Agency audiences are different from general marketing crowds, and sessions built for one do not work well for the other. Agency teams deal with SEO at a client-service scale — multiple verticals, varied technical environments, and the challenge of explaining complex work to clients who need to approve it. Agency owners have a different set of questions on top of that: hiring, positioning, pricing, and how to stay credible in a field that changes constantly. I have been running an agency for over a decade and I can speak to both.

What Agency Teams Actually Need

The most common request I get from agency leaders is a session that goes past the basics. Their teams are already doing SEO. They do not need an intro to keyword research. What they need is:

  • Advanced schema markup implementation — the custom structured data work that most agencies do not have in-house and that generates significant differentiation with clients
  • AI search and how it is changing client conversations about organic traffic
  • Technical audit methodology that goes beyond automated reports
  • Content architecture for search intent at scale across client accounts
  • How to communicate technical SEO value to clients who do not understand it

That last one matters more than most agency leaders realize. An SEO team that cannot explain what they are doing in terms a non-technical client can understand is always at risk of being replaced by the cheaper vendor with a better pitch.

What Agency Owners Are Usually Asking

Agency owner audiences want a different conversation. The operational and positioning questions come up more than the tactical ones:

  • How do you position an SEO agency when the market is commoditizing?
  • What specializations hold value as AI tools make basic SEO easier to do generically?
  • How do you hire and retain SEO talent in a field that requires ongoing learning?
  • What does a credible AI search offering look like for an agency in 2025?

I can speak to these from experience running Salterra Digital Services rather than from a framework I read about. That grounding in actual agency operations makes those conversations more useful than theory.

The Schema Specialty

Custom schema markup is the specific area where I have the deepest implementation experience. Most agencies treat structured data as a checkbox: add the basic types, move on. Advanced schema implementation — custom types, nested relationships, entity linking, schema that is genuinely machine-readable at a level that affects AI and rich result performance — is a different kind of work.

I can build a session specifically on advanced schema for agency teams that want to develop this as a service offering. It is one of the cleaner ways for an agency to differentiate on a technical capability that requires real expertise and is not easily automated.

To give you a sense of what advanced schema actually looks like, a basic Article markup might have author and datePublished. A differentiated implementation layers in Organization with sameAs entity links to authoritative sources, BreadcrumbList that mirrors your actual site hierarchy, FAQPage for content that targets featured snippets, and HowTo where the process is genuinely step-based. Each of those signals tells a machine reader something the raw HTML does not. When a language model is deciding whether to trust and cite a piece of content, that machine-readable layer matters in a way it did not three years ago.

AI Search and the Client Conversation Problem

The shift to AI-generated search responses has created a new communications problem for agencies. Clients are seeing different traffic patterns and asking questions their account managers are not equipped to answer. “Why is our informational content losing traffic?” and “Are we going to show up in ChatGPT?” are questions that require a clear framework, not a vague reassurance that things are changing.

A session I often build for agency teams covers exactly this: how to have the AI search conversation with clients, what the data actually shows, and what the agency can point to as tangible actions being taken. Teams that leave with that framework handle the client relationship better. Teams that do not have it tend to lose the client to the competitor who does.

Technical Audit Depth: Going Past the Tool Report

Automated crawlers — Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, Ahrefs Site Audit — surface a lot of valid issues, but they also create noise and miss the issues that require human judgment. A session on technical audit methodology for agency teams focuses on the diagnostic layer: understanding crawl budget on large client sites, interpreting canonical and hreflang signals that tools flag but do not explain, and identifying the structural issues that generate cascading problems rather than isolated errors.

One of the more useful exercises I run in hands-on agency sessions is asking a team to pull a client audit report and identify which flagged issues would actually move the needle versus which are noise. In most cases, agency teams over-index on the easy fixes and underweight the structural ones. That pattern costs clients results and costs agencies the renewal.

Teaching SEO at Scale

I run live six-week cohorts through SEO University. Agency teams have gone through those cohorts as a group, which is one way to build internal capability across a team rather than relying on a single speaker session. A lunch-and-learn or conference session plants a flag — the cohort actually builds the skill. Both have a place depending on what the agency needs.

I also co-host the SEOST / SEO Spring Training conference, which is practitioner-focused and attracts a significant agency audience. If you have team members who would benefit from that format, it runs annually in Chandler, Arizona.

Positioning an Agency for What Comes Next

The longer-term strategic question for agencies is what services hold value as AI tools take over the more routine execution work. Generic content production, basic on-page checklists, and bulk link outreach are already being undercut by automation. The services that hold margin require judgment: technical audits that go past the automated report, schema implementations that require understanding entity relationships, and content strategy that requires knowing how a client’s audience searches rather than just what keywords have volume.

I have a point of view on this built from watching which agency services retained value through the past few years of disruption and which ones got commoditized. That is a useful conversation to have with agency leaders who are trying to make hiring and positioning decisions now for where the market is going.

Bringing Me In

Agency speaking engagements I take include: team training days, agency conference sessions, client event keynotes where the agency is the organizer, and podcast appearances focused on the agency side of SEO. For agency team training, I prefer a conversation about what the team currently knows and what gaps the session should close before I agree to anything.

The main SEO speaker page covers the broader picture on formats and availability. For audiences considering how to frame the session — keynote versus workshop — the keynote vs. workshop comparison is a useful starting point for that decision.