You build a website and think, "Here we go!"—but that excitement is short-lived. No matter how long you wait, your site doesn't show up on Google or Yahoo... it doesn't even come up when you search your own company name...
No matter how good your website is, if it doesn't appear in search engines nobody will notice it, and there's no point in having built it.

Let us show you how to prevent that from happening—and what to do if it does.

Your own company name should appear in search results within a month at the latest

Unless there are dozens or hundreds of companies nationwide with the same name as yours, searching your company name after launch will normally bring your site up on the first or second page of results.
It can take as little as 1–2 days after launch to appear in search results, and usually within a week.
This used to take longer in the past, but it has become faster recently—if you do what needs to be done, you can expect to be registered within 2–3 days.

To put it the other way around, if your site still doesn't show up after a week, you should suspect that something is wrong or that you've forgotten to do something.
(Incidentally, this applies to your "company name"—it doesn't mean you'll immediately rank highly for "service name + area name" searches such as "clinic Hamamatsu" or "Iwata City builder," so please keep that in mind. In those cases, whether you can rank highly comes down to competing against the websites of others in your industry.)

Register your site with search engines once it's live

If your site doesn't appear in search results even for your own company name after launch, there's a strong chance the search engines haven't noticed your website yet.

Search engines crawl websites around the world to collect information. So when you launch a new website, you need to let those crawler bots know: "Hey, there's a new website over here!"
Even if you don't tell them, they may eventually find you on their own—but it takes extra time. So don't forget to take care of this once your site goes live.

To register with search engines, you only need to do two things:
"Add your account to Search Console"
"Add your website's sitemap in Search Console"
There may be a few unfamiliar terms, but it isn't difficult. Let us walk you through the steps briefly.

[Adding your account to Search Console]
1. Log in to Google and open the Search Console screen
2. Add a property → enter your website's address
3. Download the HTML file for ownership verification → upload it to your website
4. Click the verify button

[Adding your website's sitemap in Search Console]
1. Prepare a sitemap in XML format
2. Upload the sitemap to your website
3. In Search Console, select "Crawl" → "Sitemaps"
4. Specify the location where the sitemap was uploaded

That's all there is to it.

Don't forget! Registering with Bing

Besides Google (Yahoo uses the same engine as Google), there is one more search engine: Bing. Bing is a search service provided by Microsoft.
The majority of users are on Google (and Yahoo), but there is a steady number of Bing users and that number may grow in the future, so be sure to register there as well.
The registration process is almost the same as with Google.

How to check whether your site is properly registered

If you submit your sitemap as described above and it is recognized, every page on your site should be registered with the search engines.
Here, let's check how the pages on your site have been registered.

1. Open Google and enter "site:http://~ (your website address)"
2. A list of pages registered (also called "indexed") with Google will be displayed

If you can confirm this, you're all set.

Be careful if your company name is in a foreign language!

So far we've explained how to register your website.
There's one point to be careful about here.
If your company name is in English or another foreign language, don't forget to also write it in Japanese.
For example, our company name is "メルシー," which is "Merci" in French.
If you enter "Merci" instead of "メルシー" as the company name in your page title, your site may not turn up properly when someone searches your company name in Japanese. Even if it does appear, users may not recognize it as your company name.
To reliably attract customers, be sure to write it in Japanese.