Best SEO Speakers in Australia 2026
The SEO landscape across the Asia-Pacific region has never been more dynamic. As AI rewrites the rules of search visibility, a cohort of practitioners based primarily in Australia have earned international recognition for their research, presentations, and willingness to share exactly what is working on the ground. These are not theorists. They are agency founders, in-house leads, and consultants running experiments, publishing data, and taking that knowledge to conference stages from Sydney to Singapore. Whether you are building an APAC search strategy, looking for the next conference circuit to follow, or scouting speakers for your own event, these are the names that matter right now.
James Norquay
James Norquay founded Prosperity Media in Sydney in 2012 and has spent over two decades at the intersection of enterprise SEO, content strategy, and digital PR. He has delivered more than 65 presentations across Australia and internationally, covering everything from programmatic link building to AI-driven PR strategies for the APAC market. His agency has taken home the Best APAC SEO Campaign at the Global Search Awards and was recognised as the Best Large SEO Agency in APAC for 2025. James is also the organiser of the Sydney SEO Conference, Australia's largest dedicated SEO event, which he uses to bring global speakers to the local market each year. His speaking topics span digital PR, link acquisition, affiliate SEO, and the evolving role of AI in content and outreach strategy.
Jes Scholz
Sydney-based but globally minded, Jes Scholz is one of the most distinctive voices in search today. Described as an SEO futurist, she specialises in audience development, entity optimisation, automated content distribution, and the evolving relationship between brand and discovery in an AI-dominated environment. She held CMO-level positions before the age of 30 and brings rare strategic depth to topics that can easily drift into abstraction. A regular contributor to Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, and Moz, Jes has spoken at MozCon, SMX Munich, and Marketing Festival, and serves as a judge for both the APAC Search Awards and Friends of Search Awards. She is also the 2022 SEOktoberfest World Champion. Her sessions consistently challenge assumptions about what SEO practitioners should be optimising for in the first place.
Dan Petrovic
Widely considered Australia's most recognisable name in SEO, Dan Petrovic has spent two decades applying scientific rigour to search problems that most practitioners approach by instinct. The managing director of DEJAN, a Brisbane-based AI SEO agency, Dan holds two Google awards for uncovering internal APIs that exposed algorithmic systems. His work bridges mechanistic interpretability, natural language processing, and practical brand visibility optimisation for global clients. He is an adjunct professor at Griffith University and chairs the Industry Advisory Board for the School of Marketing, making him one of the rare SEO practitioners with a credible foot in both industry and academia. Colleagues have described watching him present as a moment of genuine awe.
Dejan Mladenovski
With 15-plus years of hands-on SEO experience spanning agency, in-house, affiliate, and freelance roles, Dejan Mladenovski is one of Australia's leading authorities on programmatic SEO and large-scale technical execution. He is the founder of Shuffle Digital, a boutique Sydney consultancy built specifically around data-intensive programmatic strategies. He has completed more than 100 technical SEO audits and authored over 1,000 NLP-optimised articles. Dejan founded and hosted the Sydney SEO Collective meetup and the OMSYD Conference, which was Australia's largest SEO event of 2020. His conference presentations on programmatic SEO secrets and technical audit methodology have become some of the most referenced sessions in the Australian SEO community.
Aaron Taylor
Aaron Taylor has built a reputation as one of Sydney's most technically credible SEO voices. As General Manager at Prosperity Media, he has worked across major Australian brands and brings a practitioner's perspective to topics that other speakers often keep at arm's length, including Google Cloud Platform applications for SEO, BigQuery workflows, and the intersection of analytics infrastructure with search strategy. He co-hosts the Sydney SEO Collective alongside Dejan Mladenovski and has become a fixture on the Australian conference circuit. His talks consistently receive strong feedback for being genuinely actionable. His visible growth as a speaker over several years, backed by formal coaching and repeated stage time, has made him one of the more compelling emerging voices from the Sydney market.
