Best SEO Speakers in Sydney 2026

If you want to know what is actually happening in SEO right now, the best place to look is not a blog post or a vendor whitepaper. It is the people taking the stage at Australian conferences, sharing real data from real campaigns, and being willing to say what works and what does not. The eight speakers below represent the sharpest minds on the Australian SEO circuit in 2026 — a mix of agency founders, in-house leaders, and independent consultants who are all doing the work before they talk about it.

James Norquay

James Norquay has been in SEO for over 20 years and shows no signs of slowing down. He founded Prosperity Media in 2012, grew it into an award-winning agency with more than 30 staff, and has spoken at over 65 events around the world. He also runs the Sydney SEO Conference, which is essentially the centrepiece of the Australian SEO calendar each year. His talks tend to focus on the areas he spends his days working in — digital PR, link building, content, and increasingly the role AI is playing across all of them. The agency has won Best APAC SEO Campaign at the Global Search Awards and Best Large SEO Agency in APAC for 2025, so there is genuine credibility behind everything he says on stage.

Jes Scholz

Jes Scholz calls herself an SEO futurist, and unlike most people who reach for that kind of label, she has earned it. Based in Sydney, she has spoken at MozCon, SMX Munich, and Marketing Festival — three of the most competitive speaking slots in global search marketing — and writes regularly for Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, and Moz. She is also the 2022 SEOktoberfest World Champion and judges major industry awards. Her sessions tend to focus on entity optimisation, brand discovery, and what AI is doing to the relationship between content and visibility. She has a gift for taking genuinely complex ideas and making them feel urgent and actionable.

Dan Petrovic

Ask anyone in the Australian SEO industry who the most technically rigorous practitioner in the country is and Dan Petrovic's name comes up immediately. He runs DEJAN, an AI SEO agency based in Brisbane, and has spent decades studying how search systems actually work — not how we assume they work. He holds two Google awards for research that exposed internal algorithmic systems, and he applies that same careful, evidence-based approach to everything from machine learning to NLP to brand visibility in AI search. He also teaches at Griffith University, which reflects how seriously the broader academic world takes what he is doing.

Dejan Mladenovski

Dejan Mladenovski has spent 15-plus years doing SEO in every possible context — agencies, in-house roles, affiliate sites, freelance work — and he has taken all of that experience and built Shuffle Digital around the thing he is best at: programmatic SEO. He has done more than 100 technical audits and written over 1,000 NLP-optimised articles, and he brings that volume of hands-on experience to everything he talks about on stage. He also built the Sydney SEO Collective from scratch and ran the OMSYD Conference, Australia's biggest SEO event of 2020. If you want a speaker who can go deep on technical strategy without losing the room, Dejan is that person.

Aaron Taylor

Aaron Taylor is General Manager at Prosperity Media and is making a name for himself by talking about things most SEO speakers quietly avoid. His sessions on Google Cloud Platform for SEO and BigQuery applications are the kind of content where you can tell someone is not just reading the documentation — they have actually built the thing and worked out where it breaks. He co-hosts the Sydney SEO Collective and has put in the work to become a better speaker over time, including working with a professional coach. The improvement is noticeable, and his talks are consistently cited as among the most practically useful at any event he appears at.

Nik Ranger

Nik Ranger is a Senior SEO Consultant at DEJAN Marketing in Melbourne and one of the most interesting technical SEO voices in Australia right now. She chairs SEO Collective Australia, holds a Google Women's Techmaker Ambassador designation, and has been named by Search Engine Journal as one of the top global SEO experts to follow. Her area is the overlap between technical SEO, internal linking, and machine learning — a space that can get very abstract very quickly, but which Nik makes concrete through tools like LinkBERT and the internal link optimisation framework she has developed with the DEJAN team. Her talks at the Sydney SEO Conference and SMX Munich have both landed well.

Destiny Flaherty

Destiny Flaherty is Head of SEO at Princess Polly and had one of the most talked-about sessions at the Sydney SEO Conference 2026. She presented on GEO strategy for ecommerce — a topic everyone is circling but few people can speak to with actual data behind them. Using Princess Polly as a case study, she walked through what LLM visibility actually looks like in practice: why JavaScript-heavy sites are largely invisible to AI systems, how schema markup is influencing AI Overview appearances, and what product feed optimisation looks like when you are thinking about AI surfaces, not just Google Shopping. Her core message — stop chasing GEO dashboards and start building real distributed influence — was well timed.

Lauren Schwartz

Lauren Schwartz is SEO and Content Manager at Maid2Match and gave one of the clearest and most quotable talks at the Sydney SEO Conference 2026. Her session on local SEO in an AI search environment made a point that sounds obvious once you hear it but clearly is not being applied widely enough: if a competitor could take your suburb page, change the location name, and publish it as their own, the page is not working hard enough. Local data, real testimonials, visible team presence, and a genuine brand voice are what separate pages that build long-term trust — in users and in AI systems — from those that simply exist. Practical, clear, and directly applicable.