If we’re ever launching a new website, perhaps for a specific project, brand or event, it seems very important to me that the website is there in the search engine results from day one. Why? Because the vast majority of people just type company names into their browsers nowadays, not the domain URLs. Even on launch day, if they hear about the new bluewidget23 range, they’ll type in ‘bluewidget23’ into their browser and trigger a search, rather than type in ‘bluewidget23.com’. We need our new site to be the first result.
That’s why it’s important to submit the site to the search engines several weeks in advance (four weeks should be enough). Yes, it also means that it has to exist, but it can be a teaser home page if the content of the rest of the site needs to be kept under wraps.
What can help get the site indexed? Of course, we should use the Google Search Console URL Inspection Tool, and Bing’s equivalent. We should try to get a few links from frequently-indexed pages on other sites (again, Google Search Console can tell us, or the site’s owner, what these pages are, through a Crawl Stats report). And some people recommend a tweet or two with a link, as Google follows those quickly.
Ensure that the home page (if that’s all we’re making public) has some text on it, not just ‘coming soon’. It should be quite possible to get a few relevant keywords in without giving the game away, if secrecy until launch day is part of the plan.