Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools: getting started

1. Check your Demona SEO settings first

1. Make sure your website has been launched, not just created in the editor.
2. Under Settings → Marketing → SEO, enable search-engine indexing when your site is ready to be public.
3. Open /sitemap.xml on your own website. Demona automatically manages its sitemap of published, indexable content.
4. Review the titles and descriptions of your most important pages and make sure they are not individually marked noindex.

For details, see Site-wide SEO settings and Sitemap, robots.txt and llms.txt.

2. Google Search Console: add and verify your website

1. Sign in to Google Search Console with your Google account.
2. Choose a URL prefix property and enter your website's full address, for example https://yourdomain.com/. This works with your own domain and with a Demona subdomain.
3. Choose the HTML tag verification method. Copy either the full <meta name="google-site-verification" …> tag Google provides, or just the value of its content attribute.
4. In the Demona editor, open Settings → Marketing → SEO → Site verification and paste the value into the Google Search Console field. Save the SEO settings, then click Verify in Search Console.

Demona automatically places the correct verification meta tag on your homepage. This is not visitor tracking code, so it belongs in SEO settings rather than Analytics and does not depend on cookie consent.

Another option for custom domains: choose a Domain property if you want to cover all protocols and subdomains together. Google requires a DNS TXT record for this method. You must add it at your DNS provider; Demona's HTML-tag field cannot verify a Domain property. DNS updates may take time.

3. Submit your sitemap and check indexing

In Search Console, open Sitemaps. Enter the address of your website's sitemap, for example https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml, and submit it. This tells Google where to find the list of URLs, but submission does not guarantee immediate crawling or indexing.

Next, open the Pages / Page indexing report to see which URLs have been indexed and which have not. For a specific important page, paste its URL into the URL inspection field at the top to see more details. You can request indexing when appropriate.

Not every excluded URL is a problem: a deliberately redirected, duplicate or noindex page may correctly be missing from the index.

4. Four important Search performance metrics

• Clicks: how many times someone clicked through to your website from Google Search.
• Impressions: how often your website appeared in search results.
• CTR (click-through rate): clicks as a percentage of impressions.
• Average position: a useful summary indicator, not one fixed ranking.

Under Queries, you can see which search terms triggered impressions for your website. Under Pages, you can identify which URLs receive the most search impressions and clicks.

For example, if a service page receives plenty of impressions but few clicks, review its page title and meta description. If it does not appear for relevant searches at all, investigate indexing and content first.

5. Bing Webmaster Tools: look beyond Google

1. Open Bing Webmaster Tools and sign in.
2. If you have already verified your website in Google Search Console, choose Import from Google Search Console. Bing can import the verified site and known sitemaps.
3. To verify independently, add your website manually and choose the Meta tag verification method.
4. Copy the <meta name="msvalidate.01" …> tag provided by Bing, or just its content value, into Settings → Marketing → SEO → Site verification → Bing Webmaster Tools in Demona. Save your settings, then complete verification in Bing.
5. Review Sitemaps, search performance and indexing reports. New websites may take time to gather data.

DNS-based verification is also available when you manage your own domain, but Demona's built-in field is intended for meta-tag verification. Bing is a separate search engine, so its figures will not match Google's.

6. A monthly checklist that leads to action

• Your sitemap is available to both search engines and has no persistent processing error.
• You have checked indexing for the homepage and your most important service pages.
• You have reviewed the queries and pages that generated impressions and clicks.
• You have chosen one content improvement for next month: a clearer title, an answer to a missing question, a stronger service description or a useful internal link.

Alongside search performance, look at what happens after someone clicks with Google Analytics 4. To identify visitor friction, read our Microsoft Clarity guide too.