How to Setup and Index Your Squarespace website using Google Search Console

How to Setup and Index Your Squarespace website using Google Search Console

Momentum Monday Marketing Blog (please subscribe)
By: Mac Frederick

1. Create a Squarespace account
- Update to Premium
- Activate your Domain

2. Create a Google Account
- Use Gmail or Google Premium Account

3. Setup Google Search Console
- Login and configure account

4. Log into Squarespace
- Before you begin review these steps by Squarespace support
- Remove your site-wide password or page password on your homepage if either are enabled. Passwords prevent Google from indexing your content.
- If you have a third-party domain, ensure it's connected properly. For best results, we recommend waiting 72 hours after you connect your domain before verifying it with Google Search Console.
- Verification with Google Search Console won't work on trial sites because trial sites are hidden from search engines. If your site is in trial, publish your site before continuing.
- In the Home Menu, click Analytics.
- Click Search Keywords.
- Click Connect in the panel's pop-up.

5. Connect Your Google Search Console
- Log into the Google account you want to connect to your site. If you have multiple Google accounts, ensure you select the correct one.
- Review the permissions, then click Allow.
- Wait 72 hours for the data to populate.
- If you're having trouble connecting to Google Search Console, try authorizing through the Connected Accounts panel.

6. Index your Website
- Index the whole site by submitting a site map
- By submitting a site map, you provide Search Console with your site’s publicly available page URLs and image metadata. All Squarespace sites automatically generate a site map. To learn more about site maps in - Squarespace, visit Your site map.
- On the Google Search Console dashboard, select the site you’d like to index from the property menu in the top left corner.
- Click Sitemaps.
- Under Add a new sitemap, type sitemap.xml
- Click Submit to request Google index your site.

7. Warnings and errors
- When verifying your site with Google Search Console, you'll see a message showing that parts of your URL are restricted by robots.txt. This is completely normal. We ask Google not to crawl these pages because they’re for internal use only, or display duplicate content that can count against a site's SEO.
- To learn more about errors in Google Search Console, visit Understanding Google SEO emails and console errors.
- Check back - Review your sitemap and Google Search Console in 72 hours
- By then you should start seeing keyword data in Squarespace


Resources
account.squarespace.com/
search.google.com/search-console/about
support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/20581…
support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/20581…
support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/20581…
support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/20653…
support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/20654…