With more than a billion active websites on the Internet, simply launching a Strikingly website is not enough to build online awareness for your brand. In fact, working on your site is not yet complete after you hit publish to go live. The actual digital marketing work is just getting started. The next step is to submit your site for Google site verification.
What is site verification?
Website verification refers to the process of proving your ownership of a website to search engines. Getting your site verified gives you access to Google Search data for your site through the Search Console. This is valuable information that you can use to shape your future digital marketing campaigns and make further improvements on your website.
Why get verified?
With 93% of online experiences starting with a search engine, you want to make sure that your website is visible to Google. By going through Google webmaster verification, you make it known to search engines - Google in particular - that your site exists. It enables you to submit a sitemap that search engines use to gain insight into your website’s pages.
Google needs to see your website so it can crawl it and index your pages. Without a sitemap submitted, it may take some time for the search engine to get to your pages, if at all. If your pages are not indexed, your website will not get into the relevant search results lists so your chances of attracting organic traffic and generating leads from search engine marketing are pretty slim.
Without going through Google webmaster tools site verification, you are also at risk of managing your website without sufficient data to support your campaigns. Strikingly can provide you with traffic analytics through an integrated tool in your dashboard but to get a more granular view of your website’s performance data - search queries that lead to your site, click through rates, bounce rates, user demographics, etc. - you will need to get access to Google Analytics.
Google site verification also opens more opportunities for managing your website and customizing how it appears on the search results. It gives you access to tools for targeting specific audience groups and geographic locations so you have a better chance of attracting quality leads to your website.
Finally, the best part of getting your site verified is that you don’t have to spend extra for access to market data that Google Analytics can provide. This is a tool that you can access for free provided that you add the Google site verification code on your site and set up your Analytics account.
How to get started
To get your Strikingly website verified with Google, you need to create a Google Analytics account through http://www.google.com/analytics/. Add the Google Analytics tracking code to your website through the site editor and wait for the search engine to verify ownership and crawl your pages. Feel free to contact our customer support if you encounter any issues or if you have any questions about adding the tracking code to your website.
As of last year, all existing Search Console accounts are eligible for auto-verification. After adding the tracking code to your website, Google automatically verifies you as the site owner for the site without the need to go through any one of the manual processes that were originally required for this process to start.
Google periodically runs verification on your website to confirm that you still own the site. If, for some reason it is unable to confirm ownership of your site, your access to the site data on Search Console will expire after some time. Search Console will start collecting data on your website as soon as it is added to your account. You should start seeing stats on the platform soon after.
