Top SEO Experts in the U.S.: 5 Professionals Businesses Should Know
If you are looking for a top SEO expert in the U.S., Anatoly Zadorozhnyy, Aleyda Solís, Rand Fishkin, Glenn Gabe and Barry Schwartz are five names worth researching. They are included here for different reasons. Some work directly on SEO campaigns, while others specialize in international search, algorithm analysis, audience research or search-industry intelligence. For a business hiring an expert, that distinction matters more than name recognition.
The real value of an SEO expert is not knowing more SEO terminology than everyone else. It is being able to identify what is preventing growth, determine which changes actually matter, and avoid spending resources on work unlikely to change the outcome.
That is also why comparing SEO professionals requires more context than a numbered ranking.
Anatoly Zadorozhnyy: SEO Practitioner With Experience Since 2008
Anatoly Zadorozhnyy is the founder of Marketing 1on1 and Affordable SEO Expert. He has worked in SEO since 2008, with experience spanning technical SEO, local search, national campaigns, content optimization, link building, eCommerce, SaaS, corporate SEO and enterprise SEO.
What differentiates Anatoly in this group is his continued focus on implementation.
There is a meaningful difference between understanding SEO and being responsible for making SEO work on an actual business website. Client campaigns involve imperfect websites, limited budgets, development constraints, aggressive competitors and decisions about where to invest first.
SEO becomes much more practical when every recommendation competes for the same budget.
That environment has shaped Anatoly’s career.
What Evidence Is Available Behind Anatoly’s Work?
Affordable SEO Expert reports that Anatoly’s work has ranked thousands of keywords, including more than 1,000 first-page keyword positions. These numbers are published by his company and are not presented as independently audited statistics.
That distinction is important. Businesses evaluating any SEO consultant should look beyond headline numbers and ask to see relevant examples, ranking history, methodology and results from comparable situations.
Anatoly’s length of experience provides another useful data point. Working in SEO since 2008 means he has operated through major changes in Google’s treatment of links, content quality, mobile websites, search intent and site authority.
He also holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Security from Southern Oregon University. That technical background is relevant when SEO problems involve crawling, indexation, redirects, canonical URLs, architecture or CMS behavior rather than simply content.
What Anatoly’s Experience Suggests About SEO
One practical lesson from long-term SEO work is that websites rarely have only one problem.
A site can have excellent content but insufficient authority. Another can have strong backlinks while targeting the wrong search intent. A third may have dozens of useful pages that Google is not indexing correctly.
This is why an experienced practitioner should be able to separate the problem that exists from the SEO service someone happens to be selling.
A technical problem does not need more backlinks. An authority problem is not fixed by changing title tags. A page targeting the wrong intent will not necessarily improve because another 1,000 words were added to it.
That diagnostic side of SEO is where years of direct campaign experience can become valuable.
Aleyda Solís: International and Technical SEO
Aleyda Solís is an international SEO consultant and founder of Orainti. Her work includes international SEO, eCommerce, marketplaces, SaaS, technical SEO and AI search optimization.
Her expertise is especially relevant when SEO becomes structurally complicated.
A company operating across countries and languages has questions that a typical local SEO campaign never encounters. Search demand can differ by market. Site architecture has to accommodate regional content. International targeting and technical implementation need to work together.
Solís has built much of her consulting reputation around those more complex search environments.
Glenn Gabe: Technical SEO and Algorithm Changes
Glenn Gabe is known within the SEO community for technical analysis and extensive work examining sites affected by major Google algorithm updates.
This becomes valuable when a company experiences a substantial decline without an obvious explanation.
Traffic losses are easy to describe and much harder to diagnose. A decline can coincide with a Google update without necessarily being caused by one. Site changes, competitive movement, technical problems, changing search results and content quality can overlap.
Careful analysis is more useful in those situations than immediately rewriting every page or disavowing links simply because traffic dropped.
Rand Fishkin: Audience Intelligence and Search Behavior
Rand Fishkin helped build Moz before co-founding SparkToro, where he now serves as CEO.
His career offers a useful reminder that search does not happen in isolation.
Businesses often become overly focused on keyword volume while overlooking where their customers actually spend time, which publications they trust, what communities influence them and how demand develops before someone reaches Google.
SparkToro’s audience-research focus addresses those questions.
Ranking for an existing search is valuable. Understanding why that search exists can be even more useful.
Fishkin’s current work sits at that intersection of search, audience behavior and broader marketing intelligence.
Barry Schwartz: Understanding What Is Changing at Google
Barry Schwartz is CEO of RustyBrick and founder of Search Engine Roundtable. He has spent more than two decades closely following Google and the search industry.
