I co-host SEOST — SEO Spring Training — with Clint Butler in Chandler, Arizona. It is an SEO conference, but it was built as a deliberate alternative to the kind of conference where the programming is shaped by sponsorship revenue and the sessions are vendor showcases with an educational wrapper. We wanted a practitioner event. That is what we try to run.
What SEOST Is
SEO Spring Training is a focused event for working SEO professionals. The sessions are built around things practitioners actually deal with — technical SEO, schema markup, AI-driven search, content strategy, local SEO, link building — and the goal is that attendees leave with something they can use the following week, not just a stack of business cards and a bag full of branded pens.
The format is tighter than a large industry conference. Fewer speakers, more substance per session. Q&A that actually goes somewhere because the audience is engaged rather than checked out. Side conversations between practitioners who are dealing with the same problems and comparing notes. That is the value that a smaller, focused event can deliver that a large one often cannot.
We also cap attendance deliberately. It would be easy to sell more tickets and rent a bigger room, and every year someone asks why we don’t. The honest answer is that the thing that makes SEOST useful — a speaker who can actually answer a follow-up question in the hallway twenty minutes after their talk, a room small enough that the same fifteen people end up at lunch together and keep the conversation going — breaks down past a certain size. We’d rather stay the size that works than grow past the point where it still does.
Why We Built It
Clint Butler and I have both spoken at SEO conferences for years. We have also both sat through sessions that were not worth the attendee’s time — generic overviews, vendor pitches dressed as education, talks that could have been delivered to any industry without changing a word. That frustration is where SEOST came from.
We wanted to build something where the programming decision starts with the audience question: what do working SEO professionals actually need to learn right now? That is a different starting point than: what sponsors are paying to have a slot?
In practice that means we say no to sponsors fairly often. A sponsor who wants a speaking slot in exchange for a check gets a booth and a mention, not a session, unless someone on their team can actually teach something the audience doesn’t already know. That has cost us sponsorship revenue some years. It’s also the reason attendees trust the agenda, which turns out to matter more for the event’s long-term health than any single year’s sponsorship line item.
The result is a conference that has a real community around it. Attendees come back because the sessions hold up and the conversations are worth having.
Location and Format
The event runs in Chandler, Arizona, which puts it in the Phoenix metro — accessible for local attendees and close enough to Phoenix Sky Harbor that travel is not burdensome for people coming from outside the state. The timing in spring means it is a reasonable destination for people who want to combine a conference with a few days in Arizona weather, before the summer heat sets in.
The format evolves year to year, but the core is the same: a focused day or days of sessions with real practitioners, time built in for conversations between sessions, and a genuine effort to keep the ratio of useful content to filler as high as we can manage. We’ve experimented with session length — shorter, denser slots versus longer deep-dive formats — and adjust based on what attendee feedback tells us actually worked the year before, rather than locking the format in and running it the same way indefinitely.
Who Attends
The SEOST audience skews toward working practitioners and agency professionals. These are not people who are new to SEO and looking for a surface-level introduction. They are people who are doing this work daily and want to go deeper on specific topics, hear how other practitioners are handling the same challenges, and stay current as the field shifts under AI and algorithm changes.
That audience profile shapes the session selection. We are not trying to program for people who need to be convinced that SEO matters. We are programming for people who already know it matters and want to do it better. It also means we can go further into technical depth than a general marketing conference could — a session on schema implementation can assume the room already understands JSON-LD syntax, for instance, and spend its time on the harder judgment calls instead of the basics.
We also see a fair number of in-house marketers alongside agency people, which produces a useful tension in the room. Agency practitioners tend to want to talk tactics and tooling. In-house people tend to push back with the reality of getting buy-in from a CFO or a legal department before any of those tactics can ship. Both perspectives sharpen the conversation, and it’s one of the reasons we’ve resisted narrowing the audience to just one type of attendee, even though it would make programming slightly simpler.
king at SEOST
If you are a practitioner with something real to share and are interested in speaking at SEOST, the best first step is to get in touch through the SEOST page with a specific topic proposal. We are more interested in depth and practitioner credibility than in speaker profiles and conference histories. The question we are trying to answer is: does this person know something useful that our audience does not, and can they explain it clearly? If the answer is yes, the conversation is worth having.
We also actively look for speakers outside our own network specifically to avoid the event becoming an echo chamber of the same voices every year. Some of the sessions attendees rate highest have come from practitioners nobody in the room had heard of before that talk.
What Attendees Tell Us Afterward
The feedback we pay closest attention to isn’t the immediate post-event survey — it’s the message someone sends two or three months later saying they actually implemented something from a session and it worked. That’s a harder thing to measure than a satisfaction score, but it’s the actual bar we’re trying to clear. A session that gets rated highly in the room but produces nothing anyone acts on afterward is, by our own standard, a session that didn’t do its job, even if the applause was loud.
We’ve adjusted the agenda based on that feedback loop more than once. An early version of SEOST leaned heavily toward strategy-level talks — useful for thinking, less useful for doing. Attendees told us, politely but directly, that they wanted more sessions they could walk out of and apply that afternoon. We shifted the mix toward more hands-on, implementation-focused sessions as a result, without dropping the strategic material entirely, because both have a place in a one- or two-day event.
The Broader Context
Running SEOST sits alongside the other ways I stay embedded in the SEO community — teaching live cohorts through SEO University, doing client work through Salterra Digital Services, and speaking at other events. The conference is not a side project; it is a core part of how I think the field develops practitioners and builds the community that makes it better. For more on how I approach speaking at events beyond SEOST, the main SEO speaker page covers the full picture.