- Rand Fishkin - co-founded Moz, a company that focused, at its beginnings, exclusively on SEO. Rand has been in this field practically since its inception. Fishkin especially became known for Whiteboard Friday - an educational and funny YouTube show about SEO, with weekly appearances.
2. Brian Dean is the orchestra man behind Backlinko.com, a very useful resource for SEO beginners as well as intermediate and advanced specialists. His case studies are highly appreciated and expected in the digital marketer community. His articles are in-depth, educational, and easy to consume, covering both on-page SEO and creative off-page SEO strategies.
3. Gary Illyes works as a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google. He often answers webmasters' questions about SEO quite directly, so he's an important influencer to watch.
4. John Mueller is a Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google and works on the same team as Gary Illyes. He has been with Google since 2007. He helps ensure that information flows freely between webmasters and Google engineers. You can find many answers to your SEO questions on the official Google Search Central channel, where John Muller is constantly answering questions.
5. Barry Schwartz writes for Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch and founded his own SEO company, Rusty Brick, a web consulting firm based in New York. His articles are extremely popular and he has an impressive number of followers on Twitter.
6. Neil Patel is one of the most well-known digital marketing and SEO specialists. He founded 2 successful companies: CrazyEgg (one of the most popular web analytics tools, noted for the variety of heatmaps) and Kissmetrics (web analytics tool that provides key information about user interaction with the analyzed site), and is a contributor to Quicksprout (a digital marketing knowledge resource).
7. Joost de Valk is the founder and CPO of Yoast, an SEO agency that also created the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress that makes it easy to introduce technical SEO optimizations to your site and comes with a series of SEO optimization suggestions, advanced and adapted to new SEO trends.
8. Cyrus Shepard has been in the SEO field since 2009, is the former head of content and SEO at Moz, and is now the founder of Zyppy - which deals with advanced SEO and develops SEO tools.
9. Danny Sullivan is the founder and former editor-in-chief of SearchEngineLand and MarketingLand.com. He has more than half a million followers on Twitter, who are probably there for his deep expertise in SEO optimization.
