If you've changed the content of your website, deleted, renamed or added a page, then it might take a while until Google takes notice of that and updates the search results.
Take an outdated page as an example. Let's say you've deleted this page in the meantime. Immediately after deleting it, it can still be found using Google search. If your visitors click the link to that page within search results, they will see the related error message on the so called 404 page.
In order to keep your website's search results up to date, you could actively prompt Google to recheck your website and update the index. Thus, you don't have to wait until Google notices these changes on its own. But please do note that it will still take a while until you can see these updated search results on Google.
You have two ways of going about this, depending on how extensive these changes on your website are. Both these methods make use of Google Search Console.
URL Inspection
Choose this method if you've made small changes to the page structure, like renaming a single page. You can find the URL Inspection on the left edge of the Search Console interface.
There, enter the complete URL of the affected page (i.e. https://yourdomain.com/contact), then click Request indexing.
Submitting your sitemap
If you've made bigger changes to the overall structure, i.e. added or removed a lot of pages, then you can simply submit the current sitemap of your website using Google Search Console. Using this method, you don't have to submit every single page using URL inspection and save precious time. You'll find the Sitemaps item on the very left of the Search Console interface as well. Simply type sitemap.xml after your domain name and click Submit.
You can find our help article on the topic of sitemaps here: