Log into Google Search Console, select your verified property, click Sitemaps in the left sidebar under Indexing, enter your sitemap URL in the field (typically sitemap.xml or sitemap_index.xml), and hit Submit. Google confirms submission immediately and begins processing within a few hours, though full crawling can take 1-7 days depending on site size and crawl budget. Before submitting, verify your sitemap is accessible by visiting yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml in a browser. It should display XML with your URLs listed. If you see a 404 or blank page, your sitemap isn't properly generated or placed in your root directory. Most CMS platforms like WordPress handle this automatically through plugins like Yoast or Rank Math, but custom sites need manual XML generation. Common mistakes we fix for clients: submitting a sitemap with 404 URLs, including noindexed pages, or listing tens of thousands of low-value URLs that waste crawl budget. Keep sitemaps under 50,000 URLs and 50MB uncompressed. For larger sites, use a sitemap index file that references multiple smaller sitemaps organized by content type or section. After submission, monitor the Coverage report in Search Console. Google shows how many URLs were discovered, how many are indexed, and any errors like server errors or redirect chains. If Google finds issues, fix them in the sitemap source and resubmit—Google recrawls submitted sitemaps automatically every few days, but you can trigger faster recrawls by resubmitting. You don't need to resubmit every time you add content. Once Google knows your sitemap location, it checks periodically. However, if you migrate domains, restructure your site, or change your sitemap URL structure, submit the new sitemap explicitly. At Ottawa SEO, we also add sitemap locations to robots.txt as a backup discovery method, though Search Console submission is the primary signal to Google.