Speaking to an in-house marketing team is different from speaking at a conference. Related: SEO Conference Speaker. At a conference, I am talking to a mixed room of people who may never work together. When I come into a company to speak to their marketing team, everyone in that room shares the same site, the same goals, and the same leadership pressure. The session needs to be about their situation, not a generic overview of SEO.

What In-House Marketing Teams Actually Need

Most in-house teams I work with are not starting from zero. They have a site that is live, some organic traffic, content that has been published, and a set of rankings that are either growing, flat, or declining. What they often lack is a clear framework for what to prioritize and why, and a shared vocabulary so that the content person, the technical person, and the brand person can have the same conversation about what matters.

That is the gap I try to close. By the end of a session, the team should agree on what the current biggest lever is, what they are going to do differently starting Monday, and what they should stop arguing about because it does not actually move the needle. Alignment on the wrong things is as costly as misalignment — I try to help teams identify which debates are worth having and which are distractions.

Topics I Cover With Marketing Teams

I scope the session to the team before I arrive, but the topics that come up most consistently are:

  • How search engines understand and evaluate content now — entities, E-E-A-T signals, and the shift away from pure keyword matching
  • Schema markup and structured data: what it is, what it does, and why most in-house teams are not using it as effectively as they could
  • AI-generated answer features: how content gets selected for AI Overviews and third-party AI systems, and what that means for your content and visibility strategy
  • Content architecture: how to structure a site so that topic authority builds over time instead of each piece of content competing with the others
  • Measurement: which metrics to watch, which to ignore, and how to connect organic search activity to business outcomes that leadership cares about
  • Internal alignment: how to explain algorithm changes to leadership, how to prioritize competing requests, how to make the case for technical work that does not have obvious immediate ROI
  • Competitive analysis: how to understand what competitors are doing in search and what conclusions are and are not warranted from that analysis

That last bucket — internal alignment — matters more than most people admit. A lot of in-house SEO stalls not because the team does not know what to do but because they cannot get the organization to let them do it. I give teams language for those conversations. Related: Best SEO Speakers in 2026.

How I Prepare for a Team Session

Before showing up, I want to understand the team’s current situation: their site, their rankings, their recent wins and current frustrations, and what leadership is asking them to prove. I do a light pre-session review — not a full audit, but enough that I am not asking basic questions the team has already answered a hundred times.

That preparation changes the session significantly. Instead of generic examples, I can reference the team’s own content, their own schema (or lack of it), and their actual competitive landscape. People pay attention differently when the example on the screen is their site. They also tend to raise better questions because the abstract has become concrete.

Ongoing Speaker Engagements

Some teams book me once and that is the right call. Others benefit from a quarterly or monthly check-in format where I come back to review what changed, answer the questions that came up over the preceding weeks, and recalibrate based on what search is doing. For teams whose leadership wants a strategic-level view, a digital marketing keynote can complement the team session. This is closer to a retained advisor relationship than a single speaking engagement, but it works especially well for teams that are building their SEO capability in-house and want an experienced practitioner to pressure-test their thinking.

Through Salterra Digital Services and SEO University, I have worked with enough in-house teams to recognize the ones that will execute well on a single session versus the ones that need ongoing reinforcement. I will tell you honestly which situation I think you are in.

Team Size and Format Considerations

I have run sessions for teams of four and teams of forty. The dynamics are very different. A small team can work interactively for most of the session — looking at the site together, building a priority list in real time. A larger team needs more structure, usually a presentation format followed by breakout discussions and then a reconvening to align on priorities.

Virtual works for both sizes if the platform is set up correctly. In-person is better when the team is co-located and you want the whiteboard-and-sticky-notes energy that drives real alignment decisions. The best in-person team sessions I have run ended with a one-page priority list on the whiteboard that the team photographed before leaving. That is a concrete artifact that drives action in a way that a shared doc link rarely does.

What the Session Does Not Do

I will not tell a team what their content calendar should look like, what keywords to target, or what specific pages to create. Those decisions require domain knowledge the team has and I do not. If you want to hear how I think about these questions in a less structured setting, the SEO podcast guest page covers that format. What I do is give them a framework for making those decisions well — so the content calendar and the keyword choices and the page structure all serve a coherent strategy rather than reflecting whoever had the loudest opinion in the last planning meeting.

Next Step

The right starting point is a short conversation about your team’s current situation and what you want them to walk away from the session knowing or doing differently. From there I can scope a format that fits your team size, schedule, and goals.

The SEO speaker page covers the full range of formats I work in. For a training-focused engagement where skill-building is the primary goal, the corporate marketing trainer page covers that format in more detail.