Adding WordPress website with Google search console is a very important step for website owner towards understanding the website’s performance, search engine visibility and security monitoring etc. It provides important insights of the performance and area of improvements in your website. In this article we will talk about How to Add Your WordPress Site to Google Search Console to enhance the performance and identifying the areas of improvement.
What is Google Search Console?
This is a web service offered by Google. This web service allows website owners and administrators to monitor and manage the presence of their websites in Google Search results. Google Search Console provides the range of tools and reports which helps website owners to understand how their site is performing in Google’s search engine result. With the important insights provided by search console, website owner can improved data driven decisions to enhance the visibility and user experience of their website.
Why Adding WordPress Website with Google Console is Important?
Adding WordPress website to Google Search Console is important for monitoring, optimizing, and maintaining your site’s presence in Google search results. It provides valuable Insights, data and tools to improve the search engine visibility, user experience, and overall performance of your website.
- Search Engine Visibility– It helps website owners to monitor the performance of their website is Google search results. It also provide data of the keywords that lead to your site, and the click-through rates. This information is very useful for understanding your website search engine visibility.
- Indexing– It allows you to check the status of your site’s pages in Google’s index. You can identify indexing issues, such as pages that are blocked from indexing or have errors.
- Sitemaps– You can submit XML sitemaps to Google Search Console. Sitemaps help search engines discover and crawl your site more efficiently.
- Performance Optimization– It provides performance data of your website, with the help of this data you can identify which pages are performing well in search results and which may need improvement. This information will help in optimize your content and SEO strategy.
- Mobile Friendliness– This feature helps you to identify and fix mobile usability issues, and make sure that your WordPress site is mobile-friendly.
- Structured Data– It allows you to test and validate the structured data and helps your website’s rich and featured snippets to appear correctly in search results.
- Security Monitoring– It can alert you to security issues, malware, or hacked content on your WordPress site.
- Manual Actions– It can inform you about manual actions taken against your site in case your WordPress website violates the guidelines of Google.
- Link Analysis– It provides information about websites that link to your WordPress site.
- Core Web Vitals– It offers pay attention to Core web vitals by providing you valuable insights and helps you in optimizing the performance of your website.
How to Add Your WordPress Site to Google Search Console
Adding your WordPress site to Google Search Console includes multiple steps to verify your ownership on the website. Here we are sharing detailed procedure in step by step format to tell you how to add your WordPress site to Google search console easily.
Sign in to Google
- Signing into your Google account is the first step towards adding your website to Google search console. Therefore you need to make sure that you are signed in to your Google account.
- You need to create a Google account if you dont have Google account.
Access Google Search Console
Firstly open your web browser and go to the official website of Google Search Console.
Add a Property
- On the homepage of official website you need to click the “Start now” button.
- In the “URL prefix” field, enter your website’s full URL (e.g., https://www.example.com).
- Please make sure that you enter the correct URL.
- Now Click on the “Continue” button.
Verify Your Ownership
To verify ownership you need to prove that you own the website. Google provides several methods for verification. Here are two common methods
Method 1: HTML Tag Verification
- Choose the “HTML tag” verification method.
- Google will provide you with a meta tag that you need to add in the header section of your WordPress website.
- Copy the entire meta tag carefully.
- Now log in to your WordPress dashboard.
- Go to the “Appearance” section and select “Theme Editor.”
- In the Theme Editor, locate the “header.php” file. Click on it to open the file for editing.
- Paste the copied meta tag from Google Search Console into the <head> section of your site’s header, just before the closing </head> tag.
- Save the changes and go back to Google Search Console and click the “Verify” button
Method 2- Google Analytics Verification
- If you already have Google Analytics set up for your WordPress site, you can use it to verify ownership
- You need to choose the “Google Analytics” verification method.
- Select your Google Analytics account and property from the drop-down menu.
- Click the “Verify” button.
- Verify Successful Ownership
- Once you’ve completed the verification process, Google will confirm successful ownership.
- After confirmation access the data of your WordPress website in Google Search Console.
Set Up Additional Reports and Tools
It provides various reports and tools to help you manage and optimize your WordPress site’s presence in Google Search. Explore the different sections, such as “Performance,” “Index Coverage,” “Sitemaps,” and more, to gain insights and make improvements.
How to Verify Google Search Console by Using a Plugin
Verifying Google Search Console using a plugin is a easy method of verification. Here we are using Yoast SEO Plugin to show you the verification process by using plugin.
Install and Activate Yoast SEO Plugin
Firstly you need to install and activate the Yoast SEO plugin on your WordPress website. To Install Yoast SEO you can follow these steps.
- Log in to your WordPress dashboard.
- In the left-hand menu, go to the plugin directory
- Now click the “Add New” button.
- In the search bar, type “Yoast SEO.”
- click the “Install Now” button.
- After installation, click the “Activate” button to activate the plugin.
Access the Yoast SEO Settings
- In the dashboard of your wordpress website, navigate to “SEO” in the left-hand menu just below the “Dashboard” menu item
- Click on “SEO.”
Access the Webmaster Tools Section
- In the Yoast SEO settings, click on the “General” tab.
- Click on the “Webmaster Tools” tab in the General settings.
Add Your Google Search Console Verification Code
- Open a new tab or window in your web browser and go to Google Search Console
- Sign in with your Google account
- Now select the property you want to verify if the property is already listed in your Search Console account. If it’s not listed, add it.
- Now in Google Search Console, click on the property you want to verify.
- Click on the “Verification details” option.
- Look for the HTML tag
- Copy the content attribute value
- After that return to your WordPress dashboard and paste the verification code into the “Google Verification Code” field and save the changer
Verify Ownership
- After adding the verification code to Yoast SEO, return to GSC and click on Verify button
- Google will check if the code is correctly added to the header of your website
- If everything is set up correctly, you will receive a successful verification message
Confirm Verification
After the successful verification this will display your WordPress site’s data and provide access to various tools and reports to help manage your site’s presence in Google Search.
Conclusion
Adding this to your wordpress website provide you important insights and reports of the performance, user interaction, search result visibility of your website. You can link your website with Google search console by using various plugins or manually. With Insights and data from Google search console you can easily monitor the performance of your website. We hope you get the detailed procedure on How to Add Your WordPress Site to Google Search Console. Visit our website to read more interesting article on digital marketing.