How to Get AdSense Approval for WordPress Websites?

Man, why is it so hard to get approval from Google AdSense? It is under construction! Not enough content! You need to fix this! You need to fix that! Gosh! I give up. Now hold the horses, because in this video, we're going to share with you the things you need to know and do so that your site can be approved by Google AdSense without any hiccups. In fact, I'm going to try my best to beat the odds. If you have been following us, you know that we often use this domain for demonstration purposes on

ly. But over the past couple of days, I've beefed up the website with a number of high quality articles, created necessary pages such as the privacy policy, disclaimer, and stuff, and have the entire website fully functional and easy to navigate. And I'm going to add this website to Google AdSense to hopefully have it approved. I am not putting a lot of hopes on this. If it gets approved, it's a miracle. And it proves that you do not need a lot of traffic and a lot of articles to get approved. B

ut if it doesn't, well, what I can guarantee is if I continue to do what I did in the past couple of days, eventually the site will get approved. Take it from someone who has done this multiple times, and this is the proof of it. But I've got no bragging rights here because it is actually a fairly simple process. And it is the same process I've used to get my sites approved by Google AdSense, and now I'm sharing them with you. Let's go. Hey, it's Jack from Rank Math, the one WordPress SEO plugin

that constantly strives to provide you with the fastest and the most cutting-edge SEO tools. And on this channel, we provide you with the most up to date SEO knowledge. So if you are new to our channel, consider subscribing. Now, having a Google AdSense account and having your website approved are two separate issues. Setting up an account is easy, but there are quite a number of things to have in place before they approve your site. And in this video, we are talking specifically about top leve

l domains, meaning the domains that you have bought, not domains from sites like Blogger.com, because the process will be different. For example, this, or Rank Math. These are top level domains. Domains that you own and not by a third party. So, without further ado, let's start with creating a Google AdSense account from scratch. If you already have an account, but you can't get your site approved, feel free to skip ahead. To start, we have to visit this link. If this is your first time creating

an AdSense account, you should click on get started. You need to log into the Google account that you want to sign up for AdSense. Take note that you can only have one Google AdSense account. You can't have multiple accounts in your name but you can have multiple websites approved on the same account. Now, once you are logged in, you'll see something like this. You'll need to enter your site, but if your site is not ready for AdSense to be reviewed, you can check this for now and add a site lat

er on. Then you can select for AdSense to reach out to you for some tips and suggestions, or not. Next, you need to select your payment country or territory. This is important. You need to select the right payment country because you can't change it later. And you should select the country where your bank account is located, be it a USD, SGD, INR or whatever currency account. I live in Singapore and I have a Singapore bank account. Google needs to verify and pay to that account, so I would selec

t Singapore. In case you have moved to a new country or territory, you need to cancel your existing AdSense account and create a new account. So please select this carefully. Once you have selected your payment country, a country specific terms and conditions will appear where you have to read and accept the terms before your account can be set up. Once you have checked this, you can now start using AdSense. Then give it a while and you'll be brought to the AdSense Dashboard, which means your ac

count is created. But before you get paid, there are three steps you need to follow. One is to provide your payment information, which is a required step, the other is to place Ads on your site, which is optional and can be done later when your site is approved. And finally to connect your site with AdSense for it to be approved. Let's start with the payment step. Click on "Enter information". Now you have the option to select either the individual account type or the business account type, and

you can only do this once. You can't change it later on. So, for example, if you intend to receive payments to a business bank account instead of your individual account, but you have not set up your LLC or Private limited company, do not set up your AdSense account yet. Get your business account set up before you provide your AdSense payment information. And if you intend to receive payments to your personal bank account, you shouldn't have to worry about this and select "Individual". Next, you

have to provide your full name. Take note, this is the name that appears on your identity card. For example, you know me as Jack Cao, but in my identity card there is no Jack, and in my personal bank accounts there is no Jack as well. So you have to follow exactly the name that appears on your identity card and bank accounts. Otherwise you will have a hard time receiving payments from Google later on. Add your residential address or business address. If it is a business account, this has to fol

low the address you have with your bank for verification later on. Following that, you can add your phone number and hit submit. Google needs to verify that you are a person and not a bot, so a phone verification is justified. Once done, this step is completed. Now you have fully created an AdSense account. Congratulations! But that's the easy part. The tough part is to get your site approved by Google AdSense. And before we submit our sites, let me share with you several pointers that could pot

entially cause your site to be disapproved, especially for new sites. Some of you may not pay attention to the menu items of your site, and you may just have the "Home", "About us", "Contact us", and the "Privacy Policy", which are the standard menu items. But Google may view it as bad navigation because they would think how are your site visitors going to access other parts of your website? So here's what I did for the BBQ site. At the header menu we have "Home", "Blog", which is the blogroll t

