A successful marketing campaign relies on successful organic search results. When it comes to ensuring that your site performs well, you have to rely on Google—the leader of search—as the source of truth for whether or not your site is search engine friendly.
Their tool for this—formerly called Google Webmaster Tools—is called . This tool allows you to track all your technical SEO issues and stay ahead of any problems that may arise in regards to spiders properly crawling, 404 errors, problems with sitemaps, testing your site’s robots.txt file, and so much more.
Steps to Submitting Your Site to Search Console
After signing up for a Google account (which is no more difficult than signing up for a Google email address), you’ll go to this URL to sign in: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en (or you can just search online for Google Search Console).
After logging in, you’ll immediately be prompted to enter the URL of the website that you are trying to set up within the tool. Once you do this, you will have many ways to confirm your identity, to prove that you truly have ownership over the website. Each of these ways have their own steps and you should consult a professional to help you set up your website in Search Console. We say this as it usually requires access to domain registrars information, cPanel access, .htaccess, or some third party plugin installed through your content management system to properly do this—if you’ve never done it before, it can be quite the undertaking.
We cannot stress this enough. If you set up your site incorrectly, you could block your site from being accessible by Google. This would mean that no matter how great your site and content is, you would never rank or even appear in Google’s results.
Using Google Search Console Tools
After you confirm your site you’ll be able to start checking your site regularly for technical issues and you’ll receive updates with major problems directly from Google through your email. More importantly, once you are set up, you can start using Google’s tools that are now at your disposal to improve your site.
Some of the tools that are most beneficial to new websites are the Add Sitemap tool, the Fetch as Google tool, the Robots.txt tester, and the Structured Data and Rich Cards tools. Using these tools will make sure that your site is in tip-top shape in Google’s eyes.
Disavow, 404s, and Mobile Usability
Part of why Google gives you these tools is that they expect you to act on them. By giving you a tool to disassociate yourself from bad backlinks, giving you a tool to identify links on your website that no longer work, and a tool for ensuring that your site is streamlined for all devices, you can make your site better for your visitors and guarantee a better experience for everyone.
As you continue to make your site better for visitors by removing all the technical SEO issues, they will reward you by ranking your content higher in the search engine result pages.
