Skip to content 
How Can We Help?
How to Connect to Google
Whether your selling skis, Toyo stoves or coffee, you want to get found in Google. And this doesn’t happen by accident. Getting indexed by the search engines is a multi-step process that requires knowledge, technical skill, and some creativity. Oh, and some would say, a sprinkle of fairy dust.
It’s known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). And the first thing you need to do is connect your site to Google.
WHY CONNECT TO GOOGLE
One of my favorite sayings is, “if it can’t be measured, it can’t be managed”. In other words, if you don’t know –
- who is visiting your site,
- how they are finding you,
- how long they stay on your site,
- and what pages they visit,
then you can’t have an effective SEO campaign. So, let’s walk through how you connect your site to Google.
HOW TO CONNECT TO GOOGLE
Step One: Set up a Google Analytics account. It’s free, just go here, https://www.google.com/analytics/
Step Two: Add your website to your Google Analytics account.
Step Three: Prove you own the site you set up. This typically means adding some code to your WordPress themes settings. It’s a simple copy/paste of code.
Now Google knows your site exists, where your site is located and will start tracking visits to your page. Note – it could take several days before the stats come rolling in.
But wait… there are a few more important steps.
Step Four: Install a sitemap. This is mondo important! Site maps outline your entire site for the Google Bots to index. Without a sitemap, Google is left to guess where all your pages are and may miss some. At the very least – it will take it longer to find all your pages and delay your rankings.
Here are two free WordPress Plugins we recommend for sitemap generation:
Step Five: Connect to Google Search Console, https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/. Here you can submit your sitemap, see what keywords (search terms) people are using to find your site and more. If you want to measure your success, then connect to the Search Console, it’s free.
CONCLUSION
Now you are set up to measure your sites performance. Next, we want to optimize your website and get you on the front page of Google. So stay tuned… I’ll have some tips for you on that in the next article.