What Is Indexing?
Updated: Feb 2, 2022
Why Your Pages Need To Be Indexed By Search Engines
Before you even get ranked on the search results, your pages have to be indexed. So if you have an indexing problem, it comprises a huge chunk of your Lawyer SEO strategy. In this post, we'll explain what indexing is, why some pages don't get indexed, and what it means for your law firm's website.
Every search engine gets its information from an index, and if a web page isn't in that index, it won't show up in the results. Therefore, an indexing issue can completely negate all of your high-quality content and on-page optimization efforts.
How Is A Page Indexed?
There's no way to announce or inform search engines that you have a new site or page. Instead, search engines comb the internet to find them. This is accomplished through the use of search engine bots (also known as crawlers).
Crawlers go through everything on your website, crawling internal and external links to find where everything is. This is how they find your keywords and determine the quality of your content.
All the data the bots obtained from crawling pages are then stored in an index, where they get queued up to be ranked.
Crawlers go back to indexed sites regularly. So if you've made any updates on a page or post, it will reflect on your ranking. The most common reasons why a page isn't indexed are as follows:
Crawlers can't find your pages. If your website doesn't have a complete XML sitemap or internal links, a crawler will likely miss it. If your links are also buried in directories and other pages, they might become hard for crawlers to find.
The page is set to "noindex". Crawlers ignore pages that have been marked as "noindex", even if you have links pointing to the said page.
A robots.txt file is blocking site crawls. Every web server has a file named robot.txt that contains crawler instructions. This robots.txt file is used to prevent site crawls as a way to restrict specific pages. You can check if you've accidentally blocked crawlers by reviewing them.
Low-quality content. Search engines want to feature high-quality content from trusted sites. Bad backlinks, spam, and thin content can be considered low-quality content.
There are several reasons why pages aren't being indexed, but they can all be boiled down to an issue within your website. So regularly audit, improve, and update your site settings to avoid indexing issues.
Why Indexing Issues Are A Huge Problem
The extent to which indexing issues affect a website depends on which specific pages are affected. For example, if a minor page on your site isn't indexed, it might not be a huge problem. However, if a high-quality, SEO-friendly content or landing page isn't indexed, it will have significant negative impacts on your Lawyer SEO.
Why Indexing Is Important To Your Lawyer SEO
Lawyer SEO and its technical aspects are important to your digital law firm marketing strategy. No matter how good your legal blog, law guides, landing pages, and infographics are, they won't serve their marketing purpose if people can't see them in the searches.
Sure, you can always promote de-indexed sites on your social media and get traffic that way, but that would be dismissing the lost opportunity of having potential clients find you on the search results.
If new clients can't find you on Google, it would be a terrible waste of the time and resources you put into content creation and optimization. Not to mention, if your pages don't get indexed, they don't build domain authority.
So no matter how good the content and optimization on your pages are, algorithms will have no data to consider it relevant or high-quality if it's not indexed.
Remember: Ranking high and maintaining your ranking means people can still see your content without having to promote them on your other platforms constantly.
What Can LawyerLeadMachine Do For You?
Implementing Lawyer SEO strategies boosts traffic and conversions. An important factor in On-Page SEO is to make sure there's nothing preventing your site from getting indexed by search engines—including the quality of the content you make.
To get started on your SEO strategy, review your options here.
