Why the Next Great SEOs Will Be Builders, Not Just Optimizers

Speaker:

Phil Buckley:

A self-taught web technologist who started building for the internet in the 1990s and never stopped. Over the past 20+ years, Phil's led SEO, content, and digital strategy initiatives for startups, media organizations, and global enterprises, including IBM, where he helped optimize millions of pages and drive sustained organic growth across business units.

His superpower? Translating über-geek into plain English, and vice versa. Phil bridges the gap between dev, content, marketing, and C-suite with strategies that don’t just check boxes, they drive results

Along the way, he helped build and led Raleigh’s most successful SEO Meetup, launched the Digital Marketing for Business conference, and had his ideas on the future of media covered by Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab.

Today he's leading OnLogic's global push for world domination of the industrial computing sector from his desk in Cary.

Presentation:

Why the Next Great SEOs Will Be Builders, Not Just Optimizers:

Phil will talk about rethinking the way we work as digital marketers. For too long, SEO has been tied to repetitive workflows, endless spreadsheets, copy-paste routines, and waiting on dev teams to prioritize requests. But we're now in a moment where experimentation is in everyone's hands. With the rise of vibe coding platforms like Replit, AI copilots, and tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, marketers can combine the practical knowledge they've built in the trenches with the insights they pick up online, and then supercharge it with the jet fuel of AI.

Phil will share how he's been applying this mindset to his own work, including combining Screaming Frog with ChatGPT and Gemini to extract semantic embeddings that make internal linking far more precise.

He'll also walk through how he built his own lightweight content evaluation tool in Replit that scores writing across multiple dimensions, all in a couple of days and on a shoestring budget, instead of waiting weeks for engineering resources.

The goal isn't just to show off hacks, but to inspire marketers to see themselves not just as optimizers, but as builders of their own game-changing tools.

Venue:

FM:Systems Office:

We'll be gathering at the FM:Systems (now part of Johnson Controls) office at Raleigh Iron Works, 1101 E Whitaker Mill Rd suite 220, Raleigh, NC 27604.

The office is located on the second story of the building, stairs and an elevator are available to reach the second story.

Quick first person video walk through of how to get up to the second story and to the entrance of the office:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/i6VHRPiwwPg

Parking at Raleigh Iron Works is free and can be found on-street surrounding the building, in a nearby parking deck (behind the Ponysaurus brewery), or in the handful of adjacent parking lots.

Thank you to the team at Johnson Controls and to Brian McDonald for graciously hosting us in their beautiful office.

Agenda:

6:00pm - doors open, drinks, mingling, networking
6:30pm - presentation, q&a
7:15pm - drinks, mingling, networking
8:00pm - doors close