Corporate marketing training is a different animal than conference speaking. When I am in front of a company’s marketing team, the goal is not inspiration — it is skill transfer. People need to walk out of that room and do something differently on Monday. That is the standard I hold these sessions to.

Who Corporate SEO Training Is For

The marketing teams I train most often fall into two categories. The first is an in-house team that has been running SEO on autopilot — publishing content, doing basic keyword research, maybe some link building — but has not kept pace with how search has changed in the last two years. The second is a team that has grown fast, brought on people from paid, social, or brand backgrounds, and needs everyone aligned on how organic search actually works before they waste another quarter going in different directions.

Both situations respond well to structured training because the problem is the same: the team is operating on an outdated or incomplete mental model of search. The world they learned SEO in does not match the world they are working in now, and the gap is costing them.

What I Cover in a Corporate Session

The curriculum is always scoped to the team’s actual situation — I review their site, their current rankings, and their biggest gaps before walking in the door. That said, the topics that come up most consistently are:

  • How search engines understand content now — entities, relationships, and the knowledge graph — versus keyword matching
  • Schema markup and structured data: what it is, why most teams under-use it, and how to prioritize what to implement
  • E-E-A-T in practice: what signals actually demonstrate experience and expertise to both algorithms and human raters
  • AI-generated answers and how they pull content — what this means for top-of-funnel visibility and how to respond
  • Technical SEO fundamentals that content teams can control without engineering tickets
  • How to measure what matters and stop chasing metrics that do not connect to revenue
  • Content architecture: how to build topical authority systematically rather than publishing pages in isolation

I connect each topic to the team’s own site and industry so the concepts are not abstract. If I am training a SaaS marketing team, we look at SaaS examples. If it is a multi-location service business, we dig into local and entity signals relevant to their market.

Training Formats

Most corporate engagements run as either a half-day session (three to four hours) or a full-day workshop (six to seven hours with breaks). For teams with more ground to cover or a mix of skill levels, I sometimes run a two-day format that separates fundamentals from advanced application.

Virtual delivery works well for distributed teams. In-person is better when the goal is collaborative work on the company’s own data — reviewing actual pages, running audits, and building a prioritized action list together in real time. The whiteboard energy of an in-person session drives alignment decisions that are harder to reach in a video call.

I also do ongoing engagements where I work with a team monthly — reviewing what they shipped, answering questions that came up, and keeping them calibrated as search changes. This is closer to embedded consulting than training, but for teams that want to genuinely build the capability in-house rather than outsource it, it is often more effective than a one-day event.

How I Prepare

Before every corporate training, I do a pre-session review of the team’s site. Not a full audit, but enough that I can reference their actual content, their schema setup (or lack of one), and their competitive landscape during the session. The difference between a generic training and a useful one is usually whether the examples on screen are real or hypothetical. When I show a team their own site with a problem identified and a fix demonstrated, the concept lands differently than when I show them a stranger’s site.

I also ask the event organizer or team lead to collect questions in advance. Some teams have very specific questions they have been arguing about internally — whether to consolidate URLs, how to handle category pages, whether their current schema plugin is doing enough. Starting with those questions means the session addresses real concerns rather than a pre-built curriculum that may not match what the team needs most.

What Separates This From a Workshop Someone Bought Online

I have been doing this work for fourteen years at Salterra Digital Services, and I have been teaching it formally through SEO University cohorts for several years on top of that. Teaching is not a side hustle for me — it is half of what I do professionally. That means I have figured out where people get stuck, what explanations actually land, and how to calibrate depth to a room’s level without either losing people or boring them.

When someone asks a hard question mid-session — and they always do — I answer it from real client work, not from a pre-built answer. The team gets the actual complexity of the problem, not a polished non-answer. Sometimes the right answer is ‘it depends, and here are the factors you should weigh.’ That is more useful than a false certainty.

Deliverables After Training

Every session comes with a summary document: key concepts covered, action items prioritized by impact, and resource links for going deeper on each topic. Teams that leave with a written action list execute at a much higher rate than those that leave with great notes and no clear next step. I also make myself available for follow-up questions via email in the two weeks after the session — things come up when people try to apply what they learned, and a quick answer at that moment is worth a lot more than a formal follow-up session scheduled weeks later.

If the training session reveals gaps that need more than skill-building — a technical issue, a structural problem with the site’s content architecture — I will say so clearly and can scope a follow-on audit or consulting engagement if the team wants to pursue it.

Starting the Conversation

The right starting point is usually a short call to understand the team’s current situation, their gaps, and what a successful training day looks like for their leadership. From there I can propose a format, a curriculum outline, and a timeline that fits your schedule.

The SEO speaker overview covers my broader speaking background. If your team needs an ongoing speaker presence rather than a single training day, the speaker for marketing teams page covers that format in more detail.