10 SEO Experts to Follow Today

When seeking advice on how to improve your nonprofit SEO, there’s a lot of wanna-be experts out there who want to sell your their services. It is very possible that you could pay an “SEO expert” a hefty fee to just have your SEO go terribly wrong.

Imagine you’re a nonprofit that helps provide clean water to small villages in Guatemala. I’m a volunteer looking to donate my time to an organization, and I type in “water project Guatemala” into Google. Your organization is buried on the third page of Google search results due to your bad SEO, and I don’t get even close to even noticing it. As a result, you miss opportunities to gain new volunteers and, of course, more donations.

However, there is hope – a select few of talented individuals who have dedicated a good portion of their lives to mastering the complexity of search engines. And lucky for us, they continue to share their knowledge of SEO as Google evolves. They keep us up-to-date via their blogs, Twitter accounts, conferences, etc. We encourage you to follow and learn from these ten SEO experts so that your nonprofit doesn’t get left behind in the search engines.

Matt Cutts | Director of Engineering | US Digital Service

Matt Cutts is currently the Director of Engineering at the US Digital Service after resigning as the head of the webspam team at Google in December 2016. His blog “Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO” contains a ton of useful resources for all things SEO. He’s someone you should definitely be paying attention to in the SEO world, especially considering he spent a big chunk of his career at Google. Regarding his philanthropic contributions, Cutts says on his blog that he founded a nonprofit foundation with his wife (which then closed in 2013), where he donated to foundations such as charity: water, the Sunlight Foundation, and Free Press. He also refuses to receive compensation from companies or individuals for his work with conferences, consultations, etc. With over 530K followers on Twitter, you can guarantee that Cutts is one of the go-to guys for everything you need to know to get to the top of Google rankings.

Joost de Valk | Founder & CEO | Yoast

“Open source aficionado, developer, marketeer. In that order. I come to bring traffic.” So are the words of Joost de Valk on his Twitter profile. De Valk created his company Yoast in order to have a site that focuses on software, training and services for website optimization. It includes the Yoast plugin, SEO Yoast, which is currently available for two platforms and active on around 4 million websites, and is an extremely handy tool for optimizing your SEO on WordPress. Yoast’s Twitter has 103K followers.

Rand Fishkin | Founder | Moz

Rand Fishkin, self-proclaimed startup junkie, frequent traveler, blogger, social media addict and evangelist of all things TAGFEE, founded Moz (formerly SEOmoz) in 2004. Moz has grown dramatically since its founding, shifting focus from exclusively SEO tools to broader web marketing software. Fishkin was Moz CEO from 2007 to 2014 and now focuses on product and marketing as the “Wizard of Moz” while still contributing regularly to the blog. He also spends much of his time traveling and speaking at marketing conferences around the world, averaging 100 days on the road each year and 30-40 speaking appearances. Fishkin has over 360K followers on Twitter.

Neil Patel | Founder | CrazyEgg

Neil Patel is an entrepreneur, investor, and influencer who co-founded hugely successful businesses, including Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics, Hello Bar, and Quick Sprout. Patel’s was recognized as a top influencer on the web by The Wall Street Journal, one of the top 10 online marketers by Forbes, and creator of one of the 100 most brilliant companies in the world by Entrepreneur Magazine. President Obama named him one of the top 100 entrepreneurs under the age of 30, and the UN recognized him as one of the top 100 entrepreneurs under the age of 35. He is a columnist for Forbes, Inc, Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, etc., as well as writes for his blog QuickSprout and maintains over 242K followers on Twitter.

Danny Sullivan | Founding Editor | Search Engine Land

Danny Sullivan is the founding editor of Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today, all of which are published by the company that he co-founded and serves as Chief Content Officer for, Third Door Media. