[Quick Win] How to Submit a Sitemap to Google Search Console
It’s super simple to submit a sitemap to GSC—no matter if your host is Squarespace, Wix, or Wordpress—just follow this quick tutorial!
Submitting a sitemap to Google Search Console (GSC) is ridiculously simple! (Take it from me who avoided the task for SO long simply because it sounded complicated...) Just look at how short this episode is. In just a few minutes, you can easily improve your SEO ranking and make yourself more findable. Sounds like a win to me! Press play & let's check off this task that's been on your To Do list for far too long.
With this episode, you’ll be able to:
Learn the exact steps to take to submit a sitemap to Google Search Console.
Uncover what to do once you've submitted your sitemap.
Learn one other key task you can accomplish in Google Search Console.
Links & Resources:
Google Search Console
Watch the Tutorial on YT
Related Episodes:
SEO titles + meta descriptions
Sitemaps + SEO Experts w/ Samantha Mabe
Connect w/ Brittany:
Website
Instagram
LinkedIn
YouTube
This episode of The Basic B podcast is brought to you in partnership w/ Leah Bryant Co.! Help me reach more service providers like you by following the show & leaving a rating or review on Apple & Spotify!
The unedited podcast transcript for this episode of The Basic B podcast follows
Welcome to The Basic B podcast, a show for the wannabe SEO savvy service providers among this for the coaches and consultants who dream of becoming known for their storytelling skills. Not to mention the solopreneurs who straight up need to master all things social proof to increase sales. After a little reluctantly, fully committing to this online rather business, I quickly realized I needed to get people to come to me, I needed to tell them I was here and how I could support them. I dove headfirst into social proof, which led me to SEO, which led me to storytelling. And now it gives me great joy to share what I've learned with other business owners so they skip the hard stuff and ease straight into sales. This podcast gives you expert insights, actionable takeaways, and casual combos with some of the online world's best and brightest experts and strategists. I think that's enough of an intro. So here we go.
Welcome back to The Basics with B of course, this is our Friday special episode where I go deeper into something that we talked about in the guest episode on Wednesday. So this week, we had Samantha Mabe, and she and I, among other things, we were talking about sitemaps. And I wanted to create this video walkthrough, so you could see exactly how simple it is to submit a sitemap to Google Search Console.
So I'm going to walk you through all those steps today. Now, if you're watching the video, you're seeing my screen and you're seeing that I'm in Google Search Console, that this is how I got here. First of all, I just Googled Google Search Console, there will be links all over the place for this tutorial. So you could just click the link and be taken here. And from there, you're going to end up on this overview tab.
You can scroll down and see all of these fun things. But what I want you to do for this instance, in order to get the sitemap in to Google Search Console is come over here you're going to see indexing, then you're going to see sitemaps. And we're going to click on sitemaps. And you're going to be directed over here, where you will either see nothing down here under submitted sitemaps. Or again, if you're looking at my screen, you can see what it looks like once you do have a sitemap that has been submitted. How many times can I say that phrase in one episode.
What we're going to do in order to get a sitemap, if this area is in fact, blank, you don't have to type any of this stuff, your domain name is already going to show up here. So it will say for example, for me, it says HTTPS, colon slash slash Britton herzberg.com. So all I'm going to do is type in sitemap dot XML, and I'm doing this one handed. But I'm going to plug this in so you can see. So it's just sitemap dot XML. And then what I'll do is click Submit.
Now, I'm not going to do that, because my sitemap is already here. But if I wanted to just for example, sake, I could submit it again, and it would just repeat it. But all you're gonna do is click Submit. Sometimes what happens at that point is right now I'm seeing a green success status.
Sometimes it will say couldn't fetch data or something like that, and it's in red script. But if that happens to you, I would say just hit refresh a few times. And generally, that's fixed either within a matter of minutes, or at least within 24 hours. So if you've tried to refresh the screen, and you keep getting that information that feedback of couldn't such, and it's that red text, just give it a day, come back in about 24 hours, and you will be good to go. So there is nothing else you need to do at that point, like I'm telling you, it is so simple.
I avoided doing this for so long, because I thought that it was going to be super complicated. And yet, here we are, we're only like three minutes into this and it took no time at all. It will take like I said a little bit of time to get the sitemap actually submitted and uploaded to where you're seeing the screen success button. But after that, you're golden.
One other thing that I like doing inside Google Search Console is submitting a blog. So after I've written a blog, I have published it and then what I will do is I can You can see this right here again, if you're looking at my screen, you'll see like five or six different blogs recently that I posted. So what I do with that is you're going to see that it's already been indexed on Google, you'll see these green checkmarks.
But all I do once I've published a blog is I copy and paste that URL here into the search bar. I hit Enter, it brings up this screen. And at that point, everything is gray. I hit request indexing, and it does everything it indexes it and it takes maybe I think the longest time it's taken for me is about three minutes or so. So that is it. My grand thing one that we did was submitting a sitemap to Google search console that you do once you do not need to come back and do that again. And then then two is when you've published a new blog, that was just a little bonus tip for you since I was over here, you can copy paste that URL request indexing, and that enables your individual blog posts or, and or individual web pages to then be picked up.
So you could do this request indexing for new case study pages, new blog posts, let's say you create a new services page or a new sales page. All of those pages whenever you create a new web page, and you want it to be found online in a search result, that's when you're going to come over here and do this request indexing. So that is all I got for you today. I hope that was super helpful. It was definitely helpful when I learned it. And it's quick. It's again, like the sitemap you're not coming back in and doing anything to it. And then for the blog posts or the new web pages, you're just doing that, as you create blogs or web pages. If you have any questions. You've got all of my contact information, just find me ask the question, and I'll get back to you soon.
That was really something wasn't it? Let that really sink in and guide you toward being the answer to even more Google questions. Thanks so much for joining me this episode. You are the reason this show exists and that it keeps growing. You know, thanks to all those follows and reviews. If you know someone who could benefit from what we've shared, send it to them. We don't do shy around here. If you thought of clarifying or follow up questions while listening. You know what to do. Say hi on Instagram. Check the show notes for all the things that were mentioned and I'll talk to you soon bread