A lunch-and-learn works when it respects what it is: a short window of a team’s attention, probably over sandwiches, where the goal is to walk away with a few things they can actually use. I have done enough of these to know what fits in 45 minutes and what gets people glancing at the clock.

What Makes a Good Lunch-and-Learn

The format forces useful constraints. You cannot cover everything. You cannot build up slowly through an hour of context-setting. You have to pick a problem the team is actually dealing with, explain it clearly, and give them a short list of actions they could take by Friday. That is what I try to do.

A bad lunch-and-learn is a sales pitch disguised as education, or a conference talk crammed into half the time. Neither works. I build these as standalone sessions with a clear audience and a specific outcome, not as a preview of something I am trying to sell.

The best ones I have done share a common structure: spend the first ten minutes making sure the room agrees on what the problem is, spend the next 25 minutes on the clearest explanation and most useful framework I can deliver, spend the last ten on two or three specific actions the team can take this week. That pattern fits the format and respects the fact that people have meetings after lunch.

Topics That Work Well in This Format

  • What your site is doing wrong for SEO — a category overview of the technical and content mistakes I see most often, explained clearly enough that a non-technical team can spot them and escalate to someone who can fix them
  • AI search and what it means for your content — a plain-language explanation of what has changed and what your team should think about differently
  • Schema markup: what it is and why it matters — an accessible explanation of structured data and why it is worth your developer’s time
  • Keyword research that is not a waste of time — how to think about search intent rather than search volume, with a practical process a team can run themselves
  • Reading your analytics for search signals — what to look at in Search Console and GA4 to understand how your SEO is actually performing

If you have a specific topic your team is dealing with, I will tell you honestly whether it fits the format or needs more time.

Why AI Search Is One of the Most Requested Topics Right Now

The AI search topic has moved to the top of the request list over the past year. Marketing teams are seeing traffic patterns they do not recognize and getting questions from leadership they cannot answer confidently. The lunch-and-learn format is actually well suited to this: most teams do not need a deep technical primer on how large language models work. They need a clear mental model for what has changed, which parts of their traffic are at risk, and what the two or three most actionable responses are.

I frame this session around what the traffic data tends to look like when AI search is affecting click volume, how to read Search Console to separate AI-related shifts from algorithm or seasonal changes, and what content and technical signals help a site appear in AI-generated responses rather than getting bypassed. That is about 40 minutes of material that actually addresses what a team is dealing with.

Audience Size and Logistics

Lunch-and-learns work best with small-to-medium groups — roughly 10 to 50 people. Smaller groups allow more back-and-forth and I can adjust in real time based on where the questions go. Larger groups start to feel like a webinar, which is a different format.

I do these in person for Phoenix metro companies and virtually for teams anywhere. Virtual works fine for this format; I have done enough of them that the logistics are not a problem.

For virtual sessions, a few things help: a shared doc or slide deck attendees can refer to during the session, a designated question channel in chat so questions do not interrupt the flow, and a recording for team members who could not attend live. I can work with whatever video platform your team already uses.

Making the Session Stick

The challenge with any short education session is retention. Someone leaves a 45-minute lunch-and-learn feeling informed, and two weeks later the specific actions have blurred. I address this in two ways. First, every session ends with a written one-pager — a short summary of the main framework and the three to five actions we discussed. Second, I am available for a brief follow-up email thread if someone on the team has a question when they try to apply something from the session. Neither of those things is complicated, but both increase the chance that the session actually changes something.

Topics to Avoid in This Format

Not everything works in 45 minutes. Topics I will push back on for this format: comprehensive technical SEO audits (there is no useful way to teach audit methodology in under an hour), link building strategy (the topic requires enough nuance that a short session produces oversimplified takeaways), and anything that requires hands-on tool access during the session. If your team wants to actually use a tool together, that is a workshop, not a lunch-and-learn. I would rather tell you that upfront than deliver a session that does not serve the goal.

The topics that work best are those where a clear mental model is the primary deliverable — not a multi-step process, not a hands-on skill, but a framework for thinking about a problem that the team can then apply with the tools and knowledge they already have.

What This Is Not

I am not going to walk out of a 45-minute session having audited your site, fixed your content strategy, and trained your team on technical SEO. That takes more time and a different kind of engagement. What I can do is give your team a clear mental model for one piece of the problem and enough practical direction that they are better equipped to handle it themselves or to have smarter conversations with whoever you hire to help.

For teams that want to go deeper, SEO University runs six-week live cohorts that build genuine competency rather than surface familiarity. The lunch-and-learn and the full cohort are different things for different needs.

Booking a Session

If you have a Phoenix-area team and want to schedule an in-person session, or if you want to do a virtual session for a remote team, reach out with your target topic, audience size, and a rough date range. I can usually confirm quickly whether it works.

For larger conference engagements or keynote formats, the main SEO speaker page has more on what those look like. For help figuring out whether a lunch-and-learn or a more formal session fits your event better, the keynote vs. workshop comparison is a reasonable starting point even though a lunch-and-learn sits outside both categories.