Corey is the President and CEO of Voltage. He has spent 18 years working in strategic and leadership roles focused on growing national and local client brands with award-winning, ROI-generating digital strategies. He's a recent recipient of the KCDMA 2019 Marketer of the Year award.
About
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In addition to leading Voltage, he has served on the global board of SEMPO as the VP of “Cities” and previously led the local initiative in Kansas City founding the KC Search Marketing Conference. His role in establishing the conference was recognized by being presented the Skyscraper Award. He is currently a VIP contributor to Search Engine Journal, subject matter expert contributor to Search Engine Land, a contributor to Forbes, speaks locally and through North America on SEO and digital marketing topics including at SMX and Digital Summit events, and formerly served as co-host of a monthly tech radio show.
He has a passion for learning and sharing knowledge in the digital marketing industry and seeing people connect and make meaningful relationships.
Speaking Availability & Offerings
- Keynote presentations
- Single Session Digital Marketing and Search Marketing Topics
- Panel Sessions
- Moderation of Sessions, Panels, and Webinars
- Master of Ceremonies for Events
- Consultation & Advisory
- Training, Workshops, and Bootcamps
Featured Media
Speaking Topics
I love to share what I've learned.
New website launch and redesign projects are often done to improve user experience and drive business goals of increased exposure, sales, or leads. The process typically focuses on the new design and functionality of the site. Unfortunately, SEO often is a second thought or takes the back seat.
At a minimum we need to know and understand the ways to avoid disaster and take advantage of the redesign or launch process and instead try to maximize optimization.
This session will focus on the pitfalls to avoid as well as the best practices and strategic ways to use the redesign to fully realize the goals and reasons why you’re crafting a new website in the first place. This session will hit on a range of topics from introductory minimums for relaunch to some specific advanced tactics and aspects of optimization to consider and add to your process and project.
We’re exposed to a lot of data on a daily basis and we know we should be doing more with it. It seems like every time we log into Google Analytics the navigation and name of things have changed. GA is not often our first destination for data as we focus on the direct engagement metrics in the social media networks themselves and our content calendars. At the end of the day though, we have to find a way to harness what reporting and insights are available in GA and make them a part of our process.
This presentation will provide some background information on Google Analytics tracking and then quickly jump into the specific areas of reporting in a detailed, yet approachable way to show the wide range of information available and–more importantly–how you can use it to advise your social media strategy and prove the value of the work you’re doing.
How does social media impact search engine rankings? Does social factor into SEO strategy? What the heck are “social signals?”
There are seemingly endless questions surrounding the impact of social on search and we’ll tackle them in this session by separating fact from fiction and by detailing the relationship between the two.
Search marketing includes both organic and paid search options and strategies. Both can be challenging to dig into and get started with due to the number of factors and complexities with them.
This session will provide an overview of search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) advertising to show what goes into successfully managing campaigns and ways to go deeper.
Additionally, we’ll run through some basics of measurement and understanding of the impact of search marketing efforts in Google Analytics. Whether new to these topics or familiar, this session will include an overview, some processes, and valuable tools to help everyone with their next step in search.
Key Takeaways for attendees:
- Learn organic and paid search concepts and factors that go into them
- Learn the basics on measurement of search marketing efforts
- Develop an action list for taking next steps based on processes and tools presented
You’ve got a website and you’re leveraging it (or hope to going forward). Do you know how it is performing? You likely hear that people found you through it or like the content. Do you know what stood out the most to them and caused them to call you? How can you learn more to increase leads? Google Analytics is an awesome source of data, but doesn’t come with an instruction manual. Plus, we don’t necessarily have time to drill down every day to mine the data and analyze it.
This session will provide an overview of the most important information and insights that you can get from Google Analytics. It will share how you can get the most out of it while spending little time actually in the platform itself. Insights can come to you and you can use the information in ways you deem important rather than having a mountain of information to interpret. We’ll start with basics but work our way up to lead source attribution while making Google Analytics approachable in this session.
Up to 97% of consumers go online to research local products and services. What do they see when they get there? Whether you know it or not, your business has information on various review sites and social media platforms that allow users to post reviews. 88% of consumers say that they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. This stat is reason enough to make many cringe as online reviews are a source of angst and mystery.
This session will tackle the topic of online reputation management, show the importance of it, walk through the right and wrong ways to handle reviews, and strategies and technology that allow you to know when you receive a review so you can stay on top of what is being said.
Beyond that, we’ll look at ways to proactively seek out the kinds of organic reviews that your business deserves to ensure that your online reputation matches the five-star quality reputation that your actual business has.
We have a huge opportunity to reach potential customers when they are seeking our services through online sources. We hear all the time about how we need to be on certain social media networks, have a blog, constantly email our customers, and the need for better positioning in the search engines. The mix of activities and marketing methods can be overwhelming and pieced together in a way that is hard to manage.
This session is focused on engaging in the marketing activities that matter and can move the needle in terms of driving leads and business to you. Rather than guessing or hoping, these are tried and true marketing channels and activities that work and feature an approach that allows you to still run your business while growing it.
We’ll cover the most important aspects to understand about pay per click advertising, search engine optimization, social media, blogging, website content, online reputation management, and measuring all of them to ensure maximum ROI.
A common challenge for SEOs is to stay on top of the data that is being collected in analytics tools. We feel guilt over thinking or knowing that we’re not doing enough with the tools we have and not seeing enough reporting data, but often get overwhelmed with the options that exist out there.
I have 10 specific reports and/or customizations to share and none of them require rocket science or a ton of extra time to implement. The beauty of the content in this presentation is that it is powerful, yet easy to implement and utilize.
