One of the most important things to do when running your blog is to measure your success over time. One of the tools for this is Google Search Console.
Where Google Analytics will show you your traffic numbers, Google Search Console is to see what you’re actually ranking for in terms of keywords, and making sure your blog is not having any technical issues.
Let me show you how to set up Google Search Console for your blog so that you have one less thing to worry about.
What is the difference between Google Search Console and Google Analytics
Before you set up your Google Search Console account, I want you to understand the difference between Google Analytics and Search Console and why you need both.
Where Google Analytics will show you how much traffic your blog is getting, and where your visitors are coming from In terms of country, platform, etc. Google Search Console will actually show you the keywords your visitors are typing into Google for your blog to show up.
And these 2 different tools combined will give you a bigger and more complete picture of how your blog is doing.
And don’t worry, both of these tools are completely free to use and not that difficult to set up.
I will help you along the way on this blog and provide you with the right knowledge to navigate through all of it.
What do you need to set up your Google Search Console account
To set up your Google Search Console, all you need is a Google account and access to the account where you host your domain. This is to verify that you actually own the website.
Quick Tip: If you sign up for a Google account with your own website name. For example, blogtechsupport@gmail.com, it’s easy to keep everything together and if you ever decide to sell your blog, it makes it super easy to hand over all of the login credentials to the new owner.
Unfortunately in my case, I forgot to do this myself and have all of my websites under 1 account.
So if you’re just getting started, and you haven’t even set up your Google Analytics account, go create a new Google/Gmail account with your blog name. Then you can connect it all together later on.
If you already have your Google Analytics account set up, you can use the same Gmail account to set up Google Search Console. And later in this post, I show you how to connect both of them together.
Wherever you host your domain name, make sure to have the login information ready for the verification process.
I always use Namecheap for my domains.
Creating your Google Search Console account
Go visit the website for Google Search Console and click on Start Now.
It will then ask you to select a Google Account and if you don’t have one already, you have the chance to create a new one now.
Once you sign in with your Google account and this is the first website you’re adding, a popup will ask you to add your website property.
Adding your WordPress website as a property in Google Search Console
In terms of adding your blog to Google Search Console, you have 2 options:
1. you can add the domain directly
2. You can add a URL prefix, like HTTP, or https, with or without the WWW.
Both of these options have different ways of verifying your domain ownership, which we’re going to do in the next step.
My recommendation is to add your domain directly, so the left, or first option. This will make sure that all of the different versions of your site are added as 1 property.
To do it this way, you do need access to where your domain is hosted.
Fill in your domain on the left side. Make sure this is just the domain itself, without https or www.
In the case of blogtechsupport.com, this would be: blogtechsupport.com.
Then click on continue…
Verify your Website Ownership
Now that Google Search Console is going to verify your website ownership, it’s not going to find anything just yet and the screen below will pop up, asking you to add a txt record to where your domain is hosted.
Now this part can vary on where you host your domain.
For domains, I love Namecheap and I buy all of my domains at this company and then just link them to where I host my actual websites.
So in this example, I’m going to use Namecheap to add the TXT record and verify my domain ownership.
But the same principles apply to any domain registrar, whether you got your free domain with your Bluehost hosting package or Godaddy, you would just need to find the domain settings where you add or edit your DNS settings.
Log into your Namecheap account and on the left side, click on Domain List. This will give you the list of all of the domains that you have with Namecheap.
Scroll to the domain of your blog and then select Manage on the right-hand side of it.
Then from here, click on the Advanced DNS tab to get to where you can edit your DNS settings.
Now you will see a list with different kinds of records. Don’t stress about this if this is new to you, I will show you exactly what to add here and if you want me to do this for you, just reach out and I will set all of this up for you.
You can either add the TXT record or a CNAME record. I would recommend the TXT record since that’s the easiest.
So in your Namecheap account, click on add new record and make sure to select TXT record.
In the Host field, you can fill in the @ symbol. and in the Value field, you will paste in the string of text that your Google Search Console page gave you.
You can just click on copy right next to it and paste it into the Value field here.
For the TTL field, which is the time, you can just select 5 minutes or even leave it at automatic. I just picked the lowest value here, which is 5 minutes.
Once you click on save, you go back to your Search Console page and click on verify in the bottom right corner.
Keep in mind that this can usually take a few minutes to work. So if you get an error that it can not verify your domain just yet, leave this window open and keep trying to verify it again in 5 minutes.
This is it. You just added your blog to Google Search Console and it’s verified.
Wasn’t that just simple to do?
Connecting Google Search Console With Google Analytics
Now that you have Google Analytics as well as Google Search Console, it’s time to connect them both together.
This will have some of your search console data been crossover to Analytics and it will not just show you how much traffic you’re getting, but also what keywords those pages are showing up for.
This isn’t a necessity, but more of a convenience.
Go log into your Google Analytics and click on the bottom left area on the admin settings button.
then in the middle area, scroll all the way to the bottom until you see the area, product links, and click on Search Console links.
once you clicked on it, it will give you the option to link your search console account with this specific Analytics account. Just click on the Link button, pick your account and you’re all set.
Adding Your Sitemap to Google Search Console
As a last step to start accumulating your data from your blog, you’re going to want to set up your Sitemap.
Your sitemap is a specific coded page, directly on your website, that shows search engines like Google exactly what pages, posts, media, categories, and more you have on your site.
And this helps Google Search Console with indexing all of your content more quickly.
Do keep in mind that if your website still has demo content on there, those posts will also be indexed, but when you remove them, overtime those posts will automatically be removed from your Google Search Console.
By default, WordPress nowadays has its own Sitemap, which you can find by visiting this specific link:
https://www.yourdomain.com/wp-sitemap.xml
So in my case, this would become https://blogtechsupport.com/wp-sitemap.xml
And it would look something like this. Depending on what SEO tool you’re using, it can look a bit different. I use Rankmath for my SEO tool, which is the one I recommend to you as well.
And when you click on the individual pages, it will show you a list with all of your blog posts, pages, etc.
Now, if you want to tell your Google Search Console data exactly where this sitemap can be found, all you have to do is log into your Google Search Console account, on the left menu, go to Sitemap.
And it will ask you to go fill in the specific sitemap URL of your site.
Once you click on the submit sitemap button, it will do its thing and that’s your job done from here.
Now it will become a waiting game until your pages are indexed. But it’s important to do this early on, because you want to have access to this information from the beginning, moving forward.
Now, if you don’t want to do all of this and rather have me do this for you, I offer this specific service, where I set up Google Analytics as well as Google Search Console for you for just €79.
And this is also a part of my Basic Blog Setup service where I set up the entire blog for you for just €197.
You can find more information on the Google Setup service here as well as the Basic Blog Setup.
And you can pay me once the job is done.
If you’re having any difficulties indexing your blog posts on Google, I would highly recommend checking out my process for this. It usually takes just a few hours after publishing a new article for it to be on Google.
How to index your pages on Google Search Console quickly
I just wanted to publish this article so I could help everyone, whether you wanted to outsource this or do this yourself.
If you have any questions about this, leave them in the comments below or send me a message.
