SEO Podcast Guest

I have been a guest on a handful of podcasts over the years and the ones that worked best had the same quality: a host who wanted a genuine conversation about something specific, not a guest to fill a format slot. If that is what you are building, I am interested in talking.

Topics That Produce Good Conversations

The areas where I can go deep and stay useful:

• Schema markup and structured data strategy. What it actually does, where most implementations fall short, how entity-level markup differs from basic rich snippet setup, and what the connection is between structured data and AI citation behavior.
• Answer engine optimization. What is actually changing in AI search, what signals seem to drive citation in AI Overviews and tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, and what a realistic content and technical strategy looks like in response.
• Technical SEO priorities. How to triage an audit, which technical issues actually move rankings, what gets overweighted in most SEO conversations, and how to talk to developers about SEO priorities without creating friction.
• Running an SEO conference. I co-host the SEOST conference with Clint Butler. If you want to talk about the conference space, practitioner community, or what the agenda at a practitioner-focused event looks like versus a vendor-driven one, that is a conversation I can have.
• Teaching SEO. What works in structured training and what does not. I run six-week live cohorts through SEO University and that experience has shaped how I think about what practitioners actually need to learn versus what gets taught.

What I Avoid on Podcasts

Generic SEO predictions without grounding. Lists of tools without context for when to use them. Debates structured around which SEO tactics are dead. Those conversations produce content that sounds like SEO content and informs nobody. If you want a hot take show, I am probably not the right guest. If you want a show that gives listeners something actionable, I am more useful.

Format Preferences

I prefer recorded conversations over live formats, though I can do live if the host is comfortable with a more conversational structure. I like to know the questions in advance, not so I can script answers but so I can think through which examples are most relevant. Remote recording via Riverside or Zencastr works fine. I am in Tempe, Arizona, so if you are running an in-person recording in the Phoenix metro area, that is straightforward.

Most interviews run forty-five to sixty minutes. I can do tighter formats but shorter segments tend to stay surface-level on technical topics, so it depends on what you want the listener to take away.

What Hosts Tell Me Works Well

Episodes where we go deep on one narrow topic consistently outperform the broader overview conversations in terms of listener engagement and shares. If you have an audience of practitioners, picking one specific area — schema implementation, AEO strategy, technical prioritization — and staying in it for the full episode tends to produce more useful content than trying to cover SEO broadly.

How to Get in Touch

The process is straightforward. Reach out through the contact form on the SEO speaker page with a brief note about your show, your audience, and the topic area you have in mind. I will respond with whether the topic is a fit and, if so, we can find time to record.

If you are considering me for a speaking engagement rather than a podcast, the post on how to book an SEO speaker covers that process specifically.

How I Prepare for a Podcast Appearance

The prep work I do before a guest appearance is more than most hosts expect. I listen to two or three recent episodes of the show before we record — not to mirror the host’s style but to understand what the audience already knows and where the conversation is likely to go. If the show has covered schema markup at a basic level twice in the last six months, I do not want to walk through the basics again. I want to know what the audience has already heard and build from there.

I ask the host for three things: a description of the audience (who they are, what they do, what level of SEO knowledge they bring), the specific angle or question they want the episode to answer, and any context on what prompted the invitation — whether it was a listener question, a topic gap the host has been wanting to fill, or something else. That last one tells me a lot about what the episode is trying to accomplish beyond filling a release slot.

On the topic itself, I will typically come in with two or three specific examples ready — a schema implementation that produced a measurable outcome, a crawl pattern that shows up repeatedly across client sites, a specific AEO test with a clear result. Concrete examples are what make a technical conversation useful to someone listening rather than something they have to translate from abstract into applicable on their own.

What the Audience Actually Gets

The framing that matters for a podcast episode is not what the guest knows but what the listener can do after hearing it. Those are different questions and they produce different conversations. A guest who is positioning themselves is running through their credentials and areas of expertise. A guest who is focused on listener value is answering the specific question the audience actually has.

The episodes I find most useful to listen to — and the ones hosts tell me performed well from the guest side — are built around a single problem the listener is already trying to solve. Not a topic, a problem. The difference is that a topic is broad enough to stay abstract. A problem is specific enough that a listener can recognize themselves in it and stay engaged through a technical explanation they might otherwise tune out.

If you pitch me on an episode, I will ask what problem the listener is trying to solve. That question shapes everything downstream: which examples I use, how deep I go on the technical side, and where I spend the most time in the conversation. An episode that answers a real question a listener brought to it is more useful than one that covers a topic comprehensively.

This also changes how I handle promotion within the episode. I am not opposed to mentioning what I do — if a listener wants to work with someone after hearing a useful conversation, telling them where to find me is reasonable. But the promotion has to be a footnote to the value, not the point of the appearance. An episode where the guest spends ten minutes on their own background and five on something the listener can use has the ratio backwards. I would rather give the listener something they can apply Monday morning and let the work speak for whether they want more.