I am going to write this post as honestly as I can, which means I am going to tell you what actually matters when you are evaluating SEO speakers, including things that would disqualify some well-known names in the field. I am one option among several worth considering, and I will say so plainly rather than writing a list that conveniently ends with me at the top.

The Shortlist Problem

SEO is a field where visibility and credibility are easy to conflate. Someone who has been speaking at major conferences for five years and has a large social following can look like an obvious choice. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they have been delivering a version of the same talk since 2020 and have not been in the hands-on work long enough to know what has actually changed.

The shortlist problem is that most of the signals people use to evaluate speakers — conference credits, follower counts, published articles — tell you about past visibility, not current knowledge. For a field that moves as fast as SEO, that is a meaningful gap.

What to Actually Evaluate

Current Hands-On Work

The most reliable signal I know. Ask every speaker you are considering what they are actively working on right now for clients or their own properties. A practitioner will give you a specific, recent example. Someone who has moved primarily into speaking or consulting without staying close to the work will give you a topic area without the specificity that comes from doing it.

Specificity of Point of View

The best speakers take positions. Not provocative ones for performance — actual, considered positions about how things work and why, positions they would defend in a conversation with a skeptical practitioner. Generalists who try to represent all perspectives simultaneously tend to produce sessions that feel balanced but inform nobody.

Evidence of Audience Calibration

Ask each speaker how they would customize the session for your specific audience. Someone who speaks regularly and thoughtfully will engage with that question and ask you follow-up questions about the room. Someone delivering the same session everywhere will give you a general answer about adapting content to different levels.

Breadth of Format Experience

Keynotes, workshops, panels, and virtual sessions each require different skills. If you need a workshop, look for someone who has run workshops, not just keynotes. The facilitation skill is different and matters more in smaller, interactive formats.

Areas Worth Looking At in 2026

The topics that have the most practitioner demand right now, based on what events like SEOST are seeing in session submissions and audience questions:

  • Schema markup and entity optimization at scale
  • Answer engine optimization and AI search strategy
  • Technical SEO for JavaScript-heavy architectures
  • Content authority and topical depth strategy
  • Local SEO in markets with high AI Overview presence

Speakers with demonstrated, recent work in any of these areas are worth a closer look than someone with a broader but shallower track record.

Red Flags That Are Easy to Miss

A few patterns I have seen in speaker evaluations that tend to predict a poor audience experience.

The deck that does not update. Ask to see a recent session recording or the slide deck from a talk in the last six months. If the deck has not changed materially since 2023, that is a signal. SEO in 2026 involves fundamentally different questions than SEO in 2023 — if the speaker is not updating for those shifts, the audience is not getting current information.

Case studies without specificity. Generic case study: "We helped a client increase organic traffic by 200 percent." Useful case study: "We had a professional services client in a competitive regional market whose site had a core web vitals issue specific to their WordPress theme; here is what we found in the audit, what we changed, and what the traffic curve looked like over the following eight months." The second version is what practitioners learn from. Ask for specifics and see what you get.

The speaker who never disagrees with anything. SEO has genuine debates: the value of backlinks relative to entity signals, the right way to structure content for AI citation, how to think about topical authority versus domain authority. A speaker who never takes a position — who always frames everything as "it depends" without doing the work of saying what it depends on — is probably not going to give your audience actionable direction.

How the AI Search Shift Changes the Evaluation

The emergence of AI Overviews, Perplexity, and ChatGPT as real discovery channels has changed which knowledge is valuable in an SEO speaker context. The practitioners who were purely focused on link acquisition and keyword density have less to offer in 2026 than they did in 2019. The practitioners who understand entity recognition, structured data as a machine-readable layer, and how large language models decide what sources to cite have knowledge that is increasingly rare and increasingly in demand.

When you are shortlisting speakers for a 2026 event, it is worth asking directly: how do you think about answer engine optimization? What is your current view on the relationship between traditional search ranking and AI citation likelihood? A practitioner who is current will have a considered answer. Someone who is working from older playbooks will probably reach for vague statements about content quality.

Where I Fit on a 2026 Shortlist

I speak on schema markup, technical SEO, and answer engine optimization. My applied work is through Salterra, my teaching is through SEO University, and I co-host SEOST, which means I also see the conference and speaker landscape from an organizer perspective. I am a useful option for events that want a practitioner-style session in those topic areas. I am not the only option and I would not pretend otherwise.

If you want to understand what my specific sessions cover, the post on SEO speaker topics gives the full breakdown. For logistics and booking, the SEO speaker page is where to start.

A Note on Speaker Fees and Transparency

One thing that rarely gets discussed directly in these evaluations: speaker fees vary widely, and the pricing is not always transparent until you are well into the booking process. I am not going to quote a number in this post because the right fee depends on format, audience size, prep time, and whether travel is involved. But I will say this: if you ask me directly, I will tell you directly. I do not have a hidden rate card that I reveal only after a certain number of calls.

What I have noticed is that the speakers who are most evasive about pricing tend to also be evasive about other things — what they will actually cover, how they will customize the session, whether they are available on the date you need. Directness about fees is usually a proxy for directness overall. It is worth factoring in when you are building your shortlist.