Reliable information about SEO can often be difficult to find.
At one time, in the early days of search engine optimization, some SEO professionals’ images suffered harm.
Tactics like keyword stuffing, paid link schemes, link farms, and other SEO strategies that are now considered black hat techniques were commonplace. The use of these scammy and unethical business practices earned some SEOs a reputation for being dime-a-dozen con artists who would do anything for a quick dollar.
In the decades since then, SEO has risen to prominence as an established and credible marketing field. Upstanding SEO experts who advocated for the tech world and the business community helped repair SEOs’ reputation and position them as a legitimate and necessary way to grow an online business.
Even with that being the case, SEO is an over-saturated field. Marketers, in general, are notorious for exaggerating their credentials and accomplishments to get ahead, and this is just as true in SEO as anywhere else.
If you’re a business owner with a website, you need your customers to be able to find you on Google. If you want people to find you on Google, you need an SEO strategy. That much is a fact.
But how can you know who to trust?
Technical SEO in particular is a field where the most minute details matter. Technical SEO optimizations to a website involve making small changes that can either make a web page run a 1/10th of a second faster or completely break the user experience.
That’s why we put together this curated list of 25 technical SEO Experts you need to follow. These are people who have proven themselves knowledgeable, trustworthy, and credible. They use their social media platforms to disseminate the most up-to-date and reliable information about search engine optimization and related fields. These are people who intimately understand the technical details of how search engines work and what they look for in websites to categorize and rank them.
Here are the 25 Technical SEO Experts you should follow on Twitter, as well as some insight into what makes someone an SEO expert in the first place.
How We Chose the SEO Experts on This List
The people on this list are all actively involved in the SEO world. This isn’t a popularity contest that conflates social media follower numbers with credibility. Each of these people has years of SEO experience – decades in some cases – and actively post to their Twitter and other social media accounts sharing information, knowledge, and insights about what you can do to technically optimize your website.
The purpose of this list is to connect you with reliable sources of information about technical SEO so you can grow your career, your business, and your SEO knowledge.
- Danny Sullivan
Danny Sullivan can be thought of as SEO’s champion to the people. He’s one of the world’s leading experts on SEO. Indeed, he’s probably done more than any single person in living memory to popularize SEO as a marketing discipline and to redeem its reputation in the eyes of the public.
Danny Sullivan is an analyst and journalist. He’s the founder of Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch, two of the most popular SEO industry publications. He sees it as his mission to help the public better understand how Google works, and for Google to in turn incorporate public feedback to improve their algorithms.
In 2017, Sullivan retired from journalism to assume his current role at Google as the public search liaison – the first line of communication between Google and the public at large.
Sullivan moderates Google’s SearchLiason account, which is typically the first place where Google core algorithm updates are announced. He also shares SEO information and advice from his private account @dannysullivan.
- Rand Fishkin
Rand Fishkin is the founder of Moz, one of the most widely-used SEO auditing tools on the market. Fishkin’s blog posts and YouTube videos are regarded as one of the most authoritative sources of information for SEO.
SEO beginners and veterans alike are familiar with his series of Whiteboard Friday’s videos where he breaks down SEO concepts like indexation, duplicate content, and crawlability in ways that laypeople can understand and digest them.
Trustworthy, reliable SEO information given in plain language by people who know what they’re talking about. Our industry needs more people like him.
Follow him at @randfish.
- Gary Illyes
Gary Illyes has a quirky, idiosyncratic personality and his online behavior can at times appear a little odd and eccentric. Don’t let that fool you. Illyes knows more about the inner workings of Google than nearly anyone currently living.
Illyes has worked at Google for 8 years and has been involved in many of the aspects that make Google what it is today – including Googlebot itself.
Illyes was a technology journalist for many years before joining Google in 2011. He’s one of the major contributors to Google’s Webmaster Central Blog and responds to user queries on the Google Webmaster forums. He often spends his free time on web development forums helping website owners troubleshoot their SEO-related issues.
Follow him at @methode.
- John Mueller
John Mueller is a Senior Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, a role he’s occupied since 2007. Similar to Danny Sullivan, Mueller is an advocate for the search-using public and shares insights and tips for how they can rank their websites higher on Google.
Before joining Google, Mueller owned a software company in Switzerland where he created his own sitemap generator, shortly after the concept of sitemaps was introduced.
Follow him at @JohnMu.
- Dave Davies
Dave Davies is the Founder of Beanstalk Internet Marketing and a regular contributor at Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Watch. He also co-hosts the Webcology internet marketing podcast with Jim Hedger. He’s well-respected within the SEO community for his breadth of knowledge on all things search-related, as well as for being friendly and personable.
