I co-host the SEOST conference in Chandler, Arizona with Clint Butler. Building an agenda from the organizer side has changed how I think about what makes a speaker worth booking. Let me share that perspective directly, and then explain where I fit as a speaker for other events.
What Conference Organizers Actually Need
A good conference session does three things: it gives the audience something actionable, it fits the level of the room, and it does not waste the slot on content the audience can get from a blog post. That last one is harder to screen for than it sounds. A speaker can look right on paper and deliver a talk that is basically a paraphrased article with slides.
The way I screen speakers for SEOST is simple: I ask what they are working on right now, not what they have talked about before. A practitioner who is active in the work will have an answer about a specific problem they are solving or a pattern they are seeing in client data. Someone who has stepped back from the hands-on work will give you a topic area without specificity.
What to Look For in an SEO Conference Speaker
- Recent, applied experience. The topic should come from work they are doing now, not a case study from three years ago that has been repackaged repeatedly.
- A clear point of view. The best sessions take a position. Not a provocative position for its own sake, but a clear stance on how something works and why — which means the speaker is willing to be wrong about something, which means they have thought hard enough to have a real opinion.
- Audience calibration. Ask how they would change the talk for your specific audience. A speaker who cannot answer that without seeing the question first is delivering the same session everywhere.
- A specific outcome. What will the audience be able to do after the session that they could not do before? If the answer is vague, the session will be vague.
What Conference Organizers Should Be Skeptical Of
Speakers who are primarily known for being known. High follower counts and conference credits are not evidence of practitioner knowledge. They are evidence of visibility, which is a different thing. Some high-visibility speakers are also excellent practitioners. Some are not. Check the work separately from the profile.
Also be skeptical of talks that are organized around tools. Tool-sponsored talks often deliver content shaped by what the tool can demonstrate rather than what the audience needs to learn. That is not always a problem but it is a thing to look for when you are reviewing a submission.
What I Bring to a Conference Agenda
My talks on schema markup, technical SEO prioritization, and answer engine optimization are built from active client work through Salterra and the live cohort curriculum at SEO University. The material is current because I am using it currently. I customize the talk for the specific audience rather than running the same session with a different intro slide.
I speak at practitioner events, industry conferences, and internal corporate sessions. The formats I have delivered include keynotes, breakout sessions, panel participation, and workshops. I have spoken at events with audiences of twenty and audiences in the hundreds. The session structure adapts; the preparation ethic does not.
Panel Participation
I am willing to sit on panels when the panel is structured around a specific question rather than a general topic. A panel on schema markup implementation in enterprise environments is useful. A panel on the future of SEO with four people giving opinions is not where I contribute best. If you are thinking about a panel, that distinction matters for whether to invite me.
To talk about speaking at your conference, start at the SEO speaker page. For a look at the session options I offer, the post on SEO speaker topics gives a full breakdown of what each talk covers and who it is built for.
How to Evaluate Speaker Submissions Efficiently
A CFP form that asks only for a talk title and bio will produce submissions that are impossible to evaluate fairly. The form itself is a filter. If you structure it to surface the wrong information, you will end up making decisions based on name recognition, which is not the same as session quality.
The fields that actually help: a one-paragraph description of the specific argument or technique the talk covers, a list of the three things the audience will walk away able to do, and a link to a previous talk recording or a detailed writeup of a past session. That last one is the most telling. A speaker who has never written up their thinking in a way that can be reviewed is a speaker whose ideas exist only as slides — and slides without context are difficult to evaluate.
Ask for the audience the speaker has in mind. Not the general level — practitioner versus executive is not granular enough. Ask whether the session is built for in-house SEOs managing large crawl budgets, or agency teams handling multiple small clients, or marketing managers who are not technical but need to direct technical work. Those are different sessions and a speaker who cannot articulate the difference has not built a specific one.
One document worth requesting separately: a one-page summary of the speaker’s current work. Not a bio, not a speaker sheet — a brief description of the actual problems they are solving right now. You will learn more from that than from a list of previous conferences. A speaker who is active will write it without hesitation. A speaker who is living on past credentials will struggle to fill the page.
Building a Coherent Conference Agenda
A conference agenda is not a list of good sessions. It is a sequence that builds something for the attendee across a day or two. Most agendas I see are assembled from the best individual submissions without regard for what the full day feels like to the person sitting through it. That is a missed opportunity.
The practical question is: what should an attendee be able to do differently on Monday morning that they could not do on Friday? If you work backward from that, the sessions you need become clearer. You need the foundational talk that sets up shared vocabulary. You need the applied session that shows the technique in a real context. You need the advanced session that pushes past the basics for people who already have them. You rarely need more than one session per major topic area.
Sequencing matters more than most organizers account for. A session on schema implementation that runs before a session on entity authority will confuse an audience that does not yet have context for why entities matter. Reverse those and the schema session lands on solid ground. Walk through the day from an attendee’s perspective before you publish the agenda, not just from a logistics perspective.
The best agendas also build in contrast. A technical deep dive followed by another technical deep dive produces fatigue. A strategic framing session after a tactical one gives the audience a chance to absorb what they just heard and think about where it applies. Variety in depth and format — keynote, workshop, case study, panel — keeps energy up across the day in a way that scheduling the same format back to back does not.