How to setup Google Search Console for a website — Complete Guide

5 min readJan 25, 2025

Google Search Console provides valuable insights into how the site is performing on Google Search, helps you identify issues, and enables you to optimize the site’s visibility and indexing.

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What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that helps you monitor and maintain the site’s presence in Google search results. With GSC, you can:

Track website performance (e.g., clicks, impressions, average position)
Submit sitemaps for better indexing
Identify and fix technical issues like crawl errors, broken links, and more
Optimize the site’s SEO by analyzing search queries and keywords
See how Google views the website’s pages

Prerequisites

Google account.
Access to the website’s root files or can modify the HTML of the website.

Step 1 : Add the Website to Google Search Console

Click the “Add Property” button: This is typically located in the top left corner of the GSC dashboard.

Enter the website URL: You have two options to add the site: Domain or URL Prefix. Choose the one that best fits your needs:

Domain Property: Tracks all URLs under the domain (recommended if you want to track your entire site, including http, https, www, or non-www versions).
URL Prefix: Tracks a specific version of the site, such as https://www.example.com/.

Google Search Console select property page

Enter the URL and click “Continue”.

Step 2 :Verify Website Ownership

To ensure that you have the rights to access the website data, Google will require you to verify ownership. Google offers several methods to verify ownership.

Google Search Console : Methods to verify site ownership

Method 1: HTML File Upload

Download the HTML file: After clicking “Continue,” Google will provide you with a unique HTML verification file. Download this file to your computer.
Upload the HTML file to your website’s root directory: Using FTP, cPanel, or your web hosting file manager, upload the HTML file to the root directory of your website (it should be at the same level as index.html or index.php).
Verify: Once the file is uploaded, go back to Google Search Console and click “Verify.”

Method 2: HTML Tag (For Website Builders)

If the website is created using a platform like WordPress, Wix, or Squarespace, ownership can be verified by adding a tag to the site’s header.

Copy the HTML tag: In the GSC verification section, you’ll see an HTML tag option.
Paste the tag into your website’s <head> section:
Save changes and go back to Google Search Console to click “Verify.”

Google Search Console : HTML tag for verification.

Method 3: Google Analytics (If Already Set Up)

If you’ve already set up Google Analytics for your website and are using the same Google account, you can verify your website by using Google Analytics.

Select Google Analytics as the verification method.
Verify: Make sure you have the correct tracking code installed on your website. Once it’s detected, click “Verify.”

If you can’t verify your site, double-check that the HTML file is uploaded to the correct directory or that the HTML tag is placed properly in your site’s <head> section.

Google Search Console : Verification failed

Step 4: Add a Sitemap

A sitemap helps search engines discover and crawl your website’s pages more efficiently. Adding a sitemap is not mandatory, but it’s highly recommended to ensure Google indexes all of your important pages.

Google Search Console : Sitemap submission

In the Google Search Console dashboard, navigate to the Sitemaps section in the left-hand menu under “Index.”
Enter the URL of your sitemap and click Submit.

Google Search Console : Sitemap submitted successfully

URL Inspection Tool

The URL Inspection Tool in Google Search Console (GSC) powerful features for diagnosing issues with individual pages of your website. It allows you to check how Google crawls, indexes, and serves a particular URL.
Using this tool, you can quickly understand how Google views your pages, whether there are any problems, and how to fix them for better search engine performance.

When you enter a URL into the URL Inspection Tool, it provides detailed information about how Google sees that page. Here’s what you can learn:

1. Crawl Status

Crawled: Whether Google has crawled the URL recently.
Last Crawled Date: The exact date when Googlebot last crawled the URL.
Crawl Errors: If there were any issues when Google tried to crawl the page (like a server error or redirect issue).

Google Search Console : Testing live URL using URL Inspection

Indexing Status

Indexed: Whether the page has been indexed by Google. If the page is indexed, it will appear in search results.
Indexed, But Not Visible in Search: This might occur if there are issues such as a “noindex” tag or other limitations preventing the page from showing up in search results.
Not Indexed: If the page hasn’t been indexed yet, the tool will tell you why.

Google Search Console : URL Inspection successful

Indexing Issues:

If the page is not indexed, the tool will provide reasons why, such as:
Blocked by robots.txt: A directive in your robots.txt file might be preventing Googlebot from crawling the page.
Noindex tag: The page might have a <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> tag telling Google not to index the page.
Crawl Errors: Server errors (5xx errors) or not-found errors (404 errors) may also prevent Google from indexing the page.

Mobile Usability

Mobile-Friendly Status: Check if the page is mobile-friendly and whether it passes Google’s mobile usability tests.
If the page is not mobile-friendly, the tool will show you specific issues that need to be fixed for mobile optimization.

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