What is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console (GSC) is a free web service provided by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results.
You’ll be able to find information such as whether your pages have been crawled and indexed by Google, your top ranking pages, and traffic statistics over time. It’s also how Google will communicate with you when there are any issues with your site.
In short, it’s an essential tool to track your site’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) performance.
How To Create A Google Search Console Account
First, go to Google Search Console. Once there, log into your Google Account and enter the URL of your website under the Domain option. Then, click CONTINUE.
Next, you’ll need to verify your domain so that Google can be sure that the website actually belongs to you.
A pop-up window will appear telling you to Verify domain ownership via DNS record.
You will see the option to Copy the TXT record below into the DNS configuration for your site. Click on COPY.
How To Set Up Google Search Console
While you can follow the steps outlined by Google above to set up Google Search Console for your site, I recommend and will show you how to do it through a more user-friendly way using SiteGround.
On a separate tab, go to your SiteGround dashboard, click on WEBSITES, find your site, and click on SITE TOOLS.
On the left-hand menu, click on DOMAIN. A drop-down menu will appear where you can click on DNS ZONE EDITOR.
Under Create New Record, click on TXT and paste the TXT record you copied from Google Search Console into Value on SiteGround.
Now, adjust the Cache duration setting (TTL) value to 5 minutes.
Time To Live (TTL) controls how long your website’s data is stored in the cache before being refreshed. Adjusting TTL helps you balance site speed and content freshness.
Typically, it’s best to set your TTL shorter (like 5 minutes) if you have dynamic content where updates are frequent and need to be shown immediately (think stock prices, news sites).
On the other hand, if your site is mostly static content that doesn’t change often, it’s better to set your TTL longer (like 24 hours). This can help speed up your site, improving load times.
To start, I recommend you start off with 5 minutes since you want to be able to see things go live quickly while you’re first building the site.
Then, click on CREATE. You will receive a notification that says TXT Record is Created.
You’ll need to wait around 5 to 10 minutes for the DNS to be updated. Then, go back to Google Search Console and click on VERIFY.
A pop-up should appear that says Ownership Verified.
Now, click on GO TO PROPERTY.
Note that property refers to your website. This is where you’ll access your Google Search Console dashboard.
Assuming this is your first website, the dashboard will be empty. But, feel free to poke around and take a look at what’s available to you.
What’s Next?
Otherwise, you’ve successfully set up Google Search Console! Next, you’ll need to install an SEO plugin on WordPress.
