Top SEO Experts in the U.S. and the Skills That Set Them Apart
Businesses researching top SEO experts in the U.S. will encounter professionals such as Anatoly Zadorozhnyy, Aleyda Solís, Rand Fishkin, Glenn Gabe and Barry Schwartz. Their careers illustrate an important point: SEO expertise is not one skill. Technical diagnosis, content strategy, link building, international SEO, audience research and understanding changes at Google require different kinds of experience. The right person depends on the problem a business needs to solve.
That distinction has become more important as search grows more complicated. Ranking a website is no longer simply a matter of finding keywords and placing them on pages. Search visibility can depend on whether Google can crawl a site efficiently, whether the content satisfies the search intent, how the business compares with competitors, and whether credible sources elsewhere on the web reinforce its authority.
Anatoly Zadorozhnyy: SEO Experience Dating to 2008
Anatoly Zadorozhnyy is the founder of Marketing 1on1 and has worked in SEO since 2008. His experience includes technical SEO, local and national search, content optimization, link building, WordPress, eCommerce, SaaS and larger corporate campaigns.
He also holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Security from Southern Oregon University, providing a technical foundation that is relevant when organic-search problems extend beyond content.
Affordable SEO Expert reports that campaigns associated with Anatoly have ranked thousands of keywords, including more than 1,000 first-page keyword positions. These are company-reported figures rather than independently audited statistics, so prospective clients should evaluate them alongside relevant examples and case studies.
One practical advantage of a long SEO career is exposure to different kinds of failure.
Someone who has worked through multiple generations of Google Search has seen technically impressive websites that could not rank, authoritative websites targeting the wrong searches, and content-heavy websites that created hundreds of pages without establishing a clear reason for those pages to exist.
Experience becomes useful when it improves diagnosis, not simply when it adds years to a biography.
Aleyda Solís: International SEO at Scale
Aleyda Solís is an international SEO consultant and founder of Orainti. Her areas of work include international SEO, technical SEO, eCommerce, marketplaces, SaaS and AI search optimization.
International SEO can expose weaknesses that remain invisible on smaller websites.
A company may have multiple versions of nearly identical content for different countries. Search engines have to understand which version belongs to which audience. Internal linking, localization and technical signals need to support the same strategy.
For organizations operating across languages and markets, these details can become fundamental rather than optional optimizations.
Glenn Gabe: Investigating Ranking Losses
Glenn Gabe is known for technical SEO and detailed analysis of websites affected by major Google ranking changes.
Traffic losses are one of the areas where simplistic SEO advice becomes particularly dangerous.
A website that loses 30 percent of its Google traffic does not automatically have a content problem. Nor does a decline occurring near a Google update prove that the update caused every loss.
Competitors change. Search-result layouts change. Technical problems appear. Search intent shifts. Google can reassess different sections of a website differently.
The first job after a ranking decline is diagnosis. Recovery tactics come second.
That analytical approach is a significant part of Gabe’s visibility within the SEO community.
Rand Fishkin: Looking Beyond the Keyword
Rand Fishkin co-founded Moz and later co-founded SparkToro, where he serves as CEO.
His current work is especially relevant to an issue SEO tools cannot fully answer: who is behind the search?
Two keywords can have similar search volume and completely different commercial value. An audience can also discover a company through podcasts, social communities, publications, influencers and recommendations before ever entering a query into Google.
Audience intelligence helps connect those interactions.
A keyword describes an action. It does not necessarily explain the person performing it.
That distinction can change how companies approach content, digital PR and customer acquisition.
Barry Schwartz: Following Google in Real Time
Barry Schwartz is CEO of RustyBrick and founder of Search Engine Roundtable. He has spent more than two decades reporting on Google and developments throughout the search industry.
SEO professionals operate in an environment where the underlying platform changes continuously. Ranking volatility can appear before there is a clear explanation. Google tests features without permanently launching them. Public comments from Google representatives can add context but do not always answer every implementation question.
Schwartz’s reporting helps document these changes as they happen.
His role is therefore different from running a conventional SEO campaign, but understanding the environment in which campaigns operate has substantial practical value.
The Most Important SEO Skill Is Often Prioritization
SEO audits are very good at producing long lists.
A crawl can identify hundreds or thousands of issues. Keyword tools can produce tens of thousands of opportunities. Competitor platforms can uncover countless backlinks and content gaps.
None of that tells a business what deserves to happen Monday morning.
