How to Add a Page to Google (in 2 Steps)

Before you can rank well in Google, you have to appear in Google. Don’t assume that just because you’ve created your new page that Google will find it on its own. Google sometimes (always) needs help to add your page to its index for it to appear soon after publication. Thankfully it’s quick and simple to do. Here’s how to add a page to Google in just 2 steps.

How to Add a Page to Google

Step One

Step one in how to add a page to Google is to create a Google Search Console account if you haven’t already. This is a free service from Google which connects with your site.

In your search console dashboard, you can get data about the health of your website as it relates to Google.

This includes data/information about your website speed, mobile friendliness, dead links, and more.

We can even see keywords which are bringing in organic traffic via Google to our website. You can use this information to potentially better optimize existing content around those keywords or even get ideas for subsequent content.

Step Two

In Google Search Console, there’s also an option to quite literally request that any page on your site get added to Google.

Simply click on “URL” inspection in the dashboard and it will prompt you to enter a URL on your site. Enter the URL you want to check and it will tell you if the page is indexed or not.

Simply click “REQUEST INDEXING” on the right and Google will add your page to its priority crawling queue. Note that it lets you know that it may take a few days to get reviewed/added.

Other Ways to Add a Page to Google

While this is the fastest and most direct method for how to add a page to Google, it’s not the only.

Links – If another site links to that new page of yours, Google can find it via the page on that site linking to you. This is anything but efficient when it comes to indexing and is just worth mentioning.

Sitemap – Creating an XML sitemap for your website and submitting it to Google is recommended if you haven’t already done so. You can do it for free in WordPress using one of many free sitemap plugins.

Any one of these will create a special sitemap extension URL on your website. This URL is basically a directory of links to every single URL on your site.

Note that there are other ways to create a sitemap for your site. I cover how to do it without a plugin including doing it manually yourself in my recent tutorial on how to create a sitemap for your website.

We can then submit this sitemap URL to Google Search Console (“Sitemaps” from the dashboard). The plugin will update the sitemap as you add new or update existing content on your site. GSC will regularly read your sitemap and use that to find and add new pages from your site to Google itself.

A sitemap gives Google a blueprint of your website and makes it easier for it to crawl it. This is just one more reminder that it’s worth the short time it takes to create and submit your sitemap to Google between a plugin and GSC.

It’s a good habit to get into to manually submit a new URL to Google via your search console account every time you add a new page to your website which you want indexed.

The same applies if you’ve done a significant change to an existing URL and want to notify Google accordingly.

For example, if you’re doing a full scale SEO audit on a website you’ll want to do to this. As you better optimize each page, you should resubmit each URL to let Google know of the changes.