Verifying Site Ownership & Setting Up Webmaster tools for clients who use Hubspot

[rhgraves65]

We are a Hubspot partner agency.  I'm trying to find the best route for managing Google's tools as an extra resource for insight, not the primary basis for marketing effort.  I also want to explore adwords in more depth. Finding a lot of our clients don't have one or the other or both Analytics/Webmaster tools in place.

1. Can I verify site ownership to set up webmaster tools simply by having admin access to their analytics account or will that require ownership of the analytics account? With Google merging things together these days I'm not sure of the best approach to take.
2. Usually clients have their site hosted somewhere and built on some platform and ADD a Hubspot blog and the landing pages/cta's, Hubspot tools on a subdomain hosted by Hubspot.  Hubspot has tools in it's website settings for adding google analytics (actually it's just a field to add code to the header area).  If a client has universal analytics on their primary domain do I still need to go and add a separate analytics property for the subdomain and go through Hubspot's tools to install it on the subdomain? Or just use the same code from their primary domain and add it to the Hubspot header?  What is the best route?

Any additional thoughts on this subject are welcome - with so much updating and changing coming from Google (and Hubspot as we implement 3.0 - COS) I'm trying to avoid wasted effort, outdated methods, etc.

Thanks!

[InvestisDigital]

We were able to successfully verify ownership using the Meta Tag method from WMT. We copied the meta tag, logged into Hubspot, and under Content Settings > Page Publishing, we pasted the meta tag in the Site Header HTML box.

Hope this is helpful!

[SeanHenri]

I'm curious - were you able to figure out how to verify Hubspot content in Webmaster Tools?

[SeanHenri]

I'm a Hubspot user and have been unable to verify the subdomain we are using in WMT, as the root returns a 404, and webmaster tools will only accept a URL with a 200 response.

Hubspot will not allow you to put files in the root directly eliminating the file upload option...

I'm curious to learn if you were able to find a way to verify.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

If they don't have a Webmasters account, you don't need Analytics to set it up. Just just need your own Webmasters account and add it that way.

The second scenario is exactly that. Remove the code from the website and re-verify again.

-Andy

[rhgraves65]

Thanks for the feedback.

Andy, what about when they don't have a webmaster account in place. Most of the time, they don't - so I'm wanting to add that (set it up for them) and use the analytics to verify site ownership.  Sounds like Bill is doing it this way.

If they already have a webmaster account in place and don't know it (someone created it for them and either didn't tell them or it got lost in personnel changes and so on) what's the remedy? Find and remove the code from the website and start fresh?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Lisa,

If you want to verify a website, then you need access to their Webmaster account. They will need to set you up as an admin, or you will need to add them to your own profile.

As an admin, you can do most things, but you will never be able to do things like send a disavow file - this needs the owner to do it.

-Andy

[billhartzer]

Lisa, if you have admin access to the Google Analytics accounts, that generally should be enough to verify Google Webmaster Tools. I have only run into issues verifying the site with Webmaster Tools if the site doesn't have the latest Google Analytics tracking code on it.