How to Format and Deliver Your First Conference Deck
Written by: Noah Learner Tags: jobs-career, community, content, newsletter
Published: Jul 2, 2026 | Last Updated: Jul 27, 2026
● From the Community
Someone in The SEO Community Slack asked where to even start when it comes to formatting a first conference deck. I had a lot of thoughts. Here's what I told them.
Building Your Decks For Your Conference Talk
Look at my speakerdeck files: speakerdeck.com/thekraken. They are totally good enough, and if you were to deconstruct them you'd see they are free images as background (almost always space images) with as few words per slide as possible.
Here's what I've learned:
- Bulleted lists should become multiple slides so there is one point per slide.
- Never let your slides have word for word what you want to say. They are there to support you and help you remember what to talk about, but the audience should be paying attention to YOU.
- Make the font huge.
- No weird punctuation or capitalization.
- Cut, cut, cut.
Making each slide worthy of someone taking a pic of it is too high a bar, and also means that the audience won't be listening to you. The most important thing? Talk about what you want to learn about. I use my talks as a twofer and sometimes a threefer. I want to learn about a topic, be known for a topic, or maybe sell something related to it. Don't worry about "Is there an audience for this?" There's ALWAYS an audience. Instead, focus on the storytelling. Craft a hook. Get the audience to FEEL something. Then they'll pay attention as you talk.
- Speak SLOWLY.
- PAUSE A LOT to let folks consider and remember your points.
- Don't use videos or GIFs. They really do break a lot.
- Don't try to tell jokes. Let them just happen. There's nothing worse than a joke you practiced 20 times and then doesn't land. I've witnessed this moment destroy someone's talk multiple times.
Practice enough to feel comfortable with the content. And when you get your first chance, remember that you just have to be YOU. They said yes to you and not anyone else. This one thing makes it so much easier because all you have to be is yourself.
In the past year I've had to go in front of Rand and behind Mike King. Trying to be as good or better than them would do anyone's head in. You just have to be you.
Montserrat Cano added something that I think completes the picture:
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I would start with an outline of your idea and takeaways before even thinking about graphics. Then give it some structure — first and last slides, your intro and the "any questions?" slide. Those are the easiest ones and you know their order. Lastly, create the content that goes in the middle and review. For the outline, you can use NotebookLM, ChatGPT, or any other AI to get a draft to review.
● Montserrat Cano
These are the tools the community mentioned that are actually worth trying:
● Resources
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