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If you’re tired of feeling like a needle in a haystack when it comes to your online visibility, you're not alone. It's a common challenge faced by many dog trainers and animal behaviourists, given the increasing amount of competition in our industry. Of course, your online visibility is only one aspect of a comprehensive marketing plan, but for most businesses like ours, it’s an important one.

However, there’s a really simple tool that is overlooked when people first launch their dog training website. This hidden gem is a step that takes mere minutes but can have a profound impact on your digital presence by helping you to come up in search engine results.

It's Google Search Console (GSC).

Understanding Google Search Console

First things first, what is Google Search Console? Well, it's a powerful, free tool provided by Google to help website owners optimise their online presence. Think of it like your website's personal assistant, offering insights and features to improve your website's performance. It acts as a bridge between you and Google, ensuring that your website gets the attention it deserves.

There is also an equivalent on Bing but given that Google currently holds almost 94% of the market share for search engine traffic in the UK, Google Search Console should be your priority.

Benefits of Submitting Your Website to GSC

Enhanced Website Visibility

Submitting your website to Google Search Console is like saying, "Hey, Google! I'm here!" By doing so, you allow Google to index your website's pages, making them visible in search results. This increased visibility means that potential clients searching for dog trainers or animal behaviourists are more likely to find your website, ultimately leading to more business opportunities. Think of it as inviting Google round for a cuppa, to get to know you a bit better so that they can recommend you to others.

For example, imagine someone in your local area is looking for a dog trainer who specialises in recall training. By submitting your website to Google Search Console and optimising your content accordingly, your website will have a higher chance of appearing in search results when someone searches for "recall training dog trainer in [your town/city]." This increased visibility can directly translate into more enquiries and clients for your business.

Accelerated Indexing and Crawling

When you submit your website to Google Search Console, you're essentially speeding up the indexing process. Google's crawlers will visit your site more frequently, ensuring that any updates or new content you publish are quickly discovered and added to potential search results. This means that your website remains fresh and relevant, making it easier for people to find you when they need your expertise.

For example, if you’ve recently added a blog post on your website sharing valuable tips for puppy socialisation, by submitting your website (or the individual page’s URL) to Google Search Console, you ensure that Google's crawlers quickly index this new content. As a result, when someone searches for "puppy socialisation tips," your blog post has a higher chance of appearing in the search results, attracting potential clients to your website. And it’s not just blog posts: the same goes for your service pages too.

Additional Benefits

If you want to get really geeky, as well as telling Google about your website, you can also use the data that Google Search Console gathers about your site to better understand and optimise it. For example, you can learn about what people are doing on your site (user behaviour) and identify which keywords are driving visitors to your site. Armed with this knowledge, you can fine-tune your content, understand your audience better and tailor your marketing strategies to attract more clients.

Google Search Console will even keep an eye on the health of your website and flag up any technical or usability errors that may be hindering its performance, so that you can do something about them.

How to Submit Your Website to GSC

Interestingly, many self-employed dog trainers and animal behaviourists overlook the importance of submitting their websites to Google Search Console. One reason might be that they might assume that their website will be automatically indexed by Google. Others think it's a complex technical task. But, honestly, it’s really not that hard.

So… enough theory, let's get practical! Here's a quick guide to help you submit your website to Google Search Console:

Create a Google account, if you don't already have one. You can easily create one by visiting the Google Account creation page (although if you’ve already got Google My Business set up then you’ll already have an account so you can use that to log in).
Visit the Google Search Console website.
If you have access to your domain’s DNS settings, choose the ‘domain’ option. Your DNS settings are usually available through wherever you bought your domain (eg. Go Daddy, Ionos, Blue Host, Squarespace) – it’s not necessarily the same as the platform you used to build/ host your website.
If you don’t have access to your domain’s DNS settings, you can choose the other method and enter your website URL. However, in this case, be sure to use the preferred version of your website (http or https) and select the appropriate domain version (www or non-www).
Verify your ownership of the website by following the instructions provided on screen at each step. Depending on your chosen option, Google Search Console offers various verification methods such as adding a DNS record, adding an HTML tag, uploading an HTML file, or using Google Analytics.
Once your website is verified, the first thing I’d recommend you do is to submit your sitemap (see pink boxes highlighted below. Your sitemap is something that’s automatically created and won’t make much sense if you just look at it – it’s like a whole string of code. Where to find it depends on your website platform. For example, if you’re on Squarespace, it’s ‘yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml’ but if you’re not sure how to find yours, you can ask your website platform helpdesk (or just google ‘how to find your sitemap on Wordpress/ Wix… or whatever’ and you’ll almost certainly find the answer!).
Next, I would submit the individual URLs for all core pages of your site (see yellow highlighted box below) in the image below. You’ll need to do this individually for each page and it’s a bit of a boring process: you submit one URL, wait for Google to ‘fetch’ it and then request indexing (or re-indexing if it’s already indexed) before moving on to the next one. I’d do them in priority order (eg. home, about, contact, service page 1, service page 2 etc.) as there’s a limit on how many you can submit in a day but, in reality, you’re unlikely to exceed this unless you’re submitting loads of individual blog posts and that sort of thing.
If you encounter any challenges along the way, Google’s got some pretty good help pages to support you.

Next Steps with Google Search Console

When you make any changes to your site, you should let Google know through the Search Console, using the methods outlined above, to ensure speedy indexing and visibility. So, if you add new pages or change your website’s structure, you should re-submit your sitemap and any updated/ new page URLs. However, if you’ve just updated some content on a page, you can just submit that one URL instead.

Keep an eye on any issues flagged by Google Search Console (you’ll get an email), as this will allow you to address any errors that might be affecting your website's visibility or user experience. However, there’s no need to panic if you get an email highlighting some issues. Firstly, remember that it’s not usually that these are new issues – it’s just that you were just blissfully unaware of them prior to signing up for Google Search Console! Secondly, in my experience, there are two or three minor things that get flagged pretty regularly but don’t seem to actually need action… in fact, if you click to say you’ve resolved them, it will often ‘check’ and then confirm that they’ve been resolved even though you changed nothing!

Having said that, do pay particular attention to crawl errors or security issues that Google Search Console may highlight and take action, to ensure that your website continues to perform optimally.

Of course, if you want to make the very best use of what’s on offer, you can also explore some of the other features and tools in Google Search Console. For example, you could optimise your site content by analysing search queries that are driving traffic to your website and refining your keywords accordingly.

Next Steps with Improving Your Online Visibility

Once you’ve followed the instructions above and submitted your website to Google Search Console, you'll have taken a significant step toward attracting more clients and growing your business as a self-employed dog trainer or animal behaviourist.

Beyond that, there are plenty of other ways to improve your chances of being found online by prospective clients and, as luck would have it, I’ve created an e-book called ‘The Dog Trainer’s Guide to Getting Found Online’ which outlines all of the most important ones for our industry!

Of course, submitting your site to Google Search Console is one of the tips in here but there are plenty more where that came from, along with industry-specific tips and tricks (and with minimum tech speak!). For just £10, it’s an absolute steal.