How to Set Up Google Search Console and Submit Your Sitemap

To set up Google Search Console, sign in at search.google.com/search-console with a Google account the business owns, add your site as a Domain property, and verify it by adding the TXT record Google gives you to your domain's DNS settings. Once it is verified, open the Sitemaps report, enter the address of your sitemap (usually /sitemap.xml) and submit it. Google then starts reporting which pages it has indexed, which it has left out and why, and which searches bring people to your site.

Search Console is free, and it is the only place Google tells you directly how it sees your website. This guide covers the setup, then the reports you will use most.

Domain property or URL-prefix property?

When you add a site, Search Console asks you to choose between two property types.

• Domain property: covers the whole domain, including every subdomain (www, shop, blog) and both http and https. It can only be verified through DNS. This is the right choice for most businesses because nothing falls outside it.
• URL-prefix property: covers only addresses that start with the exact prefix you enter, such as https://www.example.com/. It offers more verification methods, including an HTML file, a meta tag, Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager.

You can have both, for example a Domain property for the full picture plus a URL-prefix property for your blog. If you cannot edit your DNS, a URL-prefix property for your main https address is a reasonable fallback.

Verify ownership with a DNS TXT record

1. 1In Search Console, add a property, choose Domain and type your domain without https:// or www, for example example.com.
2. 2Copy the TXT record Google shows you. It starts with google-site-verification= followed by a long code.
3. 3Sign in to wherever your domain's DNS is managed. That may be your registrar, your hosting company, or a service such as Cloudflare. For .pk domains, the DNS is often managed by the hosting company rather than at PKNIC itself.
4. 4Add a new TXT record. Leave the host or name field as @ or blank, which means the root domain, and paste the full value into the content field.
5. 5Save the record, return to Search Console and click Verify. If it fails, wait an hour and try again. DNS changes usually spread within minutes, but they can take longer.

Submit your sitemap

An XML sitemap lists the pages you want search engines to find. Most content management systems and frameworks generate one automatically. Open yoursite.com/sitemap.xml in a browser first to check it exists. WordPress SEO plugins often use a sitemap index such as /sitemap_index.xml instead.

1. 1Open the Sitemaps report in the Indexing section of Search Console.
2. 2Enter the sitemap address and submit it. If you submit a sitemap index, Google reads the sitemaps inside it.
3. 3Check that the status shows Success and that the number of discovered pages looks right. A status of Couldn't fetch usually means the URL is wrong, the file is blocked or the server returned an error.
4. 4Add a line such as Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml to your robots.txt file so other search engines can find it too.

Include only pages you want indexed: live, canonical URLs that return a 200 status. Leave out redirects, noindexed pages and thank-you pages. Google uses an accurate lastmod date when one is provided, but it ignores the priority and changefreq fields, so do not spend time adjusting them. There is no need to resubmit the sitemap every time you publish; Google re-reads it on its own schedule.

Inspect URLs and request indexing

The URL Inspection tool, opened from the search bar at the top of Search Console, shows what Google knows about one specific page. Paste in a full URL from your property to see:

• Whether the URL is on Google, and if not, the reason
• How Google discovered it, including which sitemap and referring pages listed it
• When it was last crawled and whether crawling and indexing were allowed
• The canonical you declared and the canonical Google selected, which are not always the same

Use Test live URL to check the current version of the page, for example after fixing an error. If the live test passes, you can click Request indexing to ask Google to crawl it. This is useful for a new service page or an important update, but it has a daily limit, does not guarantee indexing, and repeated requests do not speed things up.

Read the Page indexing report

The Page indexing report, listed as Pages under Indexing, splits the URLs Google knows about into indexed and not indexed, with a reason for each group. Not every excluded URL is a problem. The question is whether pages you care about are in the wrong group. The statuses you will see most often are:

• Crawled – currently not indexed: Google fetched the page and chose not to index it for now. This is usually a judgement about quality. Improve the content, make it clearly distinct from similar pages and link to it internally.
• Discovered – currently not indexed: Google knows the URL exists but has not crawled it yet. On a small site this often clears with time. On a large site it can point to weak internal linking, slow server responses or too many low-value URLs competing for attention.
• Duplicate without user-selected canonical: Google found several similar pages and none of them declares a canonical. Add a canonical tag pointing to the version you want indexed.
• Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user: you declared one canonical, but Google picked another. Check that your internal links, sitemap and redirects all point to the version you declared.
• Alternate page with proper canonical tag: the page correctly points to another version. This is normally fine.
• Excluded by 'noindex' tag: correct for admin, thank-you or filter pages, but a serious problem if it appears on service pages. A noindex tag left on from a staging site is a common cause.
• Page with redirect, Not found (404) and Soft 404: check that redirects go to the right place, that missing pages were removed on purpose, and that thin or empty pages are not being treated as errors.

After fixing a group, open it and use Validate fix. Google rechecks the affected URLs over the following days or weeks and reports whether the issue has cleared.

Understand the Performance report

The Performance report shows how your site appears in Google Search. It has four main measures: clicks, impressions, average click-through rate and average position. Google has said that activity from AI features such as AI Overviews is counted within these web search totals rather than shown separately.

• Queries: the searches that showed your pages. Some rare queries are hidden for privacy, so query totals are lower than page totals.
• Pages: which URLs earn impressions and clicks.
• Countries and Devices: how much of your audience is in Pakistan, and on mobile.
• Date range: up to 16 months of history. Use the compare option to set this month against last month, or against the same period last year for seasonal businesses.

Average position is averaged across every impression, so treat it as a trend rather than an exact ranking. A useful first exercise is to find pages with many impressions but a low click-through rate and review their titles and meta descriptions.

Core Web Vitals, HTTPS and other reports

• Core Web Vitals: groups your URLs as Good, Needs improvement or Poor on mobile and desktop, based on real Chrome user data. Small sites may not have enough traffic for it to show anything.
• HTTPS: shows how many indexed pages are served over HTTPS and flags any that are not. On a correctly configured site, every page should be HTTPS.
• Manual actions and Security issues: these should say no issues detected. If they ever do not, deal with them before anything else.

Add users and owners safely

Access is managed in the Users and permissions section of Settings. There are three levels: owners, who control everything including who else has access; full users, who can see all data and take most actions; and restricted users, who can view most data but cannot change anything.

• Make the business owner, using a business Google account, the verified owner. Do not let the only owner be an agency, freelancer or former employee.
• Give agencies and developers full user access. They rarely need to be owners.
• Give managers who only need to read reports restricted access.
• When someone leaves, remove their access. If they were a verified owner, also remove the verification token or record they used, otherwise they can verify again.
• Review the user list every few months.

Bonus: Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow

Bing Webmaster Tools is the Microsoft equivalent of Search Console, and Bing's index also feeds Microsoft Copilot and other services that use Bing results. Once Search Console is set up, adding Bing takes a few minutes: sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools and choose the option to import your sites from Google Search Console. It brings across your verified sites and sitemaps, so there is no separate verification step.

Bing also supports IndexNow, an open protocol that lets your site notify participating search engines whenever a URL is added, updated or deleted. Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam and Yep take part. Google does not use IndexNow, so it does not replace your sitemap. Many SEO plugins and some hosting and CDN providers can send IndexNow notifications automatically once you switch it on.

With Search Console verified and a clean sitemap submitted, check the Page indexing report and the Performance report once a month, and look in straight away after any redesign, migration or large batch of new pages. Most indexing problems are cheap to fix when they are caught early. If you would like help reading your reports or fixing indexing issues, Parwaz Digital can help.