Best SEO Speakers in APAC 2026

The conference circuit that has grown up around APAC SEO over the past decade is producing something rare: a local talent pool that does not need to look offshore for inspiration. From Sydney stages to international keynotes, the practitioners listed here are doing original work, sharing it openly, and contributing to a discipline that is changing faster than at any point in its history. Some have been at it for two decades. Others made their mark at a single session in 2026. All of them are worth your attention.

James Norquay

Few people in Australian digital marketing have the breadth of James Norquay's experience or the track record to match it. Since founding Prosperity Media in 2012, he has grown the agency into one of the region's most awarded SEO and digital PR operations, spoken at more than 65 events across Australia and internationally, and built the Sydney SEO Conference into the country's most significant annual gathering for search professionals. His presentations reflect the full scope of what modern SEO looks like at an enterprise level: digital PR campaigns, AI-driven content strategy, link acquisition at scale, and the operational infrastructure needed to make all of it work for major brands.

Jes Scholz

There is a version of the "SEO futurist" title that is marketing language, and then there is Jes Scholz, who has genuinely earned it. The Sydney-based consultant has spoken at MozCon, SMX Munich, and Marketing Festival — three events that programme some of the most demanding audiences in global search. She is a regular columnist for Search Engine Land and Search Engine Journal, a judge for the APAC Search Awards and Friends of Search Awards, and the 2022 SEOktoberfest World Champion. Her sessions explore entity optimisation, brand salience in AI-driven discovery, and the structural question of whether most SEO work is being directed at things worth optimising for. It is a more uncomfortable question than most speakers are willing to raise.

Dan Petrovic

Dan Petrovic operates in a part of the SEO discipline that most practitioners rarely enter: the gap between what we observe in search and what we can actually prove. As managing director of DEJAN, the Brisbane-based AI SEO agency he has built into a global reference point for research-driven search work, he has spent two decades doing experiments that the rest of the industry eventually catches up to. His two Google awards for uncovering internal API systems are perhaps the clearest illustration of his approach. An adjunct professor at Griffith University and chair of its Marketing Industry Advisory Board, Petrovic is the SEO industry's closest thing to an embedded academic — and his presentations show it.

Dejan Mladenovski

Programmatic SEO remains one of the most talked-about and least-understood approaches in the discipline. Dejan Mladenovski, founder of Sydney's Shuffle Digital and a 15-year veteran of the industry, is one of the few practitioners who can explain it at a structural level while also showing you exactly how it is executed. His background spans agency, in-house, affiliate, and freelance work, and he has completed more than 100 technical audits across that time. He built the Sydney SEO Collective community and ran the OMSYD Conference, and his presentations on programmatic strategy and technical audit methodology have become some of the most shared in the Australian market.

Aaron Taylor

Aaron Taylor is General Manager at Prosperity Media and has established a niche on the Australian speaking circuit that few others occupy: the practical application of cloud infrastructure and advanced analytics to SEO. His sessions on Google Cloud Platform, BigQuery, and the role of data engineering in search strategy speak to a reality that larger organisations deal with constantly but that rarely makes it to conference stages. He co-hosts the Sydney SEO Collective and has been intentional about developing as a speaker — a process visible in the quality of his presentations, which have grown consistently stronger over the past two years.

Nik Ranger

Nik Ranger has built a profile that is unusual in the Australian SEO market: genuinely respected on the technical side while also being one of the community's most active builders. As Senior SEO Consultant at DEJAN Marketing, Chair of SEO Collective Australia, and a Google Women's Techmaker Ambassador, she bridges the research-driven world of her colleagues at DEJAN with the community infrastructure that keeps the broader Australian SEO scene connected. Search Engine Journal has recognised her as one of the top global SEO experts to follow. Her work on machine learning-assisted internal linking — culminating in the LinkBERT tool — is some of the most original applied research coming out of the APAC region.

Destiny Flaherty

The Sydney SEO Conference 2026 produced a number of strong sessions, but Destiny Flaherty's presentation on ecommerce GEO strategy may have been the one that generated the most conversation after the room cleared. As Head of SEO at Princess Polly, she had the advantage of speaking from inside a large, fast-moving ecommerce brand at exactly the moment the industry is trying to work out what AI visibility actually means in practice. Her session covered JavaScript rendering and LLM accessibility, schema markup and AI Overviews, and the logic of building search presence across multiple AI surfaces rather than optimising for a single metric. The case study format, grounded in real data from a real brand, gave the session an authority that more abstract GEO discussions rarely achieve.

Lauren Schwartz

Local SEO is a discipline that attracts a lot of generic advice and not enough practitioner insight. Lauren Schwartz, SEO and Content Manager at Maid2Match, offered something different at the Sydney SEO Conference 2026: a clear-eyed account of what actually separates local pages that perform from those that do not. Her argument was precise — suburb pages must contain content that is genuinely impossible to replicate, drawing on local data, real customer voices, and visible brand personality. In an AI-first search environment, those signals carry more weight than ever. Her session has become a reference point in the Australian local SEO community, and rightly so.