How to submit a sitemap to Google Search Console
Submitting a sitemap to Google Search Console helps to improve your website’s visibility in search results. Google can discover your website, however, it is good to submit a sitemap to increase the speed of being indexed by various search engines.
A sitemap is simply a file that lists all of the pages on your website, and it helps search engines like Google, Bing, Yandex, and others understand the structure of your site. I will show you how to submit a sitemap to Google Search Console.
Steps on how to submit a sitemap to Google Search Console
Create a Google Search Console account
- Visit search.google.com/search-console and log in with your Google account.
- Click ‘Add New Property’
- Add your domain name on the ‘URL prefix’ option and click continue.
- You will be prompted to verify ownership of the domain. I recommend choosing the ‘HTML tag’ option and copying the code.
- Paste the code on your Rank Math, specifically on the ‘Webmaster Tool’ option in the ‘Google Search Console’ box, and click ‘Save Changes’.
- Go back to Search Console and click ‘Verify’ under the ‘HTML tag’ option to complete ownership verification.
Submit a sitemap
You don’t have to trouble yourself creating a sitemap, instead use an SEO plugin like Rank Math for this purpose. Rank Math automatically creates a sitemap for your website and allows you to integrate the plugin with Search Console.
How to find your sitemap on Rank Math
- Log in to your website admin dashboard
- On the left side click Rank Math > Sitemaps
- Copy the URL on the page. It will have this format https://yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml
Submit a sitemap on Search Console
- Visit Search Console and select the website you want to submit the sitemap for.
- In the left-hand menu, click on “Sitemaps.”
- Now paste your sitemap URL into the ‘Add a new sitemap’ section.
- Complete the process by clicking the ‘Submit’ button.
- Google will now start crawling your site.
You can also consider submitting your website’s sitemap on other search engines such as Bing and Yandex.
Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google and it helps you monitor and maintain your website presence in Google search results.
With this tool, you can easily detect any crawl errors; or security issues, and offers details statistics on your website’s overall search performance.
