Nowadays, there’s a lot of competitiveness and pressure to be ahead of the rest in any industry. Whether you’re an entrepreneur or a Fortune 500 company, staying connected with your business allows you to maintain your edge and win these challenges. One way to stay connected is to use Google Search Console.
Getting your company in front of the public eye is not enough. You need to have a gimmick to get people’s attention. In other words, “the Big G” needs to be behind you. If that’s the case, you can do some really magical things.
It might seem impossible to get the attention of Google, but it actually takes less than a minute after integration to have your site and content show up on the top search results. Plus, Google’s engineers and other experts have gone out of their way to make it possible for businesses of all sizes. All you need to do is integrate your WordPress site with their GSC.
What is Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a digital toolbox that gives you a high-level overview of what is going on with your website. It’s also quite helpful, letting you know what tools Google believes will be helpful for your business.
Want to know how Yahoo, Bing and Google view your website? Want to know who found you and best of all, the search strings they used for this site? Quickly add XML sitemaps, get other search-related data and input, plus get in-depth analytics with Google Search Console.
It’s all here, in this suite of tools and technologies. Search Console will alert you to problems with your website and allow you to make it optimized for both web crawlers and organic traffic. Search Console is free to use, too!
Why Add Your WordPress Site to Search Console?
We hope you don’t think that adding your website to Search Console is a difficult decision. In fact, the platform offers so many benefits that it’s not even worth considering not doing it. The platform helps with your search engine ranking and website indexing, overall website structure, and helps you fix known issues on the fly.
One of the options that you can’t miss is adding social sharing buttons to your website. We will explain the benefits and the process of doing this in this blog post. You don’t need to be an expert to get social media going for your site.
We’ll talk about WordPress for a second before diving into how to attach your site to Google Search Console.
What is WordPress?
Popular means one thing: WordPress is being extensively used for websites. It’s an all-in-one blogging platform that’s been a popular choice for individuals who don’t have the time, interest, or skills to try and create their own website from scratch.
A WordPress website is what many people call a site that was built with WordPress. Platforms like this have tons of functionality and are very easy to use for all levels of users. With thousands of themes, plugins, and tutorials, it’s a perfect choice for any company looking to build a website.
We’ll walk you through how to easily connect your WordPress site and Google Search Console. You’re going to want to do it – no brainer.
How to Add a Website to Google Search Console
For those of you starting your journey with website optimization, below are the steps that can be taken to help you achieve this. They’re easy and promise results.
Search Console uses different terms for websites. In this case, adding a website is called “adding a property.” Let’s proceed.
Sign into your Google account.
Visit Google’s Search Console website. You will be asked to sign into your account, which you should already have open from the previous step. When you’ve signed in, all of Google’s services (Gmail, YouTube, Docs, Drive, and so on) are accessible for your use.
Add a Property (Website)
Signing into your Google account on Affiliate Edge is the first step in linking your website with your account. Once there, you can add the property of your choice and access lots of the benefits offered to you for free!
Click on the “Add Property” button that shows in the dropdown menu to the left.
When you click the button, a popup box will appear. If you want to switch providers, use the box on the left to enter your domain name.
Verify Domain Name Ownership
To schedule changes for your website, you will need to first enter the URL into Blogger and submit a request. You can do this by either opting in to change requests from your current account or by ‘claiming’ your site through Google+ Hangouts. The process is flexible and customized to your needs.
If you’re uploading your site from a server on the web, you can choose to upload in either FTP or header insertion format. In both cases, it’s important that you add in all the necessary meta codes into your website, otherwise Google will give an error message.
One option is to do this by hand, but there are many third-party programs that can help. Just make sure you’re careful with the plug-ins and programs you use, because they offer a lot of access—which can lead to damage.
This way is the most common and easy way. You will see a popup box like the one below. In this case, take that code and enter it in to verify your site with Google Search Console.
Verify domain name ownership with google search console
Add XML Sitemaps
With everything verified, you now have automatic trust with Google and don’t need to waste time building an XML sitemap. This is a bit of machine language that tells Google about all the pages on your site(s), including the importance of each page or sections. It’s important for proper website indexing and overall SEO is well.
When it comes to creating content that’ll get you more traffic and engagement, using any of the plugins on the market is always going to be the easiest way. This plugin is a popular choice, but feel free to experiment with whatever you’re comfortable with until you find something that works for your site.
If you decide to take a different route than using the Yoast plugin, Google will point you in the right direction.
If you want to generate XML sitemaps for your website, all you have to do is install the plugin of your choice. Once that’s done, create an SEO section in the dashboard, and then tick the boxes you need to enable XML sitemap creation and configuration.
When you’re ready to add a sitemap, just head to your Settings page and input your settings. That’s all there is to it!
To submit them to Google Search Console, head back over to your account real quick. Click on “Index” on the left sidebar, and in the dropdown, select the “Sitemaps” option.
Click on index then on sitemaps
At this point, you are given the option to go ahead and start adding XML sitemaps. If you’re using Yoast SEO plugin, your main file for sitemaps will be called sitemap_index.xml. You can also find other sitemaps on your website by simply searching the appropriate folder or category name.
If you submit all your other sitemaps individually, it will help you speed up the crawl. It’s up to you if you want this to be done for your main sitemap or not.
Regardless of what you did, at this point, everything is finished. You’ve just taken a big step forward in the world of website optimization and business-savvy measures such as SEO.
It’s just a waiting game now. Once Google recognizes the site and starts crawling it to index your content, it will take a while for your website to materialize on the first page of search results.
Google Search Console streamlines the whole process of knowing where your website is on Google’s search results, and you’ll be able to access all of this data from one account.
Final Words
Thanks for reading our guide on how to use Google Search Console to integrate unlimited WordPress sites. In this article, we covered everything from setting up your accounts and profiles, to using the various tools and features available in GSC. By following these steps, you will be able to seamlessly add multiple WordPress sites to your Google account, all without having to deal with any pesky plugin or configuration issues. We hope that this guide has been helpful, and that you now have everything you need to get started integrating WordPress into your online presence. Have fun!