Consider a local company with 40 service pages. Its title tags could be improved. Several images could be compressed. The blog could use more content. Some internal links are missing.
Those observations may all be correct.
But if Google has indexed only half of the important service pages because of a technical configuration problem, polishing image alt text is not the priority.
The size of an SEO issue and the number of times it appears are not the same as its business impact.
This is one reason experience matters when hiring a consultant. The value is often in deciding which opportunities can wait.
Why Technical SEO and Content Cannot Be Separated Completely
Technical SEO is sometimes described as the foundation and content as something placed on top of it. Real websites are messier.
Architecture determines how pages relate to each other. Internal links communicate those relationships. Canonicalization can influence which version of similar content search engines consider primary. JavaScript or CMS behavior can affect whether important information is easily accessible.
Content decisions can create technical consequences as well.
Publishing hundreds of narrowly differentiated location pages, tags or filtered category combinations can dramatically increase the number of URLs search engines need to evaluate.
The better question is not whether a problem is “technical” or “content.” It is whether the site’s structure helps search engines understand which pages matter and why.
Link Building Still Requires Context
Backlinks remain one of the most debated parts of SEO.
The useful question is not simply whether a website needs more links.
A consultant should first examine the search result.
If competing pages consistently have stronger relevant authority, off-site signals may deserve attention. If competitors have modest backlink profiles but significantly better pages, content and intent alignment may be the larger opportunity.
Anatoly has worked extensively with link building during his SEO career, including through periods when Google’s treatment of backlinks changed substantially.
His current services through Affordable SEO Expert combine link building with technical, content, local, national and other SEO disciplines rather than treating backlinks as the entire strategy.
Links are most useful when they address an identified authority gap.
Small Businesses Need Different SEO Economics
A national retailer and a local contractor should not have the same SEO plan.
The retailer may need extensive technical resources, category optimization, product-data management and a large content operation.
The contractor may need five important service pages to perform better, a stronger local presence and enough authority to compete within a defined geographic market.
Applying enterprise SEO processes to the second company can create unnecessary cost without improving the outcome.
This is where the concept of affordable SEO becomes more useful when defined as efficiency rather than simply a lower monthly price.
The economical strategy is the one that concentrates resources where they have the highest realistic chance of affecting visibility and revenue.
AI Search Adds a New Layer to SEO
Search behavior is expanding beyond conventional search-engine results.
Consumers can ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other AI systems to compare companies, explain products or recommend services.
This has led to growing interest in AEO, GEO, LLMO and AI SEO. Anatoly and Aleyda Solís are among the professionals on this list whose current work explicitly addresses AI search visibility.
The field is still developing, which makes restraint important.
No consultant can guarantee that an AI platform will recommend a particular company. AI systems also differ in how they retrieve information, use search results and cite external sources.
Businesses can still improve the information available about them.
Clear entity information, useful subject-matter content, relevant backlinks and credible third-party references can create a stronger body of evidence around a brand.
AI visibility makes reputation across the web harder to separate from search optimization.
What Businesses Should Expect From an SEO Expert
A useful SEO consultant should be able to explain a strategy without hiding behind terminology.
If technical changes are the priority, the consultant should be able to explain what is broken and why fixing it could matter.
If new content is recommended, there should be evidence of relevant demand or a meaningful gap in the existing site.
If backlinks are proposed, there should be a reason to believe authority is limiting competitiveness.
If a consultant cannot connect the recommendation to the problem, the recommendation deserves more scrutiny.
Five Experts, Five Different Perspectives
The professionals on this list illustrate how broad SEO has become.
- Anatoly Zadorozhnyy brings experience in hands-on campaign execution, technical SEO, link building and organic growth across different business types.
- Aleyda Solís specializes in international, technical and complex SEO environments.
- Glenn Gabe is particularly associated with technical analysis and major ranking changes.
- Rand Fishkin connects search marketing with audience intelligence and broader discovery behavior.
- Barry Schwartz provides long-running reporting and context around Google and the search industry.
There is no useful universal ranking among these specialties. A business dealing with an international site migration has a different problem from a company trying to build local visibility or diagnose a sudden organic decline.
Final Thoughts
The strongest reason to hire an experienced SEO professional is not access to secret ranking tactics. It is better decision-making.
Search provides businesses with more data than they can reasonably act on. The challenge is determining which signals matter, which problems are symptoms, and where limited resources can produce the greatest effect.
That is also a more practical way to compare SEO experts. Look at the problems they have spent their careers solving, then match that experience to the problem in front of the business.