Nik Ranger
Nik Ranger is one of Australia's most distinctive technical SEO thinkers, with a sharp focus on the intersection of internal linking, machine learning, and AI attribution. Based in Melbourne, she is a Senior SEO Consultant at DEJAN Marketing, Chair of SEO Collective Australia, and a Google Women's Techmaker Ambassador. She has been recognised by Search Engine Journal as one of the top SEO experts to follow worldwide. Her work on the DEJAN internal link optimisation framework, including the open-source LinkBERT tool, represents one of the most concrete demonstrations of machine learning applied to SEO in the APAC region. Her sessions at the Sydney SEO Conference and SMX Munich have drawn strong engagement for blending genuine technical depth with clear, practical explanation.
Destiny Flaherty
Destiny Flaherty represents a new wave of APAC SEO speakers bringing in-house ecommerce intelligence to the stage. As Head of SEO at Princess Polly, one of Australia's fastest-growing fashion ecommerce brands, she presented The Ecommerce Playbook for GEO: Winning in AI-Powered Search at the Sydney SEO Conference 2026 to strong reviews. Her session used Princess Polly as a live case study, surfacing practical realities of LLM visibility for large ecommerce sites, including JavaScript rendering limitations, product feed optimisation for AI surfaces, and the growing role of schema markup in driving AI Overview appearances. Her core argument, that brands should focus on building distributed influence across search surfaces rather than chasing GEO dashboards, brought a grounded and well-received counterpoint to the AI hype cycle.
Lauren Schwartz
Lauren Schwartz brought a sharp local SEO perspective to the Sydney SEO Conference 2026 stage with her session Beyond the Map Pack: Local Domination. As SEO and Content Manager at Maid2Match, a service business with real local SEO requirements at scale, she offered one of the most pragmatic and well-grounded talks of the event. Her central point was direct: suburb pages still work, but only when the content is genuinely unique. If a competitor can copy your page, it is not doing enough work. Her practical guidance around leaning into testimonials, local data, and personal brand signals to build the kind of trust that AI systems can detect has been widely shared across the Australian SEO community. Lauren represents the growing cohort of in-house practitioners making the transition to public speaking at a high level.
SECURITY Best SEO Speakers in Australia 2026
The SEO landscape across the Asia-Pacific region has never been more dynamic. As AI rewrites the rules of search visibility, a cohort of practitioners based primarily in Australia have earned international recognition for their research, presentations, and willingness to share exactly what is working on the ground. These are not theorists. They are agency founders, in-house leads, and consultants running experiments, publishing data, and taking that knowledge to conference stages from Sydney to Singapore. Whether you are building an APAC search strategy, looking for the next conference circuit to follow, or scouting speakers for your own event, these are the names that matter right now.
James Norquay
James Norquay founded Prosperity Media in Sydney in 2012 and has spent over two decades at the intersection of enterprise SEO, content strategy, and digital PR. He has delivered more than 65 presentations across Australia and internationally, covering everything from programmatic link building to AI-driven PR strategies for the APAC market. His agency has taken home the Best APAC SEO Campaign at the Global Search Awards and was recognised as the Best Large SEO Agency in APAC for 2025. James is also the organiser of the Sydney SEO Conference, Australia's largest dedicated SEO event, which he uses to bring global speakers to the local market each year. His speaking topics span digital PR, link acquisition, affiliate SEO, and the evolving role of AI in content and outreach strategy.
Jes Scholz
Sydney-based but globally minded, Jes Scholz is one of the most distinctive voices in search today. Described as an SEO futurist, she specialises in audience development, entity optimisation, automated content distribution, and the evolving relationship between brand and discovery in an AI-dominated environment. She held CMO-level positions before the age of 30 and brings rare strategic depth to topics that can easily drift into abstraction. A regular contributor to Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, and Moz, Jes has spoken at MozCon, SMX Munich, and Marketing Festival, and serves as a judge for both the APAC Search Awards and Friends of Search Awards. She is also the 2022 SEOktoberfest World Champion. Her sessions consistently challenge assumptions about what SEO practitioners should be optimising for in the first place.
