How to Set up & Connect Google Search Console to Your Site

Understanding Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free web service provided by Google that helps website owners monitor and maintain their site's presence in Google search results. It provides valuable insights into how Google crawls and indexes your website, and alerts you to any issues that may be affecting your site's performance in search results. 
In this article, I will show you how to set up Google Search Console for the first time, and to connect it with WordPress plugin.

If you own a website and want to benefit from what search engines such as Google offers, your Google Search Console property must be verified in order for your website to appear on the search engine result page, check if there are any crawl issues for your site that can prevent your sites from the index. With a WordPress plugin, you can have reports delivered straight to your WordPress Admin.

Why should you verify your website on Google Search Console (GSC)

Google Search Console is a free tool that allows you to monitor your website’s performance in Google search. It allows you to collect statistics about your rankings, optimize visibility, and it’s your main channel of communication with Google, allowing you to monitor potential penalties, or identify crawling errors before they affect your rankings.

Using Search Console, you can see which keywords and phrases are driving traffic to your site, monitor your site's backlinks, and identify any crawl errors that need to be fixed. You can also submit sitemaps and individual URLs for crawling, and receive notifications if Google detects any security issues or manual penalties against your site. 

Note: Google Search Console verification is done per domain. You will need to verify each of your domains or subdomains, or new protocol (for example, If you migrate to https://) that you add.

Signing up for Google Search console and verifying your domain

1. Go to https://search.google.com/search-console/ and sign in with your Google account.
2. The console will take you to a welcome page and prompt you to click on the "Add a Property" button,  select ‘URL prefix’. and enter your domain name in the box provided.
   1. Make sure your URL is exactly as it appears in the URL bar including the protocol (http:// or https://) and the subdomain (www. or non-www., or any other subdomain you might be using). 
   2. If your website supports multiple protocols and subdomains you will want to add them all to Search Console, since the tool will treat each of them separately. 

Google provides multiple ways to authenticate your account and have your site verified.

• HTML tag: Add a meta tag to your site's home page
• Google Analytics: Use your Google Analytics account
• Google Tag Manager: Use your Google Tag Manager account
• Domain name provider
• Associate a DNS record with Google

Google Analytics, or Google Tag Manager is the fastest and easiest method to authenticate with. To use this option that Google provides, you must first have Google Tag Manager connected to your website then select “Google Tag Manager” and click “Verify. Or Google Analytics to verify your domain property but you must first also connect your site to Google Analytics.

But let’s walk through how to verify with the Google recommended method:

From here;

• Download the given file
• Upload to: http://yoursite.com
• Verify

How to connect Search Console with RankMath SEO WordPress plugin

Google also provides an easy way for WordPress users to connect their site to Search engine Console. It is the HTML tag option, which you can add to your site’s homepage. We will use RankMath to add and connect to Google. To get started;

1. You must first install the RankMath SEO plugin;
2. Open your Wordpress Admin Dashboard
3. On the sidebar, hover RankMath, and click “General settings” see image below…
4. Go back to Google verification page and copy the HTML tag, paste it on RankMath in the field provided.
   
5. Finally, click Verify

That’s it! You have successfully connected RankMath SEO and Google Search Console, you will now be able to retrieve all the crawl issues for your site straight from your WordPress admin panel. You can also check your console regularly for issues.

In a matter of time, Google will begin to fetch content of your site, present to searchers and you will begin to see your ranking growing; you can see how this site is increasing gradually from the starting point. 

By following these steps, you can submit and verify your domain on Google Search Console and start taking advantage of the many benefits that this powerful tool has to offer.

Google Analytics is widely used to understand user engagement on websites, while Google Search Console offers valuable search analytics for SEO purposes.

Bonus: Google Search Console Features

Key features of Google Search Console include:

1. Google Crawler/Googlebot: Allows you to check and adjust the crawl rate, and provides statistics on when Googlebot accesses your site. It also provides a list of links that Googlebot had difficulty crawling, along with any errors encountered.
2. Search Analytics: Provides insights into the specific keywords that led organic traffic to your site, as well as click-through rates and other relevant analytics for SEO analysis.
3. Mobile usability: Generates reports on user experience issues related to your site's performance on mobile devices.
4. Links: Provides a list of both external and internal links pointing to your site.
5. Search appearance: Offers various tools to help you inform Google about structured data and rich snippets present in your content. This is particularly useful for content types like reviews or listings that require specific markup. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is also a sub-feature within the Search Appearance tools.
6. Sitemaps: Allows you to submit and check a sitemap, helping webmasters identify any errors associated with their sitemap.

Google Search Console for On-page SEO Performance Features

Google's "Performance" feature provides detailed metrics on the search queries your pages rank for. It includes four important metrics to consider:

1. Impressions: The number of times a URL from your site appeared in search results viewed by users, excluding paid Google Ads search impressions.
2. Clicks: The number of clicks on your website URLs from a Google search results page, excluding clicks on paid Google Ads search results.
3. Average Position: The average ranking of your website URLs for the query or queries. For example, if your site's URL appeared at position 2 for one query and position 6 for another query, the average position would be 4 ((2+6)/2).
4. CTR (Click-through rate): The percentage of users who clicked on your website URL after seeing it in the search results, calculated as Clicks / Impressions * 100.

We hope this short guide helps you connect your site to Google without any problem. If you need help with your site SEO, contact us!