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Anyone who wants to start with SEO on their website should definitely begin with Google Search Console (GSC). As well as helping you to get discovered on Google, it has a number of amazing features that can help you to improve, fix and optimise to boost your website's position on Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERPS).
Where to start?
Step 1: Register your property
The first thing you should do is to register and verify your website or property within the console itself. That is pretty straight forward as it's just a matter of navigating to the top left of the GSC page, clicking the dropdown and selecting the "add property" icon.
Step 2: Add, verify and index your property
After following the instructions to add and verify your property, you can then get going with the SEO activities. This starts with requesting Google to inspect your site's URL and indexing it. Select "URL inspection" on the left hand side and then input your URL in the search bar at the top of the page. Then, select "request indexing"on the right hand side of the page. It will take a few minutes for Google to crawl your URL and then confirm that is has been indexed.
Step 3: Add your sitemap
Adding your sitemap can be done by clicking on "sitemaps" under the "Index" menu on the left hand side. Usually you can simply add your sitemap by adding "sitemap.xml" as an extension to the end of your domain's URL. Google will then crawl your sitemap and submit all of your site's pages to the Google network. You will then be able to see how many URLs have been discovered and are now 'discoverable' on Google.
That's it! Your site is all set up and ready to be found by the billions of internet users around the world. Remember, this is just the beginning. The hard work starts now as you need to work on building your content, making sure the quality of that content is high, use keywords relevant to your site, and optimise your existing content.
An SEO site audit is a good way to plan your next step as it can outline any SEO issues and prioritise them for you. At Ballantine Consulting, we have an experienced team that can help you to get your SEO sorted, provide you with monthly reports at an affordable rate. Check out our SEO Packages or get in touch with us today to find out how we can help.
Remember, investing in SEO can bring you returns, and instead of paying for advertising month after month, wouldn't it be great to be in a situation where your site appears at the top of the SERPS and those customers find you organically?
We hope this article helps motivate you to get your SEO started! Please like, share and comment.