The person who built Korea's first international SEO conference, knowing it would not pay

✦A room that existed everywhere but here

I have been to a number of SEO conferences abroad. In the United States, in Spain. Practitioners from around the world talking about nothing but search for two straight days, mixing naturally over the breaks.

Korea had no such room. Michaela Park felt the same absence.

Data marketing and the paid side have a great many gatherings, and a lot of very outgoing people. SEO tends not to have them.

So she built one. Episode ten is that story from beginning to end.

If you work in search outside Korea, this is the week to know about. It is happening in Seoul in early September.

✦From translator back to marketer

Her starting point was Naver rankings. Running a blog on her own she first met SEO through the idea of ranking, while working at an event marketing agency.

Then she used her degree and worked as a translator, having completed graduate study in linguistics. As AI arrived, more and more of the job became fixing machine translation, so she came back to marketing.

Rather than having dug this one path the whole way, I am a case of going around and coming back to marketing.

She now handles Google and Naver at the same time for Holafly, a Spanish company. I asked about the line on her LinkedIn about tripling organic revenue in three months, and she said it came from starting with a team of three in a Korean market that was close to empty.

What I noticed was that the metric was revenue, not traffic. Asked why, the answer was short.

It means it actually converted into revenue, so I thought that carried much more meaning than traffic on its own.

✦The market is full of pretenders

There was another motive behind the conference, from her time as an in house marketer.

Then and now, you could say the fakes are running wild. Especially after GEO appeared, there were a lot more of those scam agencies.

The agency her own company used was fairly poor, she said. It was frustrating to feel they did not really know while taking a lot of money. The conclusion she drew was to reduce the information asymmetry. Share more information with each other before handing work to an agency.

This is the same problem I covered in the note on choosing an agency. When the buyer holds a minimum standard of judgment, some things get filtered out before they cost anything.

✦From a meetup to a conference

It was not a conference at first. She attended a data marketer meetup run by someone on LinkedIn, liked the atmosphere, and proposed building an SEO meetup together.

Last year she found a venue she could book for free and ran a one day event. Around a hundred people came. Half were SEO practitioners, and the rest were agencies, decision makers such as CEOs and CMOs, and marketers from insurance and healthcare.

This year the scale changed. She booked a five star hotel.

This time it is a five star hotel, there is a contract, and an enormous deposit changed hands. I ran it through my own business registration, and my hand was shaking when I pressed the transfer button.

✦The speaker lineup

The names explain why this room has been rare in Korea. Per the official speakers page:

The selection criterion was explicit. In an industry where ten years of experience is already unusual, she worked to gather people who have been at this since not long after search engines appeared.

She also wanted cases rather than theory. At another conference last year she saw a case study built around this did not work, so we changed it this way, and this happened, and decided she had to bring that speaker in.

✦Does this make money

I asked directly. The answer came straight back.

It does not make money. I am not doing it for money.

Asked what she would do if anything were left over, she said that on a one percent chance of a surplus, it would go toward finding next year's venue.

Her biggest worry was tickets. Building a good event is within their control. Filling the seats belongs to the attendees.

Rather than taking it in as money, what I want is simply for a lot of people to come.

She also said a lot of it is one person grinding. Inviting international speakers, sponsorship, meetings, translation, early bird and group discounts, mostly handled directly. Being based in the United States and finding it hard to arrange meetings in Korea is what she regrets most.

✦Designing the networking

Networking was what I was curious about. There is no matchmaking. Instead the space and the food are designed so that people mix on their own.

• Finger food, eaten standing

  Sitting down to eat breaks conversations. Following what she saw at the Spanish conference, refreshments are arranged so people can talk while they eat.

• Space outside the session rooms

  Two ballrooms serve as session halls, with a lobby and a gallery set aside separately. Last year the space was tight enough that even standing and talking was uncomfortable.

• A drink on the last day

  Conversation flows better with alcohol involved. Modeled on the after party atmosphere at conferences in the United States.

• Language

  Most sessions run in English, with Korean speakers presenting in Korean and English subtitles under consideration.

✦Dates and venue

According to the official site, it runs from 1 to 4 September 2026 in Seoul, with the conference itself on 3 and 4 September. There is a city tour on 1 September and a pre networking party for speakers and sponsors on 2 September.

The venue is Hotel Naru Seoul MGallery at 8 Mapo daero, Mapo gu, Seoul, with more than one hundred and fifty attendees and over twenty speakers from more than ten countries. Programme and speakers are on the official site.

In episode ten I returned to why I concentrate on SEO rather than GEO. That reasoning is in the note on SEO and GEO.

How I work is on the services page, and the other episodes are in the episode list.

✦Common questions