Invite Google To Visit Your Website More Frequently

Google will visit your website as often as you ask it to. You only need to learn how to ask it in their language. Through our SEO services here at SilverServers, our expert SEO and content writing team knows that this language is the language of frequency and quality. How often Google visits your site depends on the frequency at which you post new content and the degree of quality they typically see with your content.

Before we start, let’s make sure to understand that the frequency of Google’s visits does not necessarily translate into increased visibility or rankings. In this article, we’re simply talking about influencing that frequency so that Google can find and index your website’s content at a pace you can expect. Let’s dive in!

The Role of a Blog

Many business owners are uncomfortable with the term “blog”, so they avoid integrating them into their site or fail to keep them up to date. This leads to unfortunate missed opportunities, as blogs are one of the primary tools for influencing the frequency of Google’s visits.

Let’s start with a fresh definition of what we mean when we say “blog”. For a business, when we say blog, we simply mean a page on your website where you can post articles about your services. These articles might be answers to frequently asked questions, details about your services that don’t fit on a Services page, company news, updates on noteworthy projects, knowledge articles explaining the science behind your approach to your services, and more.

Typically, a business blog is rarely ever a regular stream of the business owner’s thoughts, feelings, and insights into their business.

A blog is a place to demonstrate your expertise, your authority, and your trustworthiness. Every post should provide lasting value. We call this “evergreen content”, meaning that no matter how old it is, the article is still relevant and valuable to a reader. That’s not to say you should never post articles that aren’t evergreen (like newsletters and project updates),but there should be a focus on content that will maintain relevance no matter its age.

As time passes, blogs and articles with these characteristics attract Google’s attention.

How Often Does Google Visit My Website?

When a new website is launched, you might see up to 6 months between visits. We don’t always see that much of a gap, but when we do, we’re typically looking at a completely new domain for a small business with no prior web presence - not a website redesign or change in a larger marketing/content plan. This long delay doesn’t happen often in a website’s lifetime, and typically improves naturally as Google gets to know the quality of your core content and the frequency you post new content.

If your website is not frequently updated, then the frequency of Google’s visits may vary widely. You might see new visits once every 2-3 weeks, or every 2-3 months. If you intend never to update your website with new content, or only make minor updates a handful of times per year (or less),then that frequency isn’t a problem. Once Google understands that the website doesn’t update often, they decrease the frequency of their visits so they can focus their resources elsewhere.

The problem occurs when you start making an effort to improve your online visibility or change the scope of your business. If you add a new Services page on your website, but Google only visits every 3 months, then it might be up to 3 months (or more) before your new Service shows up in search results.

In many cases, when Google finally arrives they won’t index the new page immediately. If they know your site doesn’t change much, then when they see these changes, they might only make a note that there’s a new page, but not index it for a while. Sometimes, they even wait for your webmaster to manually request indexing for the page on their next visit to your website.

That process might take months. Your small business doesn’t have that kind of time. But if you cannot buy ads for your business, then there’s nothing you can do but wait. For this reason, we always recommend keeping your website active and alive - so that when you make a real change or update in your business, it doesn’t take months for Google to find, inspect, and index the page.

This leads us to a discussion of how to speak Google’s language and influence how often they visit your website.

How To Influence The Frequency of Google’s Visits

At the beginning of this article, we mentioned speaking Google’s language to ask them to visit more often. You speak Google’s language through frequency and quality.

As you may have determined by reading this far, when it comes to frequency of visits, Google “listens” to how often you post new content to your website and learns to check back at a frequency that they believe will allow them to keep up with your posting schedule.

To influence how often Google visits your website, post new and valuable content at the frequency you want them to visit.

• Do you want weekly visits? Post weekly.
• Do you want monthly visits? Post monthly.

If your posting schedule is consistent, then Google’s visiting schedule is more likely to be consistent. But what about indexing? Google doesn’t necessarily index pages immediately after seeing them.

Here we see a similar concept. Keep the quality of your content consistent. Although this aspect of Google’s algorithms is less clear, this concept seems to apply. If your content’s quality is fairly consistent, then it’s likely that Google will already know what to expect, so they’ll index it more quickly, but If your content quality is inconsistent, they might be slower to index each update - especially updates that occur infrequently or randomly.

In Our Experience

We like to post to our website’s blog weekly. We don’t post on the same day every week, but we post almost every week. Because of this, we’ve come to expect that Google will visit our website at least once a week. There have been occasional days where we post an article in the morning and it’s indexed and accessible from a Google Search by the afternoon.

Contrast that with websites that have been inactive for months or years. When websites like these join our SEO programs, it often takes months to teach Google that they’re now an active site worth visiting. It takes time and can be a slow process. We might add a new page that doesn’t get seen by Google for months.

However, every time they visit and see new content, they learn - one visit at a time - that they can come sooner next time. It’s a long process, but with frequent and consistent posts, we typically earn Google’s trust.

Conclusion

Whether or not you like the idea of blogging, (you can use a different name for it) we recommend posting something new to your website at least once a month. Not just an update to existing content, but a new page with a unique URI. This teaches Google to visit at this frequency, and shows Google that you know how to provide real value to potential visitors.

Do you need help maintaining a schedule like that? Ask our SEO and content writing team for help!

For related content, visit the SEO Tips or Content Writing Tips sections of our website.