Marketing Monday: How To Tell Google Your New Website Exists
Originally Published October 2020
In this video and blog, we’ll talk about how to tell Google your new website exists. You’ll need a sitemap and access to Google Search Console.
If you recently built a website but still aren’t seeing it in search results, that’s a problem. After watching today’s video, you’ll know how to tell Google your website and all its pages exist, and get them found in search results.
Let’s learn about How To Tell Google Your New Website Exists, together.
Also, be sure to check out our video on “How To Tell Google Your New Website Exists” if you prefer to watch rather than read.
How To Tell Google Your New Website Exists
So you’ve built your website, and Google isn’t putting it in search results. You’ve even tried to do a direct site search, where you type into the search bar site:mydomain.com. This should show you every page Google has indexed for your website. But you’re seeing nothing. What’s the deal?
The problem is that in order to be seen by Google, you need to either tell Google directly that your website exists, or someone else has to be linking to your website, and Googles web crawler has to find that link and discover your website through it.
Since we can’t directly control Google’s web crawler or whether other websites link to you – well, you can indirectly but that’s another story – let’s concentrate on how to tell Google your new website exists.
We’ll need to do three things today:
- Build A Sitemap On A WordPress Website
- Create A Search Console Account
- Add A Sitemap to Search Console
1. Build A Sitemap On A WordPress Website
First step! Build A Sitemap On A WordPress Website
- Login to your WordPress.
- Your login URL is going to be different than ours.
- It should be unique for security purposes.
- On the left-hand side, once you’re logged in head down to “plugins”, and then click on “add new”.
- Within there, you’re going to search for Yoast.
- Search plugins, type in Yoast.
- At the top left is going to be Yoast SEO, it’s a purple icon.
- You’re gonna want to click “Install Now”.
- Mine says “Update Now” but yours will say “Install Now”.
- Once that’s done installing, on the left-hand menu, you’re gonna see that the “Yoast SEO” icon has appeared.
- You’re going to want to hover over that and click on “General”.
- Once you’re in there, you’re going to see a sub-menu, click on “Features”.
- Scroll down to XML sitemaps.
- Mine’s already toggled to “On”, and yours may be toggled to “Off” to begin with.
- You want to flip that back to “On”.
- And then click on the question mark above it, that’s going to let you see the XML
sitemap. - Now you can click this and take a peek at what the XML sitemap looks like
and grab the URL. - Copy the URL out of there, the search bar.
- Once you’ve got that Yoast is gonna automatically update the sitemap based on new
pages and new posts that you’re creating. - You don’t have to update the sitemap.
- It’s a static URL, you put it in Search Console, and everything will be taken care of.
2. Create A Search Console Account
Second! Create A Search Console Account
- So now we head over to Google Search Console.
- Head to search.google.com/search-console.
- Login as your user.
- If you don’t have a Google Account, check out my video on how to create one here.
- Once you’re in there, top-left
- Click “Start Now”. It’ll pop up two options for you, Domain and URL Prefix.
- You want to use “Verify Domain”. We’re trying to capture all of the data of everyone who visits every version of your website.
- They may access your site through http, https, http://www., or https://www.
- We want to capture all of those people so, under domain type in cohlab.com or yourdomain.com.
- It’s going to pop up with a TXT record and that’s what we need to take to a domain name provider like GoDaddy.
- So here we are at GoDaddy, sso.godaddy.com.
- You have your own domain name provider, the process will be different but the basics are the same.
- So once we log in, we have to click into My Account, then we’ll see a list if you have multiple domains.
- For us, the right one is Cohlab.com, straight across you’ll see DNS, click that.
- It’s going to pop up with a bunch of A records, CNAME records.
- At the bottom we’re going to add a TXT record.
- For us, the host is going to be “@”. For you it might be “*” or just “yourdomain.com”.
- Then we’ll copy and paste the TXT record in there.
- And set a time under TTL, we set 1/2 hour to try to speed things up, but it can take a full day.
- Let’s head back to Search Console.
- We’re trying to verify cohlab.com, click Verify Now, it’s going to check and show a green box if we waited long enough.
- So now we can see we have full access to Search Console.
3. Add A Sitemap to Search Console
Third Step! Add A Sitemap to Search Console
- On the left-hand choose “Sitemaps”.
- Then you want to enter the URL from before as your sitemap.
- Ours was cohlab.com/sitemap_index.xml, put that in and click “Submit”.
- Now a few seconds later it’s going to be successful, and Google is going to monitor that sitemap for changes periodically.
- So Yoast will automatically see what pages and posts have been added to the website, the sitemap will be updated automatically.
- And since the sitemap is entered in Search Console, Google will automatically put those in search results for you.
Marketing Monday: How To Tell Google Your New Website Exists
I hope this video on how to tell Google your new website exists helps you get found by your customers and clients.
Check out our other Marketing Monday videos in our YouTube playlist to help you learn how to develop your website and handle digital marketing for your company.