Marketing Monday: How To Verify Your DNS Through Search Console
Originally Published November 2019
Today we’ll go through how to get access to Search Console as well as how to get a Google account if you don’t have one. We’ll also look at how to get into your Domain – we’re going to use GoDaddy as an example. And we’ll do an overview of what you get from Search Console. Also, be sure to check out our YouTube video on the subject if you prefer to watch rather than read.
Accessing Search Console
So first we need access to Search Console.
If you don’t have a Google Account, let’s look at how to get one. Let’s say your using your “@microsoft.com” or “@isp.com” address. If you want to access Google products using that email address:
- go to accounts.google.com
- at the bottom, see Create Account button, click it, takes you to the creation page
- click “use my current email address”
- go through remainder of account creation process
If you already have a @gmail.com address, you don’t need to do the above process.
Once you have a Google Account, now you can go to search.google.com/search-console. 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 “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.
Adding A TXT Record To Your Domain Name Provider (DNS)
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.
Verifying Search Console
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.
- Performance tab shows us how we’re doing in search results.
- URL inspection so we can force-crawl new blogs and pages to Google.
- Sitemaps allow us to add a sitemap and automatically show us what pages Google should crawl.
- Coverage shows if there are any errors with our pages we’re crawling we need to fix.
This is a really valuable tool that’s great to have.
That’s all for today, thanks for watching. Please like and share our video with your friends if you learned something.
If you didn’t learn anything, ask us a follow-up question below, and we’ll answer as soon as we can. Also, be sure to like and subscribe to get the latest Marketing Monday every week.
Cohlab
Cohlab