The independently confirmed record
I have spoken at search marketing and domain name conferences since the early 2000s. This page splits that record into two tiers, because the difference between what a third party documents and what only I document is the entire point of publishing a record at all.
These engagements are confirmed by organizer pages or third-party sources rather than by me:
- BrightonSEO, September 2023. A talk titled Advanced link profile analysis in 2023, plus a seat on the conference link building panel alongside Zoe Burke and Anna Bravington. BrightonSEO's own speaker page carries both sessions, and it is also the source that corroborates my 1996 start date in organic SEO. The slide deck from that talk is public on Speaker Deck under the handle bhartzer, so you can read the actual methodology rather than take my description of it.
- State of Search 2020 — Chair. I chaired State of Search, the Dallas conference run by DFWSEM, in the year it ran virtually. The October 21, 2020 press release for the event identifies me as State of Search Chair and co-founder of DFWSEM and quotes me by name. My CircleID member profile records the same chairmanship independently. I serve on the State of Search board, and the organization lists me as a board member as of 2025.
- Pubcon. Pubcon maintains an official speaker biography for me, describing me as an independent SEO consultant at Hartzer Consulting and a frequent speaker at industry conferences including SMX and Pubcon. That page gives no session titles and no years, and I am not going to supply either from memory and present them as confirmed.
- UnGagged Las Vegas 2015. Listed on the official UnGagged event agenda and in UnGagged's own speaker directory.
If you are vetting me as a speaker, or as an expert whose representations will be tested, start with that tier. It does not depend on my say-so.
Where the rest of this record comes from
Everything in the year-by-year list below is drawn from my own speaking page at BillHartzer.com, which I maintained over the years as I traveled. I am publishing it as self-reported, and I would rather be specific about what that means than blur the line and hope nobody checks.
Conference websites are among the least durable documents on the internet. Organizers rebuild their sites every couple of years, sponsors and platforms change, event software companies go out of business, and a session page from 2014 usually survives as a URL in a search index long after the page behind it stopped resolving. My own NamesCon speaker profiles are a clean illustration. The 2015 and 2016 pages are still indexed and both return a 404 when you fetch them now. I know I was there. I cannot show you the agenda, so I do not publish the session titles for those years at all.
The honest treatment is to say which tier a claim sits in and let the reader weigh it. A record that quietly promotes everything to confirmed is worth less than one that shows you where the seams are. If you are a retaining attorney reading this page to judge how carefully I characterize evidence, that is a fair use of it, and this is the sample.
The self-reported speaking history, by year
Source for all of the following, unless noted: my own speaking page. Where a talk title is listed, it is the title I recorded at the time.
2017
- NamesCon — January, Las Vegas, Nevada
- SMX West — March, San Jose, California
- Engage, SEMpdx — March, Portland, Oregon
- DNHouston — April, Houston, Texas
2016
- Rocks Digital — June, Dallas, Texas: New gTLD Domain Names and the Not Com Revolution
- State of Search — November, Dallas, Texas: Advanced Link Training, sponsored by Majestic
2015
- SearchFest — February, Portland, Oregon: How to Perform an SEO Audit
- SMX West — March, San Jose, California: session on HTTPS and secure websites
- MarTech — March and April, San Francisco, California
- Pubcon Austin — April, Austin, Texas: Search and Social
- ICANN 53 — June, Buenos Aires, Argentina: presentation for the Domain Name Association
- ClickZ Live Toronto — June, Toronto: Back to the Future of SEO
- Afilias Summit — September, Beijing, China: keynote
- The Domain Conference — September, Fort Lauderdale, Florida
- SMX East — September, New York, New York
- Pubcon Las Vegas — October: SEO Fundamentals, and Search and Social Content Strategy
- ICANN 54 — October, Dublin, Ireland
- Digital Summit DC — October, McLean, Virginia
- UnGagged — November, Las Vegas, Nevada (independently confirmed, above)
- Internet Summit — November, Raleigh, North Carolina
- State of Search — November, Dallas, Texas
- Digital Summit Dallas — December, Dallas, Texas
2014
- DomainFest — March 31 to April 2
