Rick Barron 27 September 2018

Categories Affiliate Marketing, B2B, B2C, Content, Search Marketing, Social Media

Searching in all the wrong places

Search engine optimization (SEO) allows you to improve the visibility of your brand’s website in the search results, making it more likely that people will click through and pay you a visit. The ins and outs of SEO can be tricky to get down. That’s where advice and insight from today’s top SEO influencers can come in handy.

SEO isn’t dead, and will never be as long as search engines exist. With the rise of social media marketing, content marketing, mobile marketing, and other effective digital marketing strategies, SEO will not die but will only evolve, adapt, and integrate as an essential ingredient to a more powerful overall marketing strategy. Below is a list of experts to check with to help you improve the visibility of your brand’s website in the search results.

Shane Barker has 27,000 Twitter followers and has authored several guides to SEO. He’s a digital marketing consultant that specializes in sales funnels, targeted traffic, and website conversions. He has consulted with Fortune 500 companies, Influencers with digital products, and a number of A-List celebrities. Connect with him on LinkedIn. 

Andy Beal calls himself the “original online reputation expert.” He’s the CEO of Reputation Refinery and one of the top SEO influencers with 30,300 followers on Twitter, where he regularly posts about the importance of maintaining (or improving) an online reputation.

Brian Clark is a writer, traveler, and serial entrepreneur. He’s the founder of the pioneering content marketing website Copyblogger, the personal growth newsletter Further, and Unemployable, a resource that provides smart strategies for freelancers and entrepreneurs.

A list of top SEO influencers wouldn’t be complete without Matt Cutts, who headed up the webspam team at Google for years. He is now working for the United States Digital Service as the director of engineering. On January 20, 2017, he became the acting administrator of the USDS.

Joost de Valk has the smallest follower count of any influencer on this list, just 8,500. He’s also the founder and CEO of Yoast, an SEO agency that’s behind the plug-in used in WordPress. Joost is an experienced digital marketer and developer who specializes in SEO. 

Rand Fishkin co-founded Moz, which started out as a purely SEO-focused company. As one of the top SEO Influencers, he’s been involved in online business in some form or another since 1993 and has been focusing on search marketing since the early 2000s. 

One of Forbes’ 30 under 30, Shama Hyder is the CEO and founder of Marketing Zen. As one of the top SEO influencers, she was ranked one of LinkedIn’s Top 10 Voices in Marketing in 2016 and 2017.

Julie Joyce owns the link development firm Link Fish Media and is one of the founding members of the SEO Chicks blog. Julie began working in search marketing in 2002 and soon became head of search for a small IT firm. 

The CEO of DK New Media, top SEO influencer Douglas Karr is also the author of “Corporate Blogging for Dummies” and has a long list of past clients, including Go Daddy and Angie’s List.

The CEO of Marketing Nutz, Pam Moore made it to Forbes’ list of the top 10 Social Media Power Influencers. Pam helps entrepreneurs to Fortune 50 brands develop and implement integrated digital marketing, social media, influencer and content marketing programs that deliver measurable results.

Dr. Pete Myer’s 50,800 followers on Twitter get a behind the scenes look at what could potentially be on the table for search engine results pages (SERPs). Pete is a marketing scientist at Moz, and top SEO influencer.

Neil Patel is one of the top SEO influencers to turn to if you’re looking to boost your website’s traffic. He founded a number of companies, including CrazyEgg and Kissmetrics, and is a writer for Quicksprout.

John Rampton’s career as one of the top SEO influencers and digital marketing consultants began after a construction accident left him unable to walk. Today, he has nearly 1.5 million Twitter followers, has been named to Entrepreneur's list of the top 50 influencers in the world, and is the founder of Due.

Angie Schottmuller is a self-described Star Wars geek, keynote speaker, and one of Forbes’ top influencers. She is an inbound marketing thought leader skilled at wielding tools and content optimized for search, social, mobile, and conversion.

Barry Schwartz knows SEO. He’s written and edited for Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch.  Barry is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.

Cyrus Shepard is the former head of content and SEO at Moz and is now the founder of Fazillion Media. Skilled in SEO, online marketer, content publisher, speaker, and writer; Cyrus has several years’ experience building highly qualified traffic through SEO and content marketing. 

Ann Smarty “tweets a lot,” which might be how she racked up 64,000+ followers. She’s also an expert when it comes to SEO, and founded both the ViralContentBee and MyBlogU.

An international SEO consultant and top SEO influencer, Aleyda Solis’s career have taken her all over the world. She’s founded several companies, including Orianti, an SEO consultancy.

Top SEO influencer Danny Sullivan’s is an American technologist, journalist, and entrepreneur. He’s the founder and has been the editor-in-chief for both SearchEngineLand and MarketingLand.com. He has more than half a million Twitter followers, who are likely there for his expertise regarding all thing’s SEO.

A self-described “martech evangelist,” Travis Wright has 221,000 Twitter followers. In addition to being a top SEO influencer, Travis is a venture catalyst, keynote speaker, CMTO, marketing technology entrepreneur, data and analytics geek, tech journalist, startup growth hacker, standup comic, and a former digital marketing strategist at Symantec. Over the past 15 years, Wright has optimized and strategized marketing for hundreds of B2B and B2C business websites, from startups and midsize businesses to Fortune 500 companies.