The website is live. What now?

First, check it can be found at all

Before anything else, three quick tests. They take a minute between them, and they catch the problem that would make everything below pointless.

1. Search for your business name

   If your own site doesn't come back for your own name, either it isn't in the index yet or something is keeping it out. A new site usually takes a few days to a few weeks to appear, so in the first fortnight this proves nothing on its own.

2. Ask Google what it already knows

   Search for site:yourdomain.co.uk, with your own domain and no space after the colon. What comes back is the list of your pages Google has indexed. Nothing at all means it has none of them.

3. Check the site isn't asking to be left out

   Sites are often built somewhere private with search engines switched off, and that switch is easy to leave on. In WordPress it is under Settings, then Reading: "Discourage search engines from indexing this site". If it is ticked, that is your answer. If somebody else built the site, ask them to confirm it is off.

Google Search Console

This is the free tool Google gives site owners, and it is the only place Google talks to you directly about your site. If you do one thing off this page, do this one.

Setting it up means proving you own the domain. The usual way is a TXT record added to the domain, which needs whoever controls your DNS, so it is worth knowing who that is before you start. Some hosts and site builders offer a one click verification instead.

Once you are in, three things are worth your time:

• Submit your sitemap. It is usually at /sitemap.xml, or /sitemap_index.xml on a WordPress site with an SEO plugin. This is how you tell Google what exists, rather than waiting for it to work that out.
• Read the Pages report. It lists what has been indexed and what has not, with a reason for each. Most of the reasons are harmless. A page you care about sitting under the excluded ones is the one to ask about.
• Leave the email alerts switched on. Search Console writes to you when it can see something wrong, and one of the things it spots is a hacked site, often before anybody mentions it to you. What to do if that message ever arrives.

Set it up in an account that belongs to the business. Not a personal one, and not your web designer's.

Your Google Business Profile

If customers come to your premises, or you travel to customers in a known area, this is the other free listing worth having. It produces the panel beside the search results and the pin on the map, and for a local business it is often seen more than the website is.

You claim it at business.google.com and verify it, usually by video or by post, and Google decides which. Then fill it in properly.

• The name, exactly as you use it everywhere else. Not the name with your town or your trade bolted on to it.
• The address, or the area you cover. A business that works at the customer's place can hide the address and show a service area instead.
• The main category. This does more work than anything else on the profile. Pick the one that describes what you actually are, then add the others after it.
• Opening hours, and the link to your website. Hours that are wrong on a bank holiday cost more goodwill than you would think.
• Photographs of the real thing. The premises, the van, the work. Stock pictures are recognised instantly and do nothing for you.

Keep the name, address and contact details identical here, on your website, and anywhere else you are listed. Where they disagree, you look like two half businesses rather than one.

Bing has the same thing in Bing Places, and it can import what you have just typed into Google. A much smaller audience, and about ten minutes of work.

The listings you already have

You almost certainly appear in places that came before the website: a Facebook page, LinkedIn, a trade body's member list, a supplier's list of stockists, a village or town site, the chamber of commerce, whatever directory your trade uses. Each one is somewhere a person might look, and a link back to your site.

Go through them once and bring each one up to date: the right name, the right contact details, and the web address itself, which is usually the part still missing. A handful of listings that suit your trade is worth more than a package of hundreds sold to you by somebody who rang up.

Word of mouth is still doing most of the work

For most small businesses the website's job is not to go out and find customers. It is to reassure the ones who have already heard your name from somebody they trust, in the minute they look you up. That is the visitor you can rely on, and it is why the ordinary things here matter more than the technical ones above.

• Put the address in front of people. Email signature, invoices, quotes, letterheads, the van, the sign, the cards. Somebody who cannot remember your web address will search for your name instead, which is what the two sections above are for.
• Ask for reviews, at the moment somebody is pleased. Google reviews land on the profile you have just claimed. A direct link in a follow up email gets far more of them than hoping does.
• Reply to all of them, including the unkind ones. A calm reply to a bad review is read by everybody who arrives afterwards, and it is usually worth more than the review cost you.
• Make sure the site answers the obvious questions. What you do, where you do it, what it involves, and how to reach a person. Somebody sent by a friend is checking that you are real, not reading your copy.

What to ignore

A new domain and a new listing are both noticed by people who sell things, so expect the post and the inbox to pick up.

• "We found errors on your website", and "your site is not ranking". Almost always sent automatically to every new domain. Whatever it says it found, it found from the outside, without ever seeing your site.
• Anybody guaranteeing first place on Google. Nobody can. The ones who promise it are either guessing or quietly aiming at a search that nobody makes.
• "Submit your site to hundreds of search engines". There are two worth the effort, and you have just done both of them yourself, for nothing.
• Letters about a domain renewal from a company you have never dealt with. An old trick, and an expensive one. Your domain renews with your own registrar, and nobody else can invoice you for it.
• "Your business listing needs verifying, click here". If a message about your listing worries you, do not use its link. Sign in to Search Console or the Business Profile yourself and look. A real notice is waiting for you in there.

Keep every account in your own name

You are about to create two or three accounts on a busy afternoon, and this is exactly when they get created in the wrong name. The domain, the hosting, Search Console, the Business Profile and any analytics should all sit in accounts the business owns, registered to an address the business will still be reading in five years.

If somebody else looks after your website, add them to those accounts as a user. Do not let them hold the account itself. It costs nothing today, and it saves a great deal on the day they retire, fall out with you or stop answering. What it looks like when that has already happened.