Most of my speaking is squarely in the SEO lane: schema markup, technical audits, search architecture. But I also speak on broader digital marketing strategy for audiences that include people from across marketing functions, not just search specialists. The framing is different, but the approach is the same: specific, applied, honest about what works and what does not.

The Challenge of a Mixed Marketing Audience

When you put content marketers, paid media managers, social media leads, and brand strategists in the same room and ask someone to talk about digital marketing, you get a hard room to serve well. The trap is defaulting to the broadest possible framing so that nobody feels excluded, which produces a talk that is useful to nobody in particular.

The approach I take is different: pick a theme that is genuinely cross-channel but go deep enough that every role in the room learns something they did not know. The current version of that talk is built around how AI-driven search is changing what content needs to do across channels, because that is a problem that touches paid, organic, content, and brand in ways that are not obvious until you walk through them together.

What the Keynote Covers

  • How AI search is reshaping content discovery. Not as a search-specific problem but as a channel-wide question about how people find information, make decisions, and engage with brands before they reach a website. This matters for everyone in a marketing function, not just the SEO team.
  • The authority signals that cross channels. Entity presence, consistent messaging, structured content, and topic depth are signals that benefit both organic and paid performance. I explain why and what that looks like in practice.
  • Where channel silos create blind spots. Most organizations optimize each marketing channel separately and miss the interactions between them. I give specific examples of where this costs performance and what coordination actually looks like in practice.
  • What a realistic integrated priority list looks like. Not a framework diagram. An actual prioritized list of the kinds of changes that produce the most consistent improvement across channels, with the reasoning behind the order.

Framing for Leadership Audiences

When the room includes marketing directors, CMOs, or founders, I adjust the framing away from implementation specifics and toward decision-making: what to invest in, what to stop investing in, and how to evaluate whether what they are being told by their team or agency is grounded in current reality. That conversation comes up a lot in the Q and A even when I do not plan for it, so I have learned to plan for it.

I am direct with leadership audiences about the gap between what agencies often promise and what is actually achievable in most timelines. That directness either resonates immediately or it does not, and I have made peace with that being a filter for which engagements are a good fit.

Where the SEO Thread Runs Through It

Even in a broad marketing talk, I am usually drawing on what I know best: how search works, how content gets discovered, how structured signals affect visibility across platforms. I run Salterra as a digital services agency, so I am working across channels practically, not just theoretically. That applied context is what keeps the broader talk grounded rather than floating into generalities.

I also teach this material in live cohorts at SEO University, which means the content is regularly stress-tested against questions from working practitioners. That tends to improve the quality of the explanations.

For a broader overview of speaking topics and formats, the SEO speaker page is the right starting point. If you are specifically looking for something more technical, the post on a technical SEO talk covers the version of this material that goes deeper into the mechanics for a more specialized audience.

What a Keynote Can and Cannot Do

A keynote is not a training. In forty-five minutes to an hour, you cannot produce the kind of skill transfer that comes from a full-day workshop or a multi-week course. What a good keynote can do is shift how the room thinks about a problem: introduce a frame they had not considered, surface an assumption that is slowing them down, or give a clear enough picture of a complex landscape that people leave with better questions than they arrived with.

That is what I optimize for in keynote format. Not a laundry list of tactics, but a coherent argument about something that matters — delivered clearly enough that someone can explain the core idea to a colleague the next day. If they can do that, the talk did its job.

The risk of optimizing for memorability is vagueness, and I try to guard against that specifically. Each major claim in the talk gets a concrete example or a number, and I flag clearly when something is my interpretation versus established consensus. Mixed-function audiences are more likely to include someone who will push back in Q and A, which I prefer — it keeps the session honest and makes it more useful for everyone in the room.

Combining Keynote With a Breakout or Workshop

Some events get more value from a two-part format: a keynote that sets the frame for a broader audience, followed by a smaller breakout or workshop that goes deeper with a subset of practitioners. I have done this format at multi-day conferences where the keynote establishes the AI search and authority signal argument and the follow-on session works through implementation specifics for the SEO and content team members who want to go further.

That structure tends to serve both audiences better than a single session trying to do both jobs at once. If your event has programming flexibility, it is worth considering.

What to Send Me When You Reach Out

The most useful first message from an event organizer includes: who will be in the room (not just job titles — what they know and what they are trying to solve for), format and approximate length, date and location, and whether there are other speakers covering adjacent territory. With that, I can respond with a specific proposal rather than a generic availability check.

I do not have a speaker reel in the traditional sense — I have recordings from specific sessions and will share those if they are relevant to what you are evaluating. The main SEO speaker page has more on logistics and how to start the conversation.

When to Skip the Keynote Format Entirely

There are events where a keynote is not the right format, and I would rather say that upfront than take a booking that is a poor fit. If your audience is small (under twenty people), a workshop or facilitated discussion usually produces more value than a presentation format. If your audience already knows the material at a high level and needs implementation help, a working session beats a keynote. If the goal is culture change or internal alignment rather than education, a facilitated conversation with the leadership team will be more effective than a talk.

I mention this because I have seen organizations spend meaningful budget on keynotes when a different format would have done more. I am not the right choice for every digital marketing event, and I have turned down bookings where the format did not fit what the organizer actually needed. That has made the engagements I do take better for both sides.