The Importance of Indexing: Ensure You're on Google's Radar
If your website isn’t indexed by Google, then it virtually doesn’t exist.
Many home improvement contractors heavily invest in web design and SEO to create beautiful websites leveraging all the right keywords, yet fail to create useful webpages for Google to crawl and index in order to display helpful content to searchers. If a webpage isn’t indexed, then it can’t rank—regardless of how beautiful the page may be.
What is indexing and why does it matter?
Web indexing is the process search engines use to crawl, analyze, and store data from webpages to compile a vast, searchable catalog. So, when you do a Google Search, you’re not actually searching the entire worldwide web for every possible result that exists. You’re effectively asking Google a question, and Google is pulling the most relevant information from its massive digital database of indexed webpages in order to serve up the most helpful answers.
Before a webpage can rank in search results, Google first has to find and read (crawl) your website. Then, it analyzes the content and determines whether it’s worthy of inclusion in its index. Once a webpage is indexed, it’s eligible to appear in Google Search results—where Google ranks and displays what it considers the most relevant or best answers for a given query. So, you want your webpages to be found, indexed, and ranking in search results.
How do I ensure my website is indexed and ranking in search results?
Google has increasingly emphasized the importance of creating consistent, helpful content that is genuinely useful to people rather than content designed solely to manipulate rankings. So, your website should consist primarily of webpages with authentic content that uniquely demonstrates your expertise and provides helpful answers to questions homeowners actually ask. Helpful content gets indexed and served up in search results.
Helpful content is content that displays
quality workmanship and great customer experiences
while defining where you work and what services you offer.
Homeowners want to know you’re the local expert, you do quality work, and other people nearby know, like, and trust you, too. Google looks at your website for evidence that supports these criteria when deciding whether any of your webpages is worthy.
If you have a Supercharged website with the Treehouse, then the good news is our team of web developers and SEO experts have already done the bulk of the heavy lifting to ensure Google knows your website exists and can easily find and crawl its webpages. Beyond that, our content team has written strong service pages that clearly define where you work and what services you offer, the types of problems you solve and the solutions you recommend, and content that answers homeowners’ frequently-asked questions or concerns.
Your own local content supports this as well. Before & After photos, case studies, and photo galleries demonstrate the quality of your work, and reviews and testimonials prove that other homeowners say great things about you and your team. Your unique examples and social proof are difficult for AI to generate or for competitors to replicate, making your webpages all the more valuable to both humans and search engines.
Should every page of my website be indexed?
No, because not all webpages are created equal. Not only does Google not index every page on a website, but many websites contain legitimate pages that should not be indexed for various reasons.
- Duplicate URLs
- Filtered pages
- “Thank You” pages
- Administrative pages
- Outdated content
Instead, Google indexes and ranks the most useful content. So, the contractors that win in search are typically those that publish genuinely helpful information, demonstrate real-world expertise, organize their websites clearly, and eliminate thin or duplicate content.
Behind the scenes, our team strengthens internal links between high-value pages and leverages your local content to help Google understand which pages are most important. We also submit and maintain sitemaps to help Google discover new and updated pages efficiently. We focus on improving and optimizing the pages homeowners actually need, ensuring Google can easily discover them, and making those pages so useful that Google has every reason to keep them in its index and rank them prominently.
For more information about web indexing, how your website is ranking, and other ways Treehouse Marketing is equipping your home improvement or home services business for even greater success in search results and lead generation, reach out to your Treehouse Account Manager today!