Submitting Your Squarespace Website Sitemap to Google Search Console
Submitting your Squarespace sitemap to Google Search Console is an important step to ensure that Google can crawl and index your website effectively. Here's a step-by-step guide on how to submit your Squarespace sitemap to Google Search Console so you can start appearing for searches.
Table of Contents
Step 1 - Verify your Squarespace site in Google Search Console
The first thing we have to do is prove to Google that you own your domain.
Go to Google Search Console and make sure that you’re signed into the correct account (whichever account you use for your business) in the top right.
On the left-hand side of the screen, click on SEARCH PROPERTY and then click on + ADD PROPERTY.
The popup should have two options for property type, DOMAIN, and URL prefix. Tracking a domain requires a different set of steps since you have to add a CNAME to your domain registrar but it’s not usually needed unless you have different subdomains that you need to track (which 99% of people don’t). So I actually recommend clicking on the URL prefix option instead.
Before you enter a URL into the URL prefix field, open a separate tab or window, and go to your website’s home page. Once your website loads, copy the URL from your address bar, that way you know you’re tracking the exact domain for your website. For example, our own website is https://www.adlyticmarketing.com/ so that’s the URL we track. If someone were to go to http://adlyticmarketing.com/ (without https or www), it redirects them to the correct version of the website and Google can track that, but if we were to track http://adlyticmarketing.com/ instead, it would miss everyone that visits https://www.adlyticmarketing.com/.
Now that you have your full domain URL, enter that into the URL prefix field and click on CONTINUE.
In the new popup, ignore the HTML file option and click HTML tag instead (about halfway down the popup). Click COPY beside the string of text.
Log into your Squarespace website and go to your CODE INJECTION section. This menu option moves around a lot, so the easiest way to find it is to click the magnifying glass in the top left, and do a search for CODE INJECTION. If you’re on an older version of Squarespace without the magnifying glass, you can go to SETTINGS > ADVANCED > CODE INJECTION. Once you’re in the section, go ahead and paste the code you copied from Google into the HEADER section (right-click inside the white space and click PASTE).
Click SAVE in the top left.
Now go back to the Google Search Console window and click the VERIFY button (make sure you click the button underneath the HTML tag option that we used.
Step 2 - Submit Your Sitemap to Google Search Console
If you still have your Google Search Console window open, make sure you have the correct property selected in the top left.
Along the left-hand edge of the screen, there will be a menu option for Sitemaps, go ahead and click that.
Now the screen should show you an option that says Add a new sitemap with a place to enter a URL. The first part of the URL should be prefilled to be your domain, in the part that says Enter sitemap URL, you just have to type in sitemap.xml as shown in the image below and then click SUBMIT.
If you followed the steps above, you should now be completely done! When you add or remove content such as pages or posts to your Squarespace website, Squarespace will automatically update your sitemap, and when Google sees that the sitemap has been updated, it will automatically start to index the new content so it can appear in searches!
Why is Google Search Console (GSC) Important?
The main reason people choose to use GSC is for the indexing option mentioned above. Without using GSC, it could take several weeks before Google even realizes that you have a new page on your website whereas with GSC it takes hours if not minutes.
Using GSC also allows you to see how people are finding your website. After a few days of collecting information, when you log into GSC, you’ll see an option for SEARCH RESULTS on the left-hand side. Clicking that will show you the keywords people are using to find your website, how many impressions that keyword has (how many people see your website on the list of results), as well as the number of clicks (how many people actually click through to your website from the list of results). Google will also format this information into a nice graph for you to see how your overall performance over the past several months is going.