This presentation provides an overview of specific technical SEO risks, walks through how to uncover problems (some are hard to find or are hidden!), shares go-to tools, a great process for solving technical SEO problems, and some examples that bring the content into a real-world context where this process and these tools were fully applicable.
Aspects covered include:
- Technical SEO Risks
- Uncovering Problems
- Go-to Tools
- Solving Technical SEO Challenges
- Putting this into Practice
If you’re an SEO or PPC practitioner working in the trenches on a daily basis, you’ve likely had some challenges in your own organization (or with organizations you work with) on moving conversations about search marketing from a siloed marketing channel to part of the company culture. It was recently quoted that only 21% of companies even budget for SEO.
There are many efficiencies to be gained by integrating tasks and data within marketing departments and companies as a whole as we know that the old days of channel marketing without collaboration are gone.
This presentation will help you to find common ground and work to build a search marketing culture in your organization or those that you work with no matter what your functional role is. There are also tips for building a successful partnership with an agency partner if you have multiple companies/teams involved with your digital marketing.
Want a jumpstart into SEO? While Google does have 200+ algorithm variables, when we break down the basics and best practices of SEO, there’s no real rocket science going on here. We’re judged against our competition when fighting for space and can focus on being least imperfect rather than to be the most savvy in our industry when it comes to our SEO strategy.
This presentation will unpack the most important aspects of SEO to get right in the three major areas that impact rankings that can drive traffic and leads: indexing, on-page, and external influences. Most importantly, priorities and importance of activities will be provided to work smarter and not harder.
This presentation will make SEO approachable and less overwhelming than it can be to owners, managers, or marketers who have a whole lot more do to and worry about than optimizing their site all day. It will include helpful categories and hierarchy to prioritize strategy around areas that have the most impact in the least amount of effort.
SEO is nuanced and we often are focused on many larger picture business things even if our role is in marketing. Whether managing SEO ourselves or through a vendor providing the service, we need to know the basics and the things that will have the most impact and be the best investment of time and resources.
This session will break down the concept into meaningful topics. Actionable points and insights will be gained by attendees for things they can do right away to work toward making a long-term impact on improving visibility in search engines.
Today it is more important than ever to have a solid PPC strategy and ongoing methodology. With companies spending more on AdWords and the mobile-first impact of less ad slots above the fold, we have our work cut out for us. Whether managing large national campaigns or those focused on small geographic areas, we’re facing ongoing competition as well as the need to harness all of the various targeting and ad types.
It can feel overwhelming and be tempting to chase a lot of things creating a shotgun approach as a PPC practitioner. However, by staying disciplined and having full definition of your process and approach, you can stay current, get ahead, and see steady performance in the face of Google and competition changes.
While most enterprise marketers utilize software, scripts, and automation to run campaigns, the need to maintain a certain level of human touch is important. Running on auto-pilot for most of the month and only getting hands-on once a month is not cutting it for many campaigns and initiatives. I recommend a simple, yet effective approach that provides a framework for effective campaign management within an era of unprecedented change. This approach includes set daily, weekly, and monthly activities to ensure we’re spending enough time on specific areas that matter and have the pulse of performance of our efforts.
While the daily/weekly/monthly methodology sounds simple, it can really work well for keeping us on track and focused on the discipline of maintaining and improving our campaigns while having room for incrementally testing and adding new features as they roll out. Additionally, we can be agile enough to adjust to new match type updates, competitive factors, and bigger time investments like the shift to expanded text ads. What often gets lost is the simple cadence that allows for proper campaign management while also being flexible enough to adapt to changing conditions.
Attendees of this session will learn the power of a simple process as outlined above. Relevant examples will be shared of how this type of thinking both allows for campaign performance improvement over time as well as adapting to Google (right rail ads going away and expanded text ads) and competitor factors. The goal is to land on the right approach that drives to success while keeping the practitioner from feeling overwhelmed or falling behind regardless of company size, campaign size, and focus.
Organic search engine optimization (SEO) has enough specialization and technical aspects that it can be overwhelming to the C-suite.
Or, worse yet, over-simplified and thought to be something easy and that can be done quickly leading to unmet expectations.
The mysterious nature of SEO can lead to misunderstanding and frustration for CEOs.
Understanding the high-level principles and some of the important aspects of SEO success can set the right expectations with executives.
Presentations can be created and crafted to match desired event agenda or session focuses. Additional topics are also available for tailored training sessions ranging from beginner to advanced.
Additional topics and presentations can align with articles written for Search Engine Journal by Corey.
Clients Helped
Posts
I don’t always blog, but when I do...
How To Become An SEO Problem-Solver
Learn why you should adopt a problem-solving mentality and how to build it into your SEO approach. Typical SEO strategies… Read More
SEO Basics That All Web Developers Should Know
SEO shouldn’t be done in a silo. And these days web development can’t be seen as an entirely separate entity…. Read More
How To Approach Duplicate Content At An Enterprise Level
Duplicate content can be detrimental to your site’s performance and your progress in reaching your goals. When search engines crawl… Read More
9 Tips For Choosing An SEO Agency
So you’ve decided to hire an SEO agency. As a digital marketing agency specializing in SEO, we think this is… Read More
Top 9 Roadblocks to SEO Success
Like every digital marketing channel, SEO is an investment. However, unlike the other channels, SEO can take much more time… Read More
Getting Site Top Navigation Right for SEO
The structure and navigation of your website is critical for great SEO, but is often overlooked. Crawlers use site… Read More