Dan Petrovic
Widely considered Australia's most recognisable name in SEO, Dan Petrovic has spent two decades applying scientific rigour to search problems that most practitioners approach by instinct. The managing director of DEJAN, a Brisbane-based AI SEO agency, Dan holds two Google awards for uncovering internal APIs that exposed algorithmic systems. His work bridges mechanistic interpretability, natural language processing, and practical brand visibility optimisation for global clients. He is an adjunct professor at Griffith University and chairs the Industry Advisory Board for the School of Marketing, making him one of the rare SEO practitioners with a credible foot in both industry and academia. Colleagues have described watching him present as a moment of genuine awe.
Dejan Mladenovski
With 15-plus years of hands-on SEO experience spanning agency, in-house, affiliate, and freelance roles, Dejan Mladenovski is one of Australia's leading authorities on programmatic SEO and large-scale technical execution. He is the founder of Shuffle Digital, a boutique Sydney consultancy built specifically around data-intensive programmatic strategies. He has completed more than 100 technical SEO audits and authored over 1,000 NLP-optimised articles. Dejan founded and hosted the Sydney SEO Collective meetup and the OMSYD Conference, which was Australia's largest SEO event of 2020. His conference presentations on programmatic SEO secrets and technical audit methodology have become some of the most referenced sessions in the Australian SEO community.
Aaron Taylor
Aaron Taylor has built a reputation as one of Sydney's most technically credible SEO voices. As General Manager at Prosperity Media, he has worked across major Australian brands and brings a practitioner's perspective to topics that other speakers often keep at arm's length, including Google Cloud Platform applications for SEO, BigQuery workflows, and the intersection of analytics infrastructure with search strategy. He co-hosts the Sydney SEO Collective alongside Dejan Mladenovski and has become a fixture on the Australian conference circuit. His talks consistently receive strong feedback for being genuinely actionable. His visible growth as a speaker over several years, backed by formal coaching and repeated stage time, has made him one of the more compelling emerging voices from the Sydney market.
Nik Ranger
Nik Ranger is one of Australia's most distinctive technical SEO thinkers, with a sharp focus on the intersection of internal linking, machine learning, and AI attribution. Based in Melbourne, she is a Senior SEO Consultant at DEJAN Marketing, Chair of SEO Collective Australia, and a Google Women's Techmaker Ambassador. She has been recognised by Search Engine Journal as one of the top SEO experts to follow worldwide. Her work on the DEJAN internal link optimisation framework, including the open-source LinkBERT tool, represents one of the most concrete demonstrations of machine learning applied to SEO in the APAC region. Her sessions at the Sydney SEO Conference and SMX Munich have drawn strong engagement for blending genuine technical depth with clear, practical explanation.
Destiny Flaherty
Destiny Flaherty represents a new wave of APAC SEO speakers bringing in-house ecommerce intelligence to the stage. As Head of SEO at Princess Polly, one of Australia's fastest-growing fashion ecommerce brands, she presented The Ecommerce Playbook for GEO: Winning in AI-Powered Search at the Sydney SEO Conference 2026 to strong reviews. Her session used Princess Polly as a live case study, surfacing practical realities of LLM visibility for large ecommerce sites, including JavaScript rendering limitations, product feed optimisation for AI surfaces, and the growing role of schema markup in driving AI Overview appearances. Her core argument, that brands should focus on building distributed influence across search surfaces rather than chasing GEO dashboards, brought a grounded and well-received counterpoint to the AI hype cycle.
Lauren Schwartz
Lauren Schwartz brought a sharp local SEO perspective to the Sydney SEO Conference 2026 stage with her session Beyond the Map Pack: Local Domination. As SEO and Content Manager at Maid2Match, a service business with real local SEO requirements at scale, she offered one of the most pragmatic and well-grounded talks of the event. Her central point was direct: suburb pages still work, but only when the content is genuinely unique. If a competitor can copy your page, it is not doing enough work. Her practical guidance around leaning into testimonials, local data, and personal brand signals to build the kind of trust that AI systems can detect has been widely shared across the Australian SEO community. Lauren represents the growing cohort of in-house practitioners making the transition to public speaking at a high level.