hat connects your site visitors to all the other articles on your site. We have a HTML sitemap that connects site visitors to all the other pages of the site. This is easily achieved by toggling this HTML sitemap option on the Sitemap settings and either add this shortcode to a page or selecting a page to be the HTML sitemap. Feel free to check out the video that is popping up at the top right. And then we have the "Grill University" with a drop down menu that includes the "Grill Maintenance". I

t has four articles in the category. In the future, we can add categories like grilling fish, grilling chicken, food science, etc., to the Grill University as submenu items. And then the other menu item is Buying Guides, which is a category on its own. And this has six articles. But what about the Cookie Policy, privacy Policy, about us, and all the important pages? I'm pretty sure you saw it on the Footer menu earlier. As you can see though, this site is relatively new. To be honest, it only ha

s ten published articles. But on the homepage itself it looks like an established site. And site visitors can easily navigate to every page of the website. Make sure that every page of your site has a menu and footer so that your site visitors can visit every page of your website if they want to. So, if your site is hit with this site behavior navigation issue, you know what to do. Obviously you also want to make sure that you adhere to all these pointers as well. Do not make false claim to elic

it a click. For example, you have placed a download button, but it sends your site visitors to a payment form. Link to content that does not exist, for example, you're adding a link to a page you are going to publish, but you haven't done so. Redirect users to irrelevant on misleading pages. For example, the anchor text of a link says, read my review on this barbecue grill, but it sends people to Amazon instead. And finally, texts on page unrelated to topic or business model will be discussed wh

en we talk about site structure in a while. What are important pages? As I've mentioned earlier, your Privacy policy, your Disclaimers, About us, Contact us, Terms of Service, all these pages don't seem important to you or your site visitors because how many site visitors actually visit those pages, right? But from Google's perspective, those are important pages, especially the Privacy Policy and disclaimers. If you don't know what content to add to those pages, there are many free important pag

e generators on the Internet, but if you find them too salesy, you can either hire a lawyer or visit your competitors site to get inspiration from them. Alternatively, WordPress do have a default privacy policy generator, which you can find under "Settings" and "Privacy", if you wish to use the default privacy policy from WordPress. Normally, a draft would have been created and you should see it under "Pages", but if you don't see that, just click on "Create" and here's the generated page. You n

eed to publish this page for it to be live. But personally, I do not use the default privacy policy page. I use a custom one. But make sure that whatever privacy policy page you wish to use is declared on the privacy settings here. Now, earlier I walked you through two categories. Have you noticed that I do not have many categories? I could have added grilling fish, grilling chicken, and other categories on the menu. But why haven't I done so? That's because empty or thin category pages in your

menu may give the impression that your site is still under construction, and Google may not approve it. I get it. People who came through your site probably came through a Google search, and they may not visit the homepage or other pages of your site. But when Google reviews your sites, the entire site will be assessed. So I would say for every category, you should have at least three to four articles on it before you put it on the menu to avoid thin content, which is a very common reason they d

isapprove your site. Also, as you're building out your sites, you should tackle one category at a time, build up topical relevance for each category before moving on to the next. Maybe seven to ten articles for each category before starting a new. And since we are talking about thin category pages, we're going to talk about thin content. Thin contents are essentially pages that offer little to no value and is often associated with pages with less than 600 words. I know word count doesn't matter,

but for certain topics like "Best Gas grills below $300", where images do not provide much value, it is almost impossible to provide value to readers with below 1000 words. You see the article I've written on the same topic requires about two and a half thousand words to make a point. We talked about what we look out for in a Good Gas grill, and we discussed in detail why we recommend each of these gas grills. I know the basic SEO check in Rank Math recommends articles to be above 600 words, bu

t it is almost impossible to provide value if the article is below 1000 words, in my opinion. And that's why I like to use Content AI to provide me with a word count range so that I know if a topic is something that requires a long form article to provide value. And by the way, once you have used Content AI to analyze the topic, the Basic SEO Check will follow the same data from Content AI. You see, if I remove part of the article, it will suggest that I have at least a number that is displayed

on Content AI. But make sure that the focus keyword in the Content AI is the same letter casing as the one in the SEO Checklist for it to work. So my recommendation when creating content is not to be stingy with words, but at the same time, those extra words should not be fluff. They should be providing value to your readers in the fastest and the most efficient way. Don't worry, I'll be talking about creating content that Google will see as quality in a while. One thing Google hates the most is

