Guide to add your website to Google Search Console and Verify it - Drive 50% search traffic

Why Choose and Use Google Search Console?

Submitting your site or site's URLs to Google using the google webmaster tools is one of the most important things you should do when starting a new website or blog. You can get your website listed on google search very fast by doing this.

If you already owned a website and wish to increase your traffic from google search engine, let this action be the top priority for you.

While doing this you can fetch a huge number of traffic for your website or blog and at the same time earn a huge amount of money from your doings.

Submitting your site to Google by adding and verifying your site in Google Search Console for crawling, submitting URLs to Google search engines are what will be discused in this article, and of which are free service provided by Google.

What Is Google Search Console (GSC)?

Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool/service provided by Google. It's also well known to be called Google Webmaster Tools. In this tool is included the Google url inspection tool.

You can use this tool to tell Google about the pages on your site, to crawl the pages and help google index the pages. It also contains lots of useful information and reports about your site performance on search engine, such as your average position for different search terms and how many impressions and clicks you are getting.

You’ll get information on keywords and queries that bring traffic, find out which rich search results your content has earned and discover how your mobile site is doing.

This tool will also tell you about errors surfaced on your site, such as if Google is unable to show your pages in the search results for some reason, and a solution will be provided for that error.

longtechy.com search performance in recent weeks

Google Search Console has many great benefits and features, which some of them are listed below:

1. Performance: GSE let you know how many impressions and clicks you get in search result from search query, as well as your average position as listed for several search terms and keywords.
2. Coverage: You can see which pages are indexed and showing in Google search, as well as which pages aren’t showing and why that is.
3. Sitemap: You can upload a sitemap, which instructs Google to look for URLs of pages in your site to crawl and indexed them to reach the sight of viewers worldwide.
4. Mobile-friendly: GSE tells you which pages on your site have mobile issues and give controls to make correction.
5. Backinks: There is a report that shows the links that are pointing to your site.
6. Security and manual actions: If Google detect any security issue on your site, you will be notified. They will also tell you if there is a manual penalty, and steps to take to overcome the issues.
7. URL Inspection: GSE has made it possible for you to manually submit URLs to Google with this function.

By adding your site to Google Search Console, you will have much more data about your site’s performance in search. You are also will be notified of some technical issues and ways to improve your site performance, which will help you get better rank and get more traffic, as this is the goal of all website admin.

How to submit your website to Google Search Console

Here’s how to add your site to Google Search Console:

1. Visit Google Search Console homepage in your browser
2. Click the "Start Now" button.
3. Log in with your main Gmail account.
4. Under "URL prefix", enter the exact URL of the home page of your website and click Continue. Make sure to include http/https and www if neccessary.
5. Now to complete the required steps to verify that you own the website. Verification is always easy when using the Blogspot platform.

It's either your website is verified automatically by Google in connection of your E-mail with your website or you verify manually. See instructions below.

How to verify your website on Google Search Console

You need to prove to Google that you actually own the website that you are submitting. There are several verification options as listed below:

• HTML file: Download the file on Search Console, then upload it via FTP to the root of your website.
• HTML tag: Here you add a given HTML tag to the header of your site here. See details. The HTML tag is always in form of: <meta content='asN-KpfsB2F8-RNABr-HC2tido8cFN-MAV_Vxh7JUHU' name='google-site-verification'/>
• Google Analytics: Verify by linking to your Google Analytics account.
• Google Tag Manager: Verify by linking to your Google Tag Manager account. See details.
• Domain name provider: With this option, you add a new DNS record to your web hosting account or DNS provider.

If you can add a DNS record, then I highly recommended to use the Domain name provider verification method. This will also enable you to add a domain property in Google Search Console, which isn't explained here. See how to verify website on Google with DNS using Cloudflare here.

For Wordpress users, if you’re using the free Yoast SEO plugin, you can easily verify your website on GSE by adding HTML tag to Wordpress HTML tag. Just copy the code, go to your WordPress dashboard >> SEO >> General >> Webmaster Tools and paste the code into the Google verification code area.

If you still encounter some difficulty verifying your website on Google you can check full support from Google here.

Make sure to add all variations of your home page URL, see examples below;

1. http://example.com/
2. https://example.com/
3. http://www.example.com/
4. https://www.example.com/

Add your homepage URL by clicking the dropdown in the top left, then click "Add Property" and then typing in the variation. Do this for all four URL variations as listed above. They should verify automatically if you have already verified your main home page URL.

you may have more variations, like m.example.com for a mobile site or cdn.example.com for your content delivery network, then you add those too.

Create a domain property for enhanced reporting

Google Search Console has added a new feature called "Domain properties". This gather the reports from all of your URL variations into one report. It is a very useful feature and I recommend that you take the time to set it up.

For this to work, you need to verify your site through the Domain name verification option:

With this option, you need to add a TXT record to your DNS settings. To let you know, there are various DNS providers and they all have different instructions on how to get domain verified on Google. For this reason, I recommend you check with your web host and look for instructions about adding TXT records in your DNS settings. If you get in trouble, simply contact technical support and ask them to help you on it. Here is an article I wrote on verifying domain on Google using Cloudflare CDN.

Here’s how to add a domain property in Google Search Console:

1. In the top left of your Search Console dashboard, click the dropdown and click Add Property.
2. Under Domain, type in the pure version of your domain: example.com (no http or www).
3. Click Continue.
4. Copy the Google site verification code.
5. Create a new TXT record with your domain or DNS provider and add the verification code.
6. Now click Verify.

Be aware that it may take some time for the DNS records to be updated. If you are unable to verify right away, then try again in a few minutes or an hour.

Upload your website’s sitemap

The next step is to upload a sitemap to Google Search Console, which tells Googlebot the contents to look for when crawling your site.

A sitemap is a file that contains the list of all pages on your website. Uploading this file to Google helps it find these pages, so it can crawl and index them, then show them in the search results.

These are the steps to add a sitemap to Google Search Console:

• Login to Google Search Console and choose your site, either the domain property or the main home page URL.
• Click Sitemaps in the menu to the left.
• Under Add a new sitemap, enter the URL of your sitemap (such as https://example.com/sitemap_index.xml).
• Click Submit.

See how to generate XML Sitemap for Blogger for free

If you are using the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, then your sitemap will be called sitemap_index.xml. If you don’t use Yoast SEO then you can add a sitemap with a free plugin called Google XML Sitemaps.

Now wait a few days, then check the reports

It can take a few days for the reports in Google Search Console to start showing meaningful data.

If your site is newly created, then it will take a while. If your site is established and already listed in Google search then the reports should start showing useful data sooner.

While you wait, consider taking the time to also add your site to Bing and Yahoo via Bing Webmaster Tools.

This post was created based on personal knowledge, you might understand this better, to make some correction or add to the content please drop a comment or contact the author via the contact page. Also, you can ask questions on this and you will get a reply asap.