Reindex Your Private Practice Website: A Simple Guide

Whether you rewrote your Services page or you totally revamped your website with a Showit template for private practice owners, you need to let Google know you made a change.

What “Indexing” Means

Google doesn’t see your website live. Instead, it sends automated “crawlers” to visit pages, read them, and save a copy into Google’s index (aka a giant library where search results come from). When you make changes to a page or totally redo your website, Google won’t actually know anything is different until a crawler comes back.

For small, newer websites (like most private practice sites), this could take days or even weeks.

Therefore, we need to ask Google to “reindex” a page, which is basically asking Google “crawler” to come back and look again sooner.

Why This Matters For Your Practice

Outdated info can cost you clients. If search results land a client on a page that shows old fees, a location you’re no longer at, or a service you no longer offer, then they may leave before they ever click.

New pages don’t help until Google finds them. If you have a new blog post or specialty page, it can’t bring in search traffic until it’s indexed.

A good habit for website health. Checking in with Google every now and then shows you problems early, like pages that can’t be found or pages that aren’t showing up at all!

Steps to Reindex Your Website

Step 1: Set up Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free tool that shows how Google sees your website. Here’s a video walkthrough on how to set up Google Search Console. And good news – it’s a one-time set-up!

Step 2: Submit your Sitemap

A sitemap is a list of all the pages on your website, basically like a table of contents for Google. Most website platforms will create one for you automatically – you can find it with a quick Google search. For Showit, it’s usually yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. 

Open Search Console, click on “Sitemaps” in the left menu, enter sitemap.xml, and click “Submit”.

Google will now use this list to find the pages on your website! If you have a blog in Showit (aka through WordPress), your blog may have its own sitemap, which you can submit too.

Step 3: Request Indexing

This is the step that you’ll use most often, after you make meaningful updates or publish a new page.

After you publish your changes in Showit, head on over to Google Search Console and paste the full page URL into the inspection bar at the top. For example, https://morgansinclairnutrition.com/nutrition-counseling. 

Google will show whether the page is indexed and when it is last crawled.

Click “Request Indexing” and Google will run a quick live check and add the page to its priority crawl queue. Most of the time, you’ll see your updates in searches within a few days.

And there you have it! A few minutes of maintenance helps make sure the website you worked so hard on is the version future clients actually find.