duplicate content. We are not only talking about plagiarizing content from other websites, we are talking about duplicate content on your site. There are two types of duplicate content. One is from the content level and the other is from the category level. Let's talk about the content level first. If you use a big portion of one article and you place it on another, it is considered duplicate content. For example, you have an article about the five best charcoal grills, and then you have anothe

r article that talks about gas grills versus charcoal grills. And it will make sense that in that article you place some of the top charcoal grills in it. So you copy a large chunk of the content from the other article over to this, and this is considered duplicate content. Then what about a content like affiliate disclaimers that should appear on almost every page of your website? Sometimes disclaimers can be excessive and could take up a big chunk of your article. What we recommend is to add a

line like "As an Amazon associate, your site earns from qualifying purchases, see our affiliate disclaimer" and you place a link to the disclaimer page. The other type of duplicate content is from the category level. Do you have articles that have multiple categories? Try not to do that, especially when your site is new. You see, whenever you write an article, you have the option to select a category. But as you select multiple categories. As a Rank Math user, you have the option to select whic

h is the primary category. But just imagine, in this BBQ recipe category, we do not have any content yet. So if you select that category, that category page will only have one article. When you have one article in the category and the same article appears on another category page that has four articles, Google will view it as between these two pages, one quarter or 25% of this page is duplicated content and 100% of this category page is duplicated. It is highly likely that Google would disapprov

e your site for that reason. The key to getting approved by Google is not to give it any reason to fault your site. Now this goes hand in hand with the thin content and category pages. If you don't have enough articles on your website, your site will often be flagged by this low value content issue. AdSense does not explicitly say you do not have enough content, but this is based on personal experience. So my recommendation to navigate everything I've just said is to have at least ten to 15 arti

cles spread out evenly in two to three categories. And every piece of article should have at least 1000 words and above. But don't take 1000 words as a guide. Your article should answer every aspect of a given topic and to the best of your knowledge and experience, plus the research. Whatever the top ranking articles have talked about, you want to talk about them as well. But you want to provide more than what they offer. That's how your articles will rank above them, and that's how Google AdSen

se will approve your site. Now, assuming your site is relatively new and has fewer than 50 articles, for each of the articles, you are tackling topics that don't make sense to each other. For example, you have two articles that talks about sports, one article that talks about relationship, and three articles that talks about law. And they are all not related to each other. Do you think Google will understand what your site is about? Absolutely not. Google needs to understand what your site is ab

out before it will be approved. And that's why having a good site structure is important. If you check out our BBQ site, we made it known that there are three types of BBQ Grills and there is a category called BBQ Buying Guides and another category called BBQ Grill Maintenance. And on the menu items it is reflecting the same. Every piece of article on the site talks about BBQ. So will Google understand what the site is about? Pretty sure you know it is a BBQ site, even though the domain name doe

sn't say so. But Google will understand the same. So it is all about planning your site before you start writing. If you want to know how to create a good site structure from the start, check out this video right here in that video. We have given an example of a good BBQ site structure which we have used to develop the BBQ site we have and what we have taught can be applied to any niches or industry. Allow me to walk you through the process of writing a good quality content. Firstly, quality con

tent comes with sharing personal knowledge and insights. And if you are a beginner or you know nothing much about your niche or industry, it is hard to write a good quality content. And with that said, assuming that you have the knowledge and experience, here's the process I will follow. Say you are writing on the topic. What happens if you don't clean your grill? To write unique and good quality content, I will first list and write everything I can think of based on my knowledge and experience

before I start doing any research. That way you can provide something unique. Then what happens next is I will utilize Content AI to tell me what I need to include in the article in case I've missed something. As you can see, it is telling me to write about 1000 to 1600 words. I should have about five internal and two external links. I should have about three H2 and one H3 heading tags. I should have four images and one video. And these are the keywords. Take note that these data are analyzed an

d recommended based on the articles that are ranking for the same topic. And remember, these are recommendations and guidelines. It doesn't mean it recommends 1600 words you have to follow exactly. And to be honest, three H2 heading tags is just too little. I have many reasons why people should clean their grills, and each one of them should be a H2 by itself, I'll definitely not end at three. So, based on this data the Content AI has provided, what is it saying? Other than the basic information

other articles have covered, this question "is a dirty grill dangerous?" "How long should you let a grill burn off?" "Do you need to clean a BBQ after every use?" "Does dirty grills cause food poisoning?" And in the headings recommendation, it is saying I should include a section to mention why my readers should employ a professional to clean the grill grates. And at the end of the article, I should have these questions in the FAQ section. What about external links I should add to the article?

