There are a lot of reasons why your website might not show up immediately when you search for your business. The most common reason is that you have searched for a keyword that is highly competitive, which means it will take longer for us to achieve the rankings we want. It is also possible that you have searched for a keyword that does not have relevant search volume.

Google search works in essentially three stages:

• Crawling: Google searches the web with automated programs called crawlers, looking for pages that are new or updated. Google stores those page addresses (or page URLs) in a big list to look at later. We find pages by many different methods, but the main method is following links from pages that we already know about.
• Indexing: Google visits the pages that it has learned about by crawling, and tries to analyze what each page is about. Google analyzes the content, images, and video files in the page, trying to understand what the page is about. This information is stored in the Google index, a huge database that is stored on many, many (many!) computers.
• Serving search results: When a user performs a Google search, Google tries to determine the highest quality results. The “best” results have many factors, including things such as the user’s location, language, device (desktop or phone), and previous queries. For example, searching for “bicycle repair shops” would show different answers to a user in Paris than it would to a user in Hong Kong. Google doesn’t accept payment to rank pages higher, and ranking is done algorithmically.

For more information on how Search works, check out this guide from Google or the video above.

ADVERTISING NOTE: Please keep in mind that you should never search for keywords you are targeting as part of an ad campaign. Doing so could lower your overall quality score, which lessens the impact of your ads. Click here to read more about how you can see your Google Ads without impacting your campaign’s performance.