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Google Search Console for speakers: the four reports that matter · Speaker Hub
Google Search Console for speakers: the four reports that matter
Most of Search Console is built for ecommerce. Four reports are built for you, and one of them tells you which talk topic to pitch next.
•6 min read
Search Console has dozens of reports. Most of them exist for online shops with fifty thousand product pages.
Four of them are worth a speaker's time, and one of them will change what you pitch.
Set it up first
If you have not verified your site, that is the whole job for today. Google's guide to getting started walks through verification, and the DNS method is the one that survives you changing website platforms later.
Two things worth knowing before you start.
Performance data is not backdated. Verify today and you begin collecting today. Nothing recovers the last two years, which is the only real argument for doing it this afternoon rather than next month.
Verify the domain, not just the URL prefix. A domain property covers www and non www and every subdomain at once, which saves you discovering later that half your traffic was in a property you never look at.
1. Performance, filtered to queries
This is the report worth opening every month, and almost nobody uses it properly.
Go to Performance, then the Queries tab, and turn on Impressions as well as Clicks. Impressions are the times you appeared in results. Clicks are the times someone came.
What you are looking for is not your best query. It is the gap: queries with many impressions and few clicks.
A high impression, low click query means Google thinks your page is relevant and searchers, seeing your title and description, decide otherwise. That is a copy problem and it is fixable in ten minutes, unlike a ranking problem. See the title and description checks for what to change.
The report that tells you what to pitch
Here is the part that is genuinely useful beyond SEO.
The queries bringing people to your site are the language your actual audience uses. Not the language you use, and not the language conference websites use. Theirs.
Speakers routinely find they are appearing for a phrasing of their topic they would never have chosen. You describe yourself as speaking on "psychological safety in clinical teams" and Search Console tells you people arrive by searching "why nurses do not report mistakes."
That second phrase is better. It is more specific, it names a problem rather than a concept, and it is what a programme chair with an agenda gap is likely thinking about. Put it in your session titles.
This is the same signal Stage Finder works from when it matches what you speak about against events that book it. Search Console gives you the raw version for free.
2. Pages, under Indexing
Two numbers matter here: how many of your pages are indexed, and which are not.
Click through to the not indexed list and read the reasons. Most are harmless. "Crawled, currently not indexed" on a thin tag page is normal. What you are hunting for is a real page that should be there and is not.
The reasons that need action:
Blocked by robots.txt. Something is telling crawlers to skip it. This is the check that occasionally explains an entire invisible website.
Excluded by noindex tag. A page is actively asking not to be indexed. Site builders add these to staging pages and forget to remove them.
Not found (404). A page that used to exist. If anything links to it, put a redirect in.
3. URL Inspection
The search box at the top. Paste any URL and it tells you what Google knows about that specific page.
Use it in two situations. When you publish something new and want it looked at sooner, inspect it and request indexing. When a page you expected to rank is nowhere, inspect it and find out whether Google has it at all, which is a different problem from ranking badly.
The distinction matters because it stops you optimising a page that was never in the index to begin with.
4. Sitemaps
Submit your sitemap once and mostly forget it.
Worth being clear about what this does. A sitemap tells Google which URLs exist and when they changed. It is a request for attention, not an instruction, and submitting one does not make anything rank.
Its real value is the report next to it, which shows how many of the submitted URLs got indexed. A large gap between submitted and indexed is a signal worth investigating.
What to ignore
To save you time, the reports that are not aimed at you:
Core Web Vitals, unless your site is genuinely slow, in which case you will already know. A speaker site is a handful of pages and rarely has a real problem here.
Removals. This is for taking things out of the index in an emergency.
Shopping and Merchant listings. Not applicable.
Manual actions is worth checking once, so you know it is empty, then never again unless something strange happens.
A monthly routine
Fifteen minutes, once a month:
Performance, last three months, Queries tab. Note anything with high impressions and low clicks.
Rewrite the title and description of the page those queries land on.
Pages report. Confirm nothing important has dropped out of the index.
Write down the three query phrasings you did not expect, and use them in your next session pitch.
Yes, entirely, and it is the only place you can see the search queries that brought people to your site. Analytics tools show you what visitors did after they arrived. Search Console shows you what they typed to get there, which is different information and more useful when you are deciding what to write about.
How do I know if my site is indexed?
Use the URL Inspection tool on any page, which reports whether that specific URL is in the index and why not if it is missing. A site wide view is in the Pages report under Indexing, which splits your URLs into indexed and not indexed with a reason for each exclusion.
How long before Search Console shows data?
Performance data starts appearing within a couple of days of verification and it is not backdated, so the sooner it is set up the sooner you have history. Indexing reports populate faster. Submitting a sitemap does not make indexing immediate, since it is a request rather than an instruction.
The bio that impresses a programme chair and the bio a search engine can use are not the same paragraph. You need both, and most speakers write neither.