Let's click on links. It is recommending that poorly maintained grills can cause cancer as a result of this compound called Carcinogens. Technically, I should check out all these links here to get a good idea what more I should add to the content. As you know, linking your article to external sources that are credible is a good SEO practice and that's why we have these recommendations here. You see, from all this information, I can really get a good idea of what Google is looking for in a qualit

y content. And from here, I want to provide the best content out there. So I will go to Google and search for that key phrase. I'll go through the articles and jot down all the pointers that I've missed, but I will write those pointers based on my knowledge without referencing other people's content. Using this method of writing content, not only am I basing the article on my knowledge and experience, I am leveraging the power of AI to get good insights and I'll be talking about every pointer of

those articles that are ranking at the top. That's how you create the best content. Anyway, if you are getting value from this, can you do us a favor and smash that thumbs up button? Now, this is based on my personal experience. If your site is ever flagged with sexually explicit or abusive content, but your website is totally not sexual in nature, it means that there are some words that you have used on some of your articles that may imply sensual context. Maybe an image on one of your article

s is showing too much skin. I would recommend that you visit this page, the link in the description, and scroll through the entire list and try to remember if you have used one of these words here. If there is, but you forgot which article you have used it on, go to your post list and search for that word. Most likely the article that contains that word will appear. Visit the page, remove or change that word to a different tone and that should fix it. Make sure that you visit your media library

as well to see if there are any images that are showing too much skin. If there is, let's say for example this. As you click on the image, you want to click on this "view attachment page" and it will lead you to the page where you have used this image. This is the result from one of Rank Math's settings. Under "General Settings" and "Links" you will see this redirect attachment setting. If you haven't turned this option on, the link you have just clicked on will lead you to a page with the image

only. So turn this setting on if you haven't done so, it is a good SEO practice. By the way, change whatever you need to change and your site should be good to go. You may also want to check if the domain that you have right now has a history of spamming. Yes, you may own this site right now, but maybe a couple of years ago that site was used to cause some indecent act and was blacklisted by Google. The simplest way to check this is to use a tool like "web.archive.org" as it will tell you how y

our site used to look and you may see some telltale signs of misuse. You can also use a tool like. Google's Transparency Report to confirm if the domain has some form of penalty in the past. As you can see, the site we have is relatively new, so we are safe. So that's basically everything you should look out for to get your site approved by Google AdSense. And if you think your site is ready to be reviewed, let's now connect it to Google AdSense and request for a review. All right, once you thin

k your site is ready for approval, the next step is to connect it to AdSense. Click on let's go. Add your website's URL and hit save. As soon as you've done that, go to Sites. You will see your site here. Expand this and click on request review. There is one more step, head back to "Home" and then connect your site to AdSense and it will present you with a unique AdSense code to be added to your site's tags. There are many ways to do this. Some themes allow you to add codes to the head section

of your site in the theme Customizer. For some you can visit the theme File Editor. Go to the header.php where you can place the AdSense code between the tag of your site. But for the sake of simplicity, I will be using a plugin. On your wordPress dashboard hover to plugins and "add new", search for "insert headers and footers" and you want to install and activate this plugin by Wpcode. Once installed, you will see a new menu item called "Code Snippets". Select header and footer. And now you ca

n paste your AdSense code here. As it says, these scripts will be printed in the section of your website. So I'll go back to AdSense, copy the AdSense code, head back to the website and paste it here and "save changes" and you are basically done. Now all that's left is for Google AdSense to make a decision. It will usually take a couple of days, up to two weeks. Sometime later... The moment of truth. Google AdSense came back to me with... Dang, I've actually expected this. I had most success wi

th 20 to 30 articles from my other sites. So who was I kidding? I was just trying my luck for this video. But honestly, if I put the same amount of effort from the past couple of days to continue writing more BBQ contents that will help the community, I can almost guarantee that the site will be approved. It is just a matter of time. If ten articles is not enough, make it 20 and submit for approval. If 20 is not enough, make it 30. As the content of your site grows, there is no reason for Google

AdSense to reject you. So if your site is not approved like mine, don't be disheartened. Keep moving forward and your site will eventually be approved. And once you get approved, you can start displaying ads on your site. And when you have earned over $10, Google will mail a pin that looks like this to the address you have provided, then log into AdSense account, verify that Pin, and once your account reaches $100, you will start receiving those paychecks. With all these pointers, we hope that

your site will be approved in no time. And even if your site is not approved, you now know what to do. If you find this video helpful, can you do us a little favor and smash that thumbs up button? If you haven't done so. And if you haven't subscribed to our channel yet, know that we are constantly striving to provide you with the most accurate and up to date SEO knowledge. So consider subscribing. Stay cool. Stay awesome. This is Jack from Rank Math. I'll see you in the next video.