your site, such as which areas are lacking unique and helpful content. When you opt for a manual crawl, you’re directing algorithms to specific areas of your site. This process doesn’t allow the crawlers to work through your site as the average browser would.

Another big issue that site owners have with manual submissions is how crawlers can include or exclude certain web pages. It’s essential to have a full-picture view of your site to see its successes and failures. By directing crawlers to specific areas, they’re prone to include problematic pages while excluding high-quality content.

On the other hand, an organic crawl helps avoid indexing dozens of old pages that could be affecting your SEO ranking. These pages, often referred to as orphan pages, need to be taken into crawling as well.

Most crawling algorithms are looking for sites that are easiest to navigate and contain helpful information for visitors. With that said, we want you to focus primarily on user experience, as it’s what matters the most.

Sure, having your site indexed quickly is important. Nonetheless, the quality and navigability of your site are equally important. You’ll want to pay closer attention to two factors: UX (user experience) and site speed.

As we all know, the people who visit your site are potential customers, and your site is their first impression of your business. If your website is bogged down by too much content and is poorly organized, it sets the wrong impression. You won’t be engaging your audience, causing potential customers to click off your site and visit elsewhere.

User experience is by far one of the most challenging concepts for site owners to grasp. You’ll need to ensure all of the most important information is available right at a visitor’s fingertips. For example, they should quickly find the checkout page, have easy access to company information, and more.

Fortunately, measuring the UX for your site is simple as long as you consider these essential metrics:

Qualitative metrics include the factors that visitors consider to determine the quality of your site. These can include overall customer satisfaction with the layout, customer ratings for user experience, and other measurable metrics.

There’s no doubt that qualitative metrics give you a clear view of which areas of your site need improvement. Keeping track of qualitative metrics is relatively simple using customer surveys or looking at behavioral statistics.

For example, when you look at your back-end metrics, do you notice certain pages have less retention? If so, these pages aren’t engaging as many customers as they should be, which means they could need a content update.

The second component of user experience you need to consider is objective metrics. These are the numbers that don’t involve direct reviews or satisfaction ratings from your customers.

Consider how visitors navigate through your site organically and if they experience any problematic features. Also, watch out for user errors, the success rate of specific integrations, or the time customers spend on tasks.

For example, does it take too long for the average consumer to find your checkout page? Are certain buttons on your site not directing people to the correct pages?

By taking objective metrics into account, you can significantly improve the user experience in an unbiased fashion. Instead of making changes based on your customer’s opinions, you can make changes based on their browsing habits.

Site speed is imperative for a better user experience and helps put a more professional foot forward. Visiting a website with too much content causes pages to load slowly. More often than not, potential customers will click off your site to find a different webpage that loads faster.

Being able to identify the problematic areas of your site causing it to be bogged down is imperative. This point is especially true when getting your site crawled, as speed can affect its effectiveness.

Every site receives a PageSpeed score from Google, which can influence ranking. The faster your site loads, the more benefits you’ll experience, including:

Learning how to submit website to Google is a relatively straightforward process. However, before you get started, it’s important to consider the pros and cons of manual indexing. By focusing on user experience, you’ll have a higher likelihood of receiving quality and reliable indexing from crawlers.

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