You’ve created an amazing SEO friendly website but can your customers find your business on the web?

One of the first things you need to do after you’ve created a website is to add and verify your site in Google Search Console. Google Search Console is a free service that helps you monitor and maintain your site’s presence in Google Search results.

1.) Add Your Site

So, log into your Search Console account. Then, enter the URL of your site you’re trying to add in the box and click “Add Property.”

That was easy right?

2.) Verify Your Site

Next, you’ll be asked to verify your site. One of the best and easiest ways you can go about this is to add an HTML tag. What you want to do is select “Manage Property,” then “Verify this property.” Click on the “Alternate methods” tab and select “HTML tag” to get the HTML code you’ll need for verification. Copy the HTML code and log into your site’s homepage.

google search console

If you’re using WordPress, log into WordPress, and click on “Appearance.” Then, select “Editor” to open your HTML editor for your site’s homepage. Next, click on “header.php” which is located under “Templates” on the right-hand side of your screen. Then, look for the first section of the HTML code in the “header.php” file. Next, paste the HTML code you copied from Google Search Console. Don’t forget to hit “Save” once you have copied the code. Then, go back to your Google Search Console dashboard and click “Verify.”

google search console

That wasn’t too bad, right?

3.) Submit Your Sitemap

Now that you’ve verified your website with Google, the next thing you want to do is to submit a sitemap to Google Search Console. Sitemaps are files that give search engines and web crawlers important information about your site. You’ll be making Google’s job easier by ensuring it has the information needed to do its job more efficiently.

Go back to your Google Search Console dashboard and select your site to submit a sitemap for. On the left-hand side of your screen, click on “Crawl,” select “Sitemaps” and click on “Add/Test Sitemap” in the upper right-hand corner. This will bring up a box with a space to add text to it.

google search console

Related Article: How Google Can Help Your Small Business

Open a new tab and type in yourdomainname.com/sitemap.xml to get your XML sitemap. What you want to do is copy everything after https://yourdomainname.com. Then, go back to your Google Search Console and paste the sitemap on the box with a space to add text to it and click “Submit Sitemap.”

Okay so are you still with me? There’s still one more thing left!

4.) Fetch as Google and Submit to Index

Say you’ve made changes to your website. For example, you updated your on-page content. You’d want this to appear in search results as soon as possible. And, if you want Google to get the updates indexed, you’ll have to submit it manually.

Go back to your Google Search Console dashboard, click on “Crawl” and click on “Fetch as Google.” This should bring you to a screen that looks like this:

google search console

If you updated your whole website, you’d want to leave the center box blank. If you only updated a page on your website, entire the full address of the page you need indexed. Once you enter the page you need to be indexed, click the “Fetch and Render” button. Next, click on “Request indexing” and open up a box that will give you the option to either “Crawl Only This URL” or “Craw This URL and its Direct Links.

If you are fetching a specific page, choose “Crawl Only This URL.” If you are fetching your entire site, choose “Crawl This URL and its Direct Links,” Then, wait for the indexing to complete. Changes should appear in Google in a couple of days!

Source: https://moz.com/blog/a-beginners-guide-to-the-google-search-console

About Retailors Group

The team at Retailors Group has over 15 years of retail sales and field marketing experience. Retailors Group takes the time to understand your brand and align your core values into a tailor-made solution that builds a long-lasting relationship with your consumers.

We offer services in Experiential Field Marketing, On-site Sales Assist, Retail Management and Digital Marketing.