Every now and then, you will find a page on your website that doesn’t seem to be getting any organic traffic. If you refer to our blog on The Most Basic SEO Test, you may discover it’s because Google isn’t serving it up as a result, no matter how specific you are with your queries (even using site: syntax). If Google hasn’t discovered your content, how can you get organic traffic? The answer is to submit a crawl request through Google Search Console.

The first step is to inspect the URL using the dialog that is now present at the top of every page in GSC. Pop in the URL in question and see what the results say.

The image above shows one possible result. “URL is not on Google. This page is not in the index, but not because of an error. See the details below to learn why it wasn’t indexed. Learn more”

Google either hasn’t had time to discover the content, or there aren’t any internal links that it could follow. Link to it from other pages and the sitemap.xml to rectify. Either way, Google will probably discover it eventually, but we’d rather control that indexation.

There is a button at the lower right corner of the dialog that says “REQUEST INDEXING.” Hit that button and your content should be discovered, crawled, and available from Google searches within just a few minutes. As with everything, you cannot tell Google what to do, so this is merely an invitation. Don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t work immediately. It will eventually result in your content being discovered and traffic flowing in to your new content.