How do I add my site to Google Search Console?
Updated last month
Google Search Console lets us monitor our site's performance and learn all about our visitors. How do they find our site? What content indexing issues are there? How does Google see us? Search Console is free and very useful.
On the other hand, although Google's robots will sooner or later crawl our site so they can display it in search results, submitting a sitemap of our content speeds up the process.
Is it necessary? No. Is it useful? Very! That's why in this guide we'll look at how to create a Google Search Console account if we don't already have one, how to create a sitemap.xml file, and how to submit it. Got your coffee ready? Let's get started.
What is Google Search Console? What can I use it for?
Google Search Console is a collection of tools and reports about visits to our website. It lets us optimize and sometimes fix our content so it's as accessible as possible to users when they search. GSC shows us which queries bring traffic to our website and analyzes the impressions, clicks, and position of our content in Google organic search results.
Occasionally, it may send us alerts when problems are detected on our website, so we can fix them.
What is a sitemap?
A sitemap is a file that provides information about the pages, videos, and other files on our website (as well as the relationships between them). Search engines (such as Google) read this file to crawl our site more efficiently. The sitemap tells search engines which pages and files are considered important or high priority, and also provides valuable information about the files that make up our content. For example, when a page was last updated, or the page versions in other languages.
We can take advantage of a sitemap to provide information about certain types of content, such as videos, images, or news.
How do I create a sitemap?
Good news: sitemaps are generated automatically if we're using WordPress. To check whether one exists, simply add /sitemap.xml to our website address, that is, mysite.com/sitemap.xml (replacing mysite.com with the actual domain name).
If we happen to have an SEO plugin installed, the two lightweight options we recommend are Slim SEO and The SEO Framework.
If neither address displays something like this...
...we should make sure that, for some reason, we aren't preventing crawler bots from accessing our content. So, let's check that the following option is NOT checked:
To recap, WordPress creates a sitemap.xml file by default —natively, that is, without the need for third-party components.
How do I set up a Google Search Console account?
We need to go to https://search.google.com/search-console/
The first thing we'll see is a screen like the one below, asking us to enter a "property"—Google's term for our website (that is, the site we own).
There are two options that serve the same purpose: add the domain (mysite.com) or the URL prefix (https://mysite.com).
We'll add the domain by entering our site's name in the first column, without HTTP/HTTPS or WWW. This way, we'll get data for all URLs under the domain name, including protocols, subdomains, and paths. Later in this guide, we'll walk through the URL prefix option and explain the differences between the two options in more detail.
Google will display a pop-up window with a verification code in TXT format. We need to click the button highlighted in the screenshot below:
To make things easier, let's open another tab in our browser. There, we'll sign in to the account where we registered our domain.
Next, we'll show how to complete this step using cPanel, then how to do it with GoDaddy, the number one domain seller, and finally, we'll also explain an alternative verification method that works regardless of the company or organization where we purchased the domain name.
Verification through cPanel
cPanel is an online control panel: it's easy and convenient, and some hosting companies provide it for free as part of their hosting plan (including us).
cPanel lets us manage our domain (as well as email, security, webmail, and much more) through an intuitive graphical interface. Here, we'll see how to add the DNS record provided by Google Search Console using this versatile tool.
First, we need to log in to our cPanel, typically by entering its domain-specific address in the address bar:
Remember to replace "mysite" with your actual domain name!
After logging in with the credentials provided by our hosting company, we'll see a series of tools organized into groups. There, we need to find the ZONE EDITOR icon in the DOMAINS tools group, as shown in the screenshot below:
We'll click the ZONE EDITOR icon, then click the MANAGE button.
On the next screen, we'll look for the ADD RECORD button and click the arrow to expand the menu of options. Since we're adding a TXT record—as requested by Google Search Console—we'll click ADD "TXT" RECORD, as shown in the image below.
We'll fill in the fields as follows:
In the first field, NAME, we'll enter our domain name without http or www.
Don't change this; it should be TXT (if for some reason it isn't, select it from the drop-down menu).
Paste the text provided by Google here.
Click SAVE RECORD to finish.
Keep in mind that this process may take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours. So, wait a while before returning to Google Search Console to verify.
Verify a property with GoDaddy
After logging in to our account, we'll find the domain in question in the products section and click it, as shown in the screenshot below:
And then:
Note: if this option isn't available, it means that our hosting service manages the DNS, so we'll need to contact that company.
In the pop-up window's form, we'll fill in the fields as shown in the screenshot below:
That is:
Type: TXT
Name: @
Value: ( Paste the TXT record generated by Google Search Console )
TTL: 1 hour
After this step, we'll return to the Google Search Console window and click the Verify button.
If we get an error message, we'll need to wait, since creating the record may take a few hours.
Once this step is completed successfully, we'll see a confirmation message indicating that verification is complete.
Alternative verification method
For this option, we'll choose the second option in Google Search Console: URL prefix.
As we explained earlier, we aren't choosing this method first because it applies to just one address (e.g., https://www.mycompany.com/ and all the content under it). With the Domain verification method explained earlier, we make sure that subdomains are also included in Google's service (e.g., mobile.mycompany.com).
In the field labeled "Enter URL," we'll enter the URL to crawl, for example, https://www.mycompany.com. We need to be precise here, since some domains have SSL certificates (https) and others don't (http). The same applies to "www." For example, our site, duplika.com, does NOT use www in its domain.
After entering the correct domain and clicking CONTINUE, Google will offer several verification methods.
HTML file (recommended)
HTML tag
Google Analytics
Google Tag Manager
Domain name provider
We'll use the recommended method; it's very easy: we'll download an HTML file generated by Google. This file must be uploaded to the same URL we entered at the beginning of this alternative method.
After these two steps, we'll click the VERIFY button. If we uploaded the file correctly, we'll see the following pop-up window.
Adding my sitemap to Google Search Console
In the window shown in the screenshot above, we'll click GO TO PROPERTY.
There, we'll look for the Sitemaps tool and click it to open the following section:
As shown in the screenshot above, we'll simply enter our sitemap URL, including the filename, as we verified here.
After entering the correct path, we'll click SUBMIT and should see a message like the one below:
With this step, we've finished the guide to adding our site to Google Search Console and submitting a sitemap for immediate crawling.
Thank you for reading, and best of luck with your ventures.