Tempe is where I live and where my agency, Salterra Digital Services, operates. When people ask me where I am based, I say Tempe — not ‘the Phoenix area’ or ‘the Southwest.’ I am specific about it because I think specificity matters, and because Tempe has its own distinct business environment that I know well.

What It Means to Be a Tempe-Based Speaker

Being based here is not a marketing point. It is a practical fact that affects how I work. I do not charge travel fees for Phoenix metro events. I am available for last-minute speaking slots when a scheduled speaker cancels — I have taken more than one of those calls with less than a week’s notice, because I do not need to book a flight or clear a multi-day travel window. I can do a site visit or pre-event meeting without building it into a budget. For local event organizers, that matters more than people expect until they have tried to coordinate a national speaker’s calendar against a Tuesday morning chamber breakfast.

More importantly, when I talk about the competitive search landscape for Arizona businesses, I am talking about a market I am actually in. I know what it looks like to rank for Phoenix metro terms. I know which industries are most competitive locally — home services and personal injury law are brutal here, medical and dental practices get more competitive every year, and boutique retail is still comparatively underserved online. I know what local citation issues look like for businesses in the Valley, because I have cleaned up NAP inconsistencies for Valley clients more times than I can count. That ground-level knowledge is different from what you get from someone who flew in to give a national talk and pulled a few local statistics from a slide template the week before.

Topics I Speak On

My deepest expertise is in schema markup and structured data — the technical layer that tells search engines precisely what your content means. This has become more important, not less, as AI systems like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, and Perplexity increasingly rely on structured signals to generate answers. I explain this to audiences in plain terms: what schema is, why it matters, and what the gap looks like between businesses that have invested in it and those that have not. I usually bring a live example — pulling up a client site’s schema in a rich-results testing tool in front of the room — because abstract explanations of structured data put people to sleep, and a real example does not.

Beyond schema, I cover:

  • Search strategy for AI-driven results: The shift from keyword ranking to entity authority and answer-engine visibility. This is the topic that generates the most questions afterward, because most business owners have noticed AI Overviews eating their click-through rate and have no framework for responding to it.
  • Technical SEO: Crawl issues, site architecture, indexing problems, and the silent technical failures that undercut otherwise good content. I like to walk through a real crawl log excerpt when the audience is technical enough to follow it.
  • Local search: Google Business Profile optimization, local schema, review signals, and how proximity and relevance interact in local results. Given where I am speaking, this topic almost always lands well because everyone in the room has a GBP listing and most of them have never actually optimized it.
  • Content strategy: How to build topical authority systematically, not just write blog posts and hope. I talk through the difference between a content calendar built around keyword volume and one built around a genuine topical map.
  • Evaluating your SEO vendor: A topic that resonates with business owner audiences — how to read reports critically and ask the right questions of whoever is managing your search presence. This session tends to run long because people start raising their hands with specific examples from their own vendor relationships.

Tempe and Beyond

I am available for Tempe events and also speak nationally. I co-host SEOST, the SEO Spring Training conference in Chandler, which draws practitioners from across the country. That has helped me calibrate what topics land for national SEO audiences versus what is specifically relevant to Arizona market conditions. A national SEO conference audience wants deep technical detail and is comfortable with jargon. A Tempe chamber luncheon wants the same underlying substance translated into plain language and tied to decisions attendees can make this quarter.

Through SEO University, I run six-week live cohorts where I teach advanced SEO to practitioners and in-house teams. That ongoing teaching work keeps me sharp on how to explain difficult material clearly — which is ultimately the most important skill for a speaker. Teaching a live cohort forces you to notice, week after week, exactly where people get confused, and that feedback loop makes every talk I give afterward tighter.

Available Formats

Conference keynote: 30 to 60 minutes, built around a single clear argument. I research the audience beforehand and tailor the frame accordingly. A room of healthcare marketers needs different framing than a room of e-commerce entrepreneurs, even if the underlying SEO principles are the same. I usually ask the organizer for a list of attendee job titles or company types ahead of time — that alone changes how I build the deck.

Workshop: Half-day to full-day, hands-on. For Tempe and Phoenix metro events I often offer a follow-up Q&A session or email thread for participants who want to continue the conversation after. Workshops work best when attendees bring their own site — I would rather spend an hour looking at five real audits than presenting fifty generic slides. See the SEO masterclass format for what a structured longer session looks like.

Executive session: An hour with a leadership team, focused on strategy and resource allocation rather than technical mechanics. What should you be investing in, what should you stop, and how do you know if it is working? These sessions are quieter than a keynote but often more consequential — this is where budget decisions actually get made, and where I spend the most time listening rather than presenting.

Webinar or virtual session: I am comfortable on camera and run tight virtual presentations. Virtual sessions have a different rhythm — shorter attention spans, more reliance on the chat for questions, and less room for the kind of tangents that work in person. See the webinar speaker page for how those work.

Working With Local Organizers

Most of my Tempe and Phoenix metro bookings come from chamber events, business association meetings, marketing conferences, and corporate training programs. I work well with organizers who have a clear picture of their audience and what they want them to take away. If you do not have that figured out yet, I am happy to help think through it — understanding the audience is half the work of building a session that actually lands. I would rather have a thirty-minute planning call two weeks out than show up with a generic deck and hope it fits the room.

One thing local organizers ask often: do I customize for repeat audiences? Yes. If I have spoken to your group before, I will not give the same talk again. I ask what stuck from the last session and build forward from there, which is easier to do when I am not flying in cold each time and can actually remember the conversation.

For the full overview of speaking topics, formats, and how to book, visit the SEO speaker page.

What I Ask For Before a Session

A short intake call is usually enough: who is in the room, what they already know, what decision or action you want them walking away ready to make. I also ask about the room itself — a hotel ballroom with a projector three feet from the front row calls for a different deck than a conference hall with a wide stage. None of this is complicated, but skipping it is the most common reason a talk falls flat. A speaker who shows up without asking these questions is telling you they are reusing the same deck regardless of who is listening.

I keep my own notes on past Tempe and Phoenix metro sessions — what questions came up, what landed, what I would change — specifically so a repeat booking is better than the first one, not just a rerun of it.