To make sure that Google correctly indexes your website, you’ll need to verify it in the Google Search Console. Then you can see which pages are indexed by Google, and track the performance of your website in Google search results.
This guide assumes you have a website that’s deployed to Vercel, which is my new favorite service for deploying websites due to its UX and integration with Vercel’s framework NextJS.
- First, go to the Google Search Console and log in with your Google account. The account you use doesn’t matter, but you’ll need to use that account in the future to view your site’s search metrics.
- Once you're logged in, click on the "Add Property" button and enter the URL of your website that's deployed on Vercel. Click “CONTINUE”.
- Google will give you options to verify the domain. The easiest (and recommended) method is to use the TXT record which is selected by default. Click COPY next to the record configuration.
- Next, log in to your Vercel account and go to the settings for your website. In the "Domains" tab, go to the DNS Records section. Leave the “Name” field blank. Under “Type” choose TXT, and in the “Value” textbox paste the TXT record you copied from the GSC and click “Add”.
- Finally, go back to the Google Search Console and click on the "Verify" button. Google will then check your website for the verification code, and if it's found, your domain will be verified. This should be pretty immediate, but Google has a disclaimer that it can sometimes take hours to complete.
Now all that's left to do is wait.
Once your domain is verified, you can use the Google Search Console to track which pages have been crawled/indexed and how they perform in search results. Here's the statistics for people searching for "vercel google search console", which puts this blog as the ~6th result on average.
Enter your domain (or any url for your website) to check if Google has crawled or indexed your site. Indexing a new website takes time, and it takes even longer to rank on the first page of search results. But once you're appearing in results, you can see how improving keywords and page quality will rank you higher.
That's it! Big ups to the teams at both Google and Vercel for making the verification process so seamless.