Follow him at @beanstalkim.
- Brian Dean
Brian Dean is one of the most recognizable names and faces in the SEO world.
Dean is the founder of Backlinko. He’s an expert on the subject of linkbuilding and is the inventor of the Skyscraper Technique. Backlinko’s hugely popular blog breaks down linkbuilding strategies and other more technical SEO topics in a way that’s easy to understand and follow. For that reason, his SEO content is widely regarded as some of the best on the internet.
Follow him on @Backlinko.
- Greg Gifford
Greg Gifford is another well-respect and well-liked voice in SEO. Greg is an expert on the subject of local SEO and is also knowledgeable about technical SEO and other internet marketing topics, all of which he shares from his Twitter throughout the day.
Greg is also a movie buff who also tweets about nostalgic movies, so his content is also entertaining fun to read as well as informative and helpful.
You can follow Greg at @GregGifford.
- Mike Blumenthal
Mike Blumenthal is another local SEO expert and the co-founder of Near Media and is the host of the popular marketing podcasts Local Space: Last Week in Local, and the Near Memo Podcast. Blumenthal was one of the people who predicted the rise of local search with the invention of Google Maps in 2005.
Follow him here at @mblumenthal.
- Glenn Gabe
Glenn Gabe could be said to be one of the pioneers of SEO, and indeed of digital marketing in general.
From the time Glenn founded G-Squared Interactive in 2001, Glenn has been helping companies perform their technical SEO audits and to recover from frequently disruptive Google algorithm updates. He also has the technical chops to back up his knowledge and had been making marketing software for enterprise clients from the beginning of his career.
As the Director of Search Strategy, Glenn Gabe has had a client list that includes global brands like Exxon Mobil, Lunesta, and the US Army.
He’s also a columnist at Search Engine Land and writes about technical SEO topics from his blog The Internet Marketing Driver.
You can follow him at @glenngabe.
- Neil Patel
Neil Patel is the founder of Neil Patel Digital, a New York Times Bestseller, and was named one of the Top Entrepreneurs Under 30 by President Barack Obama. He’s also the co-founder of Crazy Egg and Kissmetrics, which are tools ubiquitously used throughout the digital marketing industry for conversion rate optimization.
His YouTube videos on the subject of SEO best practices are a go-to resource for marketers and business owners across the internet, where he covers topics such as technical SEO audits.
Follow Neil Patel at @neilpatel.
- Moz
Moz makes SEO software used by nearly every marketer and was the SEO company that Rand Fishkin created in 2004. They make a Chrome extension known as MozBar, which is one of the most commonly used apps in the link builders toolkit.
Perhaps even more than their suite of SEO tools, Moz is known for their SEO blog, which is considered one of the most authoritative resources on the subject on the internet. Their Beginner’s Guide to SEO is often required reading in many digital marketing courses.
The people who work at Moz aren’t just knowledgeable about SEO, they are intensely passionate about it. They use their blog as well as their Twitter account to evangelize the potential SEO as an opportunity for business owners.
Follow them at @Moz.
- Angie Schottmuller
Schottmuller is a thought leader in the inbound marketing space. She has over 14 years of experience working for enterprise corporate clients like Nestle and Home Depot. She’s skilled at breaking down complex challenges like calculating the ROI of social media content by using goal-driven strategies. She’s also a keynote speaker at many marketing and tech conferences.
When you browse her Twitter timeline you see that she often retweets useful statistics about social media marketing as well as SEO and SaaS topics.
Follow her at @aschottmuller.
- Bill Slawski
Bill Slawski is a well-respected voice within the industry. He knows as much as it’s possible to know about the backend of how Google works without being a member of the company himself.
He is the CEO of Go Fish Digital, a digital marketing agency on the US East Coast. He is also a regular contributor at Moz, Search Engine Land, and Search Engine Journal. He speaks at marketing conferences about technical SEO topics ranging from search engine algorithms, duplicate content, and structured data.
Slawski is unique in his scope of knowledge in that he knows more than almost anyone else about Google patents (and discusses the topic on his blog, SEO by the Sea), which gives him unique insight into how Google works.
When you follow him on Twitter, he will respond to any SEO-related questions with the hashtag.
Follow him at @bill_slawski.
- Aleyda Solis
Aleyda Solis is a well-known and well-respected voice in SEO. She is a leading expert on the subject of international SEO – one of the most difficult and challenging SEO topics.
