How to connect your Squarespace Website to Google Search Console
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You’ve created and launched your beautiful website with a good SEO foundation, so you should be getting lots of visitors rushing to work with you, right?
It would be nice if this was the way things happened, that’s for sure!
If you want to have visitors finding your website on autopilot, it’s time to enlist the help of Google!
Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO for short) is basically the process of setting up your website in a way that shows search engines like Google what your website is about, so it knows when to show your site in search results.
Google wants to show the best result for someone’s search, and by implementing a strong SEO foundation and optimising your content and your images, you can help show Google that you’re the right website to showcase!
Want to learn more about SEO? Check out these posts:
Even once you’ve taken care of the basics, it can take Google some time to find your website. Sometimes it’s a few days, sometimes it can take weeks. And once it does find your website, it will crawl through and index your content so that it knows when to show your website in search results.
Want to speed up this waiting period?
If so, read on to find out how you can submit your Squarespace website to Google Search Console in just a few minutes, so that you can start growing your search traffic as soon as possible!
What is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console is a powerful tool created to help you monitor your website and troubleshoot any issues with how it displays in search results. The best part is that it’s a free service that can help boost your SEO efforts by showing you how your website is performing in search results so you can see opportunities to improve your search position.
A free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site's presence in Google Search results. You don't have to sign up for Search Console to be included in Google Search results, but Search Console helps you understand and improve how Google sees your site.
Google Search Console ensures that Google can find and crawl your website, helps you fix any issues with finding your website online, allows you to see what people are searching to find you and so much more! It is a great way to increase your website’s visibility, and the best part is that it only takes a few minutes to set up!
Once you’ve set up Google Search Console, you can sit back and relax knowing that Google will notify you there are any issues on your website such as content that is unable to be indexed or how your website displays on phones.
How does Google find your Website?
Let’s start by understanding how Google finds websites and indexes their content, since it will help you understand some of the terms in this post.
Google has software that explores the internet to find new information, which it then stores in an index. This crawl is completed by “web crawlers”, which move through the internet following various links from one website to the next.
Web crawlers are looking for new websites, updates to existing sites, broken links and more, which is uses to keep its index as up-to-date as possible, to ensure search results are as current and relevant as possible.
Google stores the most recent information about a website based on these crawls, so if it takes Google a month to even find your website or see any updates you make, then it would mean there is a month where your website or new content isn’t searchable in Google at all.
When you head to Google to look something up like “how to poach the perfect eggs”, Google will refer back to this index to find which content it thinks is the most relevant for you and will display that content as your search results.
Want to attract more dream clients to your website for free?
If so, you need to be found on Google! This free SEO Checklist for Squarespace will help you grow your website traffic, so you can get more leads and clients from your website
Setting up Google Search Console with Squarespace
Squarespace makes it quite easy to set up Google Search Console for your website, and its well worth taking a couple of minutes to make sure you do so you can start getting search traffic as soon as possible.
You will need to have a Google account to set up Google Search Console, so if you don’t yet have one, you can set one up here. Your website will also need to be live and password-free to ensure Google can access your website.
To start the setup process, head to the home menu in Squarespace. From there, you can click on ANALYTICS, then head into SEARCH KEYWORDS.
In the middle of the Search Keywords screen, you’ll see the below prompt with the CONNECT button, and when you click the button, you’ll have a popup that appears, prompting you to log into your Google account and to review the permissions. Click ALLOW and you’re basically done!
Once your account is connected, it will take up to 72 hours for your search data to start populating in Squarespace.
Once it does, you’ll be able to come back to the SEARCH KEYWORDS tab at any time to see a list of keywords your visitors are typing to find your website, along with how many people are seeing your website in search results, how many people are clicking through to your website and what your average position on Google is.
Pretty handy for helping your track your SEO progress, huh?
Want to know more about all the other handy info you can find in your Squarespace analytics and how you can use it to grow your website? Check out my posts on Squarespace analytics here and here.
Getting Google to Crawl your Website
Now that you have Google Search Console set up, it’s worth taking a moment to request for Google to index your site so that you can start showing in search results as soon as possible. There are 2 ways you can do this:
For a brand-new website or if you have a lot of pages to crawl, you can submit a sitemap
If you only have a couple of new pages, you can use the URL inspection tool to request for the individual pages to be indexed
Submitting a Sitemap
Submitting a sitemap will provide Google Search Console a map that shows every page and image on your website in a way that is easy for Google to read and understand. Squarespace makes this process easy by automatically generating sitemaps.
To submit your sitemap to Google, you need to log into the Google Search Console dashboard first. Once there, you can:
Click Sitemaps on the left side of the screen
Under Add a new sitemap, you just need to type sitemap.xml
Hit SUBMIT
Pretty easy, huh?
From there, Google will usually crawl your website within a couple of days and will let you know if there are any issues on your website via email.
URL Inspection Tool
If you only have a page or two to index, you can submit individual page link to Google Search Console as well. This is great for when you have created a new page on your website, updated an old one, or if you wanted to index a blog post as soon as possible.
To request an individual page to be indexed, you need to log into the Google Search Console dashboard. Once there, you can:
Click URL Inspection on the left side of the screen
Type in the full URL of the page you would like to be indexed and hit enter
Once Google has retrieved the page information, you’ll see if the page is already on Google or not and can click REQUEST INDEXING
Over time, if you are consistently adding new content to your website, for example a new blog post each week, Google will start to see the frequency your website is updated and will start scanning your website more often based on that. It’s pretty handy since you won’t need to request indexing as often.
Help! My Google Search Console doesn’t look like this…
When you log into Google Search Console, if the page shows the same as the below image, you are using the older version of Google Search Console. You can change to the new version by pressing the blue button towards the top, or you can access the instructions for indexing your website with the old version of Google Search Console here.
How to know what Google had indexed on your website
Want to know if Google has crawled your website and what information it has in its index?
You can check by typing site:yourdomain.com into your internet browser.
If your website has already been crawled, you’ll see each page that Google has indexed in the search results. If the search comes back with no results, you’ll know Google has yet to find your website.
If you do a big website update, this is also a good way to check if Google has found your updates or not, so you know whether you should resubmit your website for indexing.
Setting up Google Search Console and indexing your website only takes a few minutes of your time, but it will help to set you up for success in Google searches since it allows you to easily monitor and improve your SEO over time.
I recommend doing this anytime you launch a new website or make any major updates on your website, so you can ensure Google always has the most up-to-date version of your website in its index.
Have you submitted your website on Google Search Console yet? If not, what’s holding you back? Let me know in the comments below!
Want to attract more dream clients to your website for free?
If so, you need to be found on Google! This free SEO Checklist for Squarespace will help you grow your website traffic, so you can get more leads and clients from your website
Want some more help with your SEO?
A VIP design day could be a perfect option for you! We’d start with a strategy call to get clear on your website goals, then I’d dive into keyword research, auditing and updating any SEO issues on your website and listing out content ideas to help you finally get found. Head to the link below to find out more.