- Pubcon South Florida — April 24
- DBR FunFest — June 25 to 28
- DFW SEO Meetup — August 12: Google Panda, Penguin and Pigeon
- Advanced Link Training — September 25
- Little Rock Tech Fest — September 26
- Pubcon Las Vegas — October 6 to 10: Social Media and SEO
- State of Search — November, Dallas, Texas: Google Algorithm Updates
- Dallas Digital Summit — December 9 and 10, Irving, Texas: Majestic ambassador booth
2013
- Pubcon South — February, Austin, Texas
- Pubcon New Orleans — April, New Orleans, Louisiana
- Domain Boardroom Conference — May, Dana Point, California: keynote
- Search Engine Strategies Toronto — June, Toronto
- Pubcon Las Vegas — October
- State of Search — November, Dallas, Texas
Earlier, and in general terms
My Hartzer Consulting biography records that I was a frequent speaker at Search Engine Strategies conferences in the early 2000s, and subsequently at Pubcon, State of Search and SMX. My first Search Engine Strategies invitation, to the Toronto event, came while I was in-house at a telecommunications software company in North Dallas. I have not located an archived SES agenda for any specific year or city, so those appearances remain self-reported without a year attached to them. Search Engine Strategies Toronto appears twice in my own records, once in the early 2000s and once in June 2013.
The international and domain-industry engagements in the list above are the ones people ask me about most: the keynote at the Afilias summit in Beijing, and the two guest presentations for the Domain Name Association at ICANN meetings, ICANN 53 in Buenos Aires and ICANN 54 in Dublin. Those are also self-reported. My BrightonSEO speaker page is the organizer document I point people to when they want something they can verify in one click.
What I speak about
The talks group into four subjects, and they are the four subjects I work in daily rather than a list assembled to look broad.
Link profile analysis. How to read a link profile as evidence: what the metrics actually measure, how to separate a natural profile from a purchased one, what a real disavow decision looks like versus a reflexive one, and why most link audits fail by treating every low-quality link as equally urgent. This was the BrightonSEO 2023 talk and the Advanced Link Training sessions before it.
Technical SEO audits. Crawling, indexation, rendering, canonicalization and site architecture, taught as a diagnostic sequence rather than a checklist. My SearchFest talk on performing an SEO audit was the earliest version of this. The material has changed, but the ordering principle has not: find what the crawler receives before you form a theory about what the search engine thinks.
Domain names and search engines. New gTLDs and whether the extension itself affects performance, exact match domains, how domains are and are not treated differently in indexing and ranking, and what actually happens to search visibility when a site changes domain. This is the subject I have written about at CircleID and spoken about at Rocks Digital, the Afilias summit and the domain conferences.
Domain security, theft and recovery. Domain background checks, what a name's history can cost a buyer who never looked, how domain theft actually happens at the registrar and DNS layer, and what a recovery process involves. This grew out of the background-check algorithm I built in 2013 and the recovery work I have done since.
What I do not do from a stage is a vendor pitch. I disclose the tools I have a relationship with, including Majestic and OnCrawl, and I would rather show the analysis and let the audience decide what to buy.
Inviting me to speak
This site does not take bookings. Speaking inquiries, like everything else commercial, go through Hartzer Consulting.
What is useful in a first message: the audience and roughly how technical they are, the format and length, the date and city, whether the session is recorded or streamed, and whether you want a talk, a workshop, a panel seat or a keynote. Those five things determine whether I am the right speaker for the slot, and I would rather tell you no quickly than deliver a mismatched session.
Two practical notes. First, I prepare a new deck for the subject and the audience rather than carrying one deck between conferences, so the more specific you are about what your attendees are struggling with, the more useful the session is. Second, I make slides available after the event where the organizer's policy allows it, which is why the BrightonSEO 2023 deck is public. A talk that cannot be checked afterward is a talk the audience has to take on faith, and I would rather they did not have to.