She provides SEO training and consulting through her boutique agency Orainti. She speaks on SEO topics in over 100 conferences across 20 countries and has been featured in HubSpot and Entrepreneur.
Follow Aleyda at @aleyda.
- Barry Schwartz
Barry Schwartz is a ubiquitous face and voice in online SEO spaces. If you’ve participated in the SEO community on Twitter at any point in the last 5 years, the chances are you already recognize him or at least have seen his content.
Schwartz is the founder of the SEO publication Search Engine Roundtable, a blog dealing with advanced SEO topics, and the editor of Search Engine Land. Schwartz has made himself a resource for anyone seeking more in-depth knowledge about how search engines work.
Follow Barry at @rustybrick.
- BrightEdge
BrightEdge makes an enterprise-grade SEO platform powered by AI and machine learning. Their blog includes guides on Page Speed and Structured Data, and they also include whitepapers on subjects like Schema Markup and AMP pages.
Follow them here: @brightedge.
- Ann Smarty
Ann Smarty is the brand and community at Internet Marketing Ninjas. Her credentials as the former editor-in-chief of Search Engine Journal and a contributor to search engine marketing blogs like Small Biz Trends back up her knowledge on all things SEO.
Smarty has two accounts you can follow, her general account at @seosmarty and her less-active but more SEO-focused account at @annsmarty.
- Search Engine Land
Search Engine Land includes information on the search marketing landscape, as well as the other digital marketing disciplines like social and eCommerce. They feature practical tips, advice, and strategies related to SEO as well as breaking news and industry trends, all of which they broadcast from their Twitter. They’re often the first place you’re likely to hear about Google algorithm updates other than Google SearchLiason.
You can find them here at @sengineland.
- Brian McDowell
One of the most important qualities a marketer can have is an intellectual curiosity about the world and a continuous drive to learn more about their trade. Brian McDowell embodies this trait more than most.
McDowell is the Director of Search Intelligence at Conductor. His bottomless curiosity about the internet led him to SEO while working at LendingTree. He’s an expert on enterprise SEO, and much of his knowledge has come from his research deconstructing Google algorithms. He frequently shares his insight on his Twitter account.
Follow him at @brian_mcdowell.
- Andy Drinkwater
Andy is a Freelance SEO Consultant based in the UK. He’s also a contributor to the Top 10 Moz Q&A forum and specializes in several SEO disciplines. He uses his Twitter account to share information about SEO topics like site structure, canonicalization, and SEO ranking factors.
Follow him at @iqseo.
- Adam Riemer
Adam Riemer is a longtime veteran with over 10 years of experience under his belt. He often curates SEO content from Search Engine Journal and provides commentary on the SEO industry from his blog.
Follow Adam Riemer at @rollerblader.
- Max Prin
Max Prin is the Head of Technical SEO at Merkle, one of the most prestigious digital marketing firms on the West Coast. At Merkle, it’s his responsibility to ensure the feasibility of the technical optimizations they recommend for their clients.
He also built https://technicalseo.com/, a Merkle property, which features a suite of free SEO tools for technical SEO specialists. They include tests for everything from robots.txt viability to SERP simulators.
You can follow him at @maxxeight.
- Loren Baker
Loren Baker is the founder of Search Engine Journal. In the early days of SEO, he positioned it as a resource for internet marketers until it became the second most widely-read digital marketing publication on the internet. He is also the co-founder of Foundation Digital, where he works with clients like ESPN, AirBNB, and Sony.
Follow him at @lorenbaker.
- Search Engine Journal
Search Engine Journal has guided and empowered SEO professionals and digital marketers throughout the industry for years. They provide news about everything SEO-related including how-to guides, interviews with industry experts, and bi-weekly webinars.
If you follow only one account on this entire list, it should be this one.
Follow SEJ at @sejournal.
- Areej AbuAli
Areej AbuAli is a needed voice representing women of color in the SEO industry – which is mostly dominated by white men, as in most fields.
AbuAli is the founder of the Women in Tech SEO, an online community for female technical SEO specialists. She’s also a keynote speaker at SEO conferences like MozCon and BrightonSEO. Her formidable knowledge is backed up by her BS in Computer Engineering and an MBA in Information Technology.
Follow her at @areej_abuali.
Wrapping Up
This list should give you a resource on the best technical SEO experts you can get researched and reliable information from. Tweet at them, interact with them, and pick their brains. SEOs are a community of people who love sharing what they know with others.
Who are the technical SEO experts you follow? Are there any important ones we missed? Let us know in the comments.