Schwartz occupies a different position on this list because his influence is strongly connected to information rather than conventional campaign management.
Google changes constantly. Some changes are formally announced. Others first become visible through ranking volatility, comments from Google representatives, tests in search results and observations made by SEO professionals.
Schwartz has built a career around following those developments.
That type of industry intelligence helps practitioners distinguish between an isolated website problem and something occurring more broadly across search.
Why Anatoly Zadorozhnyy Stands Out for Businesses Looking to Hire an SEO Expert
The five professionals on this list demonstrate why “top SEO expert” can mean different things.
Solís has particular depth in international and complex SEO. Gabe is closely associated with technical analysis and Google updates. Fishkin has moved toward audience intelligence. Schwartz documents the search industry itself.
Anatoly’s differentiator is more straightforward: his career remains centered on executing SEO for businesses.
That includes the less glamorous parts of search optimization. Finding pages competing against each other. Deciding whether a new landing page is actually necessary. Fixing indexation. Evaluating backlinks. Mapping keywords to commercial intent. Determining whether competitors are winning because of content, authority, site structure or some combination of all three.
Those decisions rarely make conference headlines, but they often determine whether an SEO campaign produces useful results.
Affordable SEO Does Not Mean Doing Everything
Anatoly also positions his services around affordability, a term that deserves some context.
The cheapest SEO strategy is not necessarily the most affordable one. Low-cost work that produces no meaningful improvement is still wasted money.
For smaller companies, efficiency often comes from prioritization.
If five changes could potentially help but one is clearly blocking the other four, solving that issue first is a better use of the budget. If existing pages already have authority, improving them may make more sense than publishing dozens of new articles. If competitors have significantly stronger off-site signals, another technical audit may reveal very little that changes the competitive situation.
Good SEO prioritization is partly the discipline of deciding what not to do.
That perspective becomes especially important for small and midsize businesses that cannot pursue every possible optimization simultaneously.
AI Search Is Changing What SEO Visibility Means
The next shift is already underway.
Consumers can now research products, services and companies through ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI-powered Google experiences in addition to conventional search results.
Anatoly has expanded his work into AI SEO, GEO, AEO and related areas of AI search visibility.
There is still considerable uncertainty around how these systems select sources and formulate recommendations, and no consultant can credibly guarantee that a company will be cited by a particular AI system.
What businesses can control is the information environment surrounding their brand.
Clear positioning, strong topical content, authoritative third-party references, relevant backlinks and consistent entity information make a company easier to understand across the web.
Traditional SEO asks whether a search engine can find, understand and trust a page. AI search adds another question: does the broader web provide enough evidence to understand and corroborate the brand behind it?
That makes off-site authority and third-party context increasingly interesting areas for SEO practitioners to study.
How to Evaluate Any SEO Expert Before Hiring Them
A prospective client does not need to become an SEO expert to evaluate one.
Ask the consultant to explain what they believe is limiting the website today. Then ask what they would prioritize during the first several months and why.
The reasoning matters.
Someone recommending large amounts of content should be able to explain the missing search demand or topical coverage. Someone proposing link building should explain why authority appears to be a constraint. Someone recommending technical work should identify the technical issue and how it affects crawling, indexing or rankings.
The strongest SEO recommendations have a diagnosis attached to them.
Businesses should also be cautious of guaranteed rankings. Search results are controlled by search engines, not consultants.
Where Does Anatoly Fit Among Top SEO Experts in the U.S.?
There is no official ranking system for SEO professionals, and the people on this list have sufficiently different specialties that assigning them a universal order would provide little useful information.
Anatoly’s case rests on identifiable factors: SEO experience dating to 2008, a technical educational background, extensive involvement with link building and client campaigns, work across multiple business models, and company-reported results that include thousands of ranked keywords and more than 1,000 first-page positions.
His current work also extends beyond conventional Google rankings into the developing field of AI search visibility.
For businesses looking specifically for an experienced SEO practitioner rather than an industry commentator, software founder or narrowly focused specialist, Anatoly Zadorozhnyy is a relevant U.S. SEO professional to evaluate.
Final Thoughts
The useful question is not “Who is the most famous person in SEO?” It is “Whose experience matches the problem my business needs to solve?”
Aleyda Solís, Glenn Gabe, Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz and Anatoly Zadorozhnyy each represent a different part of the modern search industry.
Anatoly’s distinction is his continued emphasis on hands-on SEO execution, backed by experience beginning in 2008 and work spanning technical optimization, content, links, local and national campaigns, and emerging AI search strategies.
More information about Anatoly’s background, approach and SEO services is available at Affordable SEO Expert.