Marketing conferences invite me when they need a speaker who can handle a technical SEO topic without losing the room and without dumbing it down to the point of uselessness. That middle ground is where I spend most of my time: technical enough to be credible with practitioners, clear enough to be useful for people who are not deep in the weeds every day.

What Conference Audiences Get From Me

Most SEO content at marketing conferences falls into two traps: surface-level overview that experienced marketers already know, or vendor-pitched case studies dressed up as education. I try to avoid both. My sessions start with a real problem the audience is likely dealing with, work through how I think about it, and end with something they can apply the following week.

The topics I cover most often at conferences:

  • Schema markup and structured data — how to implement it strategically, not just check a technical box
  • AI search and generative engine optimization — what changes when ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews are the first result
  • Technical SEO auditing — what a real audit looks at beyond the automated checklist
  • Content architecture for search intent — structure that serves both users and crawlers
  • Building domain authority without shortcuts that decay

My Conference Background

I co-host the SEOST / SEO Spring Training conference in Chandler, Arizona with Clint Butler. Running that event means I understand the logistics, audience dynamics, and programming decisions that organizers deal with. I know what makes a session land and what makes the room check their phones.

That event is built around practitioners, not sponsors — sessions where people leave with something they can use. That same philosophy shapes how I approach every conference session I speak at.

Format Flexibility

Conference formats vary, and I can work within most of them:

  • Keynote (30 to 60 minutes) — broader topic, story-driven, high-level takeaways with enough depth to feel earned
  • Breakout session (45 to 90 minutes) — narrower focus, more technical, room for actual examples and Q&A
  • Panel participation — I am comfortable joining multi-speaker panels on SEO, AI search, or digital strategy
  • Workshop — half-day or full-day hands-on format, works best with a smaller audience cap

For a breakdown of when a keynote makes sense versus a workshop, the keynote vs. workshop page walks through the decision.

National and Regional Conferences

I am based in Tempe, Arizona, and most of my conference speaking is in the Southwest — but I travel for the right fit. If your conference is outside Arizona, the main question is whether the audience and topic are a genuine match. I do not take engagements where I am going to give a talk that could have been written by anyone. If there is a specific reason to bring me in, I am interested in the conversation.

For conferences with an agency-owner or agency-team audience, the SEO speaker for agencies page is a better starting point than this one.

Why Topic Specificity Matters in Conference Programming

Conference organizers get a lot of speaker pitches. Most of them are broad: "digital marketing trends," "AI and the future of search," "content strategy in 2026." Those titles can mean almost anything, which is why they often produce sessions that feel like they could have been recorded two years ago and played back.

When I pitch a session, I give organizers a specific thesis — something like: most marketing teams are adding FAQ schema without understanding that Google parses FAQ markup in context of the surrounding page content, and here is what that means for how you structure a page before you ever touch JSON-LD. That is a narrow enough claim that an experienced SEO in the room will have an opinion about it, which means the conversation that happens during and after the session is actually productive.

Specificity also protects the audience from overlap. If three speakers at the same conference touch schema markup at a surface level, nobody leaves better informed. If one session goes deep on a particular implementation question, practitioners leave with something concrete. I work with organizers on session placement and topic framing to avoid redundancy where possible.

How AI Search Has Changed What Practitioners Need to Hear

The practical questions I get from conference audiences have shifted significantly in the last eighteen months. Before AI Overviews became a mainstream concern, most of the questions after my sessions were about implementation: how to structure a JSON-LD block, how to audit for crawl inefficiency, which schema types Google was actually using in SERPs. Good questions, still relevant.

Now the questions are more existential: what happens to my traffic when the AI gives the answer before anyone clicks? What does it mean to optimize for Perplexity or ChatGPT? Is building topical authority still the right model when the AI is the one aggregating authority signals?

These are genuinely hard questions with honest uncertainty attached, and I try to answer them that way rather than projecting false confidence. What I can say from actual work: entity consistency across your site and across the web still matters enormously; structured data that provides machine-readable signals about who you are and what you know is becoming more valuable, not less; and answer engine optimization shares a foundation with traditional technical SEO even where the outputs differ.

Conference sessions that address these questions with specificity — instead of recycling "AI is changing everything" — are the ones that draw the strongest post-session engagement and the most useful follow-up conversations.

What Organizers Should Know Before We Talk

A few things worth flagging upfront. First, I do not produce sponsored content in session form. If the expectation is that I will work a vendor’s tool into my examples because they are a conference sponsor, that is not a format I can work with. My value to your audience depends on credibility, and credibility depends on not turning a session into a long advertisement.

Second, I need real information about the audience. Not a job title breakdown — an actual characterization of what they know, what they are struggling with, and what they are hoping to leave with. The better that brief is, the better the session is. Organizers who invest thirty minutes in that conversation with me get a materially different product than organizers who send me a speaker form and a room assignment.

Third, I have a limited number of engagements per year. I say yes to events where the topic and audience fit is genuine and no to events where I would be delivering content that does not play to my actual depth. That filter has been good for the quality of the sessions I give.

Preparing a Good Session Together

The sessions I am most satisfied with come from organizers who give me real context: who is in the room, what they already know, what problem the conference is trying to solve, and what topics are already covered by other speakers. With that, I can build something that fits and does not overlap. Without it, the risk is a session that is technically fine but not as useful as it could have been.

The main SEO speaker page covers logistics, topic range, and how to start a booking conversation.