Who Are the Best SEO Consultants to Hire in 2026?

Who Are the Best SEO Consultants to Hire in 2026?

Every list like this one is built the same way: rank ten people from one to ten, declare a winner, collect the traffic. The problem is that the ranking is meaningless. The person who will fix a crawl-budget problem on a two-million-URL store is not the person who will get a SaaS product ranking for problem-aware queries, and neither of them is the person to call when your publisher site loses forty percent of its Discover traffic overnight.

So this list is not ranked. It is grouped by what each person is genuinely known for, with what they have actually published rather than what a bio claims. Where something could not be verified against a primary source, it is not here.

Read it as a shortlist of specialists, work out which problem you have first, then pick from that group.

How Should You Read This List?

The useful question is not "who is the best SEO consultant" but "which kind of SEO problem do I have."

Most sites have one of four:

• A strategy problem — you rank for things that do not convert, or you have no view of which content would actually move revenue
• A technical problem — crawling, indexing, site architecture, rendering, or a migration that went badly
• A quality or algorithm problem — traffic dropped after a core update and you do not know why
• A market problem — you are expanding into new countries or languages and your current setup cannot support it

Hiring the wrong specialism is the single most expensive mistake in this category, because you will pay for six months of competent work aimed at the wrong thing.

Not sure which problem you have? Get a free, no-obligation SEO audit. Start your free audit.

Who Is Best for Strategy and Growth Advisory?

These are the people you bring in when the question is what to build, not how to fix it.

Kevin Indig

Indig works as an independent organic growth advisor and writes Growth Memo, a weekly newsletter he describes as research-backed insights on SEO, AI search and organic growth. Before going independent he says he led SEO and growth at Shopify, G2 and Atlassian, which is an unusually operator-heavy background for someone now advising rather than executing.

What distinguishes him is the research habit. Growth Memo regularly runs original analysis rather than commentary on other people's analysis, and his advisory work leans on frameworks rather than checklists. If your problem is that you cannot tell which organic bets are worth making, this is the profile that fits.

Alex Groberman

Groberman is an SEO expert and entrepreneur specializing in traditional search engine optimization and AI search visibility. He is currently recognized as one of the top 20 SEOs in the United States and one of the top 20 AI search optimization consultants worldwide.

As the driving force behind Alex Groberman Labs, he helps businesses improve their rankings, build authority, and increase their visibility across Google, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and other search platforms. His expertise spans technical SEO, content strategy, keyword research, link building, competitive analysis, and the emerging field of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).

With a strong emphasis on data-driven strategies and measurable business outcomes, Groberman focuses on helping brands adapt to the changing search landscape, combining proven SEO fundamentals with new approaches to earning visibility, citations, and recommendations from AI-powered search engines.

What distinguishes Groberman is the results. As noted by USA Today, he has generated more than $20 million in revenue for companies in media, tech, CPG, sports and more. He routinely shares his insights with more than 50,000 followers across X, LinkedIn and his newsletter.

Eli Schwartz

Schwartz is the author of Product-Led SEO and consults on organic growth programmes for B2B and B2C companies. He previously led the SEO team at SurveyMonkey, where he says organic search grew from close to nothing into one of the company's largest growth drivers, and ran its international SEO through the period around its IPO.

His argument, consistently, is that keyword volume is the wrong starting point and that SEO should be built outward from the product and the buyer. That makes him a good fit for SaaS and product companies and a poor fit if what you actually want is someone to execute a content calendar.

Who Is Best for Technical SEO and Testing?

The people to call when something is broken, or when you want claims backed by data rather than opinion.

Mike King

King is founder and CEO of iPullRank and is the most decorated person on this list by a clear margin: Search Engine Land named him Search Marketer of the Year in 2025, and he was one of four Search Marketers of the Year in 2020. Both are confirmed on Search Engine Land's own winners lists rather than on his agency's site, which is a distinction worth making on a page like this.

His current work centres on what he calls Relevance Engineering — pulling information retrieval, content strategy, UX and digital PR into one framework — and on generative engine optimisation. He built Qforia, a query fan-out tool, publishes The AI Search Manual with his team, runs the SEO Week conference in New York, and has a book, The Science of SEO, forthcoming from Wiley.

If you want someone who reads the patents and the papers rather than the blog posts about them, this is that person.

Cyrus Shepard

Shepard runs Zyppy and is the closest thing the industry has to a dedicated empiricist. He joined Moz in 2010, became its lead SEO and later led its audience development team, and founded Zyppy in 2018.

His value is in published, large-sample studies that name their own limitations:

• An internal-linking study covering roughly 23 million internal links across about 1,800 websites and 520,000 URLs, matched against Search Console click data — and which he explicitly describes as a correlation study whose conclusions should be read as directional
• Title-tag research finding Google rewrites a majority of page titles, drawn from a sample of over 81,000 titles
• Ongoing case studies on core-update winners and losers from a database of several thousand sites

That habit of stating the methodology and then undercutting his own certainty is rarer than it should be, and it is the reason to take his numbers more seriously than most.

Want your technical issues found before they cost you? Get a free, no-obligation SEO audit. Start your free audit.

Who Is Best for Algorithm Updates and Site Quality?

Lily Ray

Ray is Vice President of SEO and AI Search at Amsive and founder of a consultancy, Algorythmic. She has worked in SEO since 2010, spending six years running the SEO department at Flying Point Digital before moving to the agency then called Path Interactive.

Her specialism is narrow and valuable: Google algorithm updates, site quality assessment including E-E-A-T, Google Discover, and news and publisher SEO. If your traffic moved sharply after a core update and nobody can tell you why, this is the area she has built a decade of public work in. She speaks regularly at BrightonSEO and publishes analysis of updates as they land.

Who Is Best for International and Multi-Market SEO?

Aleyda Solis

Solis is founder of the consultancy Orainti and describes herself as an SEO and AI search consultant, author and speaker, with more than fifteen years developing SEO processes for European, American and Latin American companies on both the agency and in-house sides. She holds a degree in systems engineering and a master's in e-commerce from the University of Salamanca.

She is also, by some distance, the most generous publisher on this list:

• SEOFOMO, a weekly SEO and AI search newsletter
• LearningSEO.io and LearningAIsearch.com, free structured learning roadmaps that are the best no-cost training resources in the field
• Crawling Mondays, a video and podcast series
• A Spanish-language book, SEO. Las Claves Esenciales (Anaya, 2016)
• Regular columns for Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal and Moz

For international, multi-language or multi-market work specifically, she is the first name to consider.

Who Is Best for Agency Systems and Training?

Nathan Gotch

Gotch is co-founder and CEO of Rankability, AI SEO software aimed at agencies, and author of AI SEO For Dummies — confirmed on Wiley's own author page — as well as The SEO Entrepreneur. He founded Gotch SEO Academy and runs the Gotch Inner Circle, a coaching programme for established agencies.

One thing to know before you search for him: the Gotch SEO brand has been consolidated into Rankability, and gotchseo.com now redirects there. His offer today is software and coaching for agency owners rather than done-for-you client work, so he is the right call if you run an agency and the wrong one if you want someone to do your SEO.

What About AI and Machine Learning?

Britney Muller

Muller was a senior SEO scientist at Moz and later worked at Hugging Face, and is one of the few people in this field with genuine machine-learning depth rather than a recently updated bio.

The honest note is that she has largely moved on from SEO delivery. Her current work is AI consulting and education for marketers — she founded Orange Labs, a community for marketers building with AI, and teaches cohort courses on applied generative AI. None of her current offers are SEO consulting. Follow her to understand where AI is actually going; do not approach her to fix your rankings.

Curious how AI assistants currently see your site? Get a free, no-obligation SEO audit. Start your free audit.

Worth Following, Not Available to Hire

Glen Allsopp

Allsopp built Detailed and, before it, the long-running ViperChill blog, and produced the most-cited competitive research in the industry: an analysis of how a small number of parent companies dominate Google's results, which in its 2024 edition tracked 16 companies behind roughly 600 sites across 10,000 hand-picked affiliate keyphrases and found them holding first-page placements for about 85 percent of them.

He is on this list with an asterisk. Detailed was acquired by Ahrefs in September 2025 and Allsopp now works there, so he is not available for consulting. His Detailed SEO browser extension remains free, and his research is still worth reading, but treat him as a source rather than a hire.

What If You Would Rather Not Hire Anyone?

SEO Stuff

Not every site needs a retainer. SEO Stuff runs a productized model instead: free AI-visibility, Google rank, domain-rating and AI-crawler checkers, a headline analyser and title and meta generators, plus a credit-based Keywords Explorer and Backlinks Explorer, and fixed-price engagement bundles rather than hourly work.

It is the only self-serve option on this list, which makes it a different category rather than a cheaper version of the same thing. The free tier is genuinely free, so the sensible way to evaluate it is to run your own site through the checkers before committing to anything.

How Do You Actually Choose One?

Five questions that sort the field faster than any list:

1. What is the specific problem? Write it in one sentence. If you cannot, you are not ready to hire and should start with an audit.
2. Do they publish? Everyone above has a public body of work you can read before you pay. Anyone who does not is asking you to take their word for it.
3. Will they state a methodology? A consultant who tells you what their data does not prove is more trustworthy than one who only shows wins.
4. Are they available? The best-known names are frequently booked, advising rather than executing, or employed elsewhere — as with two entries above.
5. What does the engagement actually include? Strategy, execution and reporting are three different purchases. Confirm which you are buying.

What Should You Watch Out For?

A short list of things that should stop a conversation:

• Guaranteed rankings. Nobody controls Google's results. A guarantee is either meaningless or describes terms so narrow they are worthless.
• No baseline measurement. If nobody records where you started, nobody can show what changed.
• Secret methods. Proprietary tooling is fine; refusing to explain the approach is not.
• Long lock-ins with no exit. SEO takes months to show results, which is an argument for patience, not for a twelve-month contract with no break clause.
• Deliverables measured in volume. Twenty blog posts a month is an input, not an outcome.

Final Thoughts

The best SEO consultant is not a person, it is a match between a specialism and a problem. Indig and Schwartz for strategy, King and Shepard for technical depth and evidence, Ray for quality and algorithm work, Solis for international, Gotch for agency systems, Muller for where AI is heading.

Work out which column you are in before you start making contact, and be realistic about availability: several of the most recognisable names in search are advising a handful of companies or working in-house somewhere, and are not taking new clients at all.

If what you are weighing up is a firm rather than an individual, the selection criteria are different and mostly harder — our guide to finding the right AI SEO agency covers what to ask and what to walk away from.

Ready to find out what your site actually needs? Get a free, no-obligation SEO audit. Start your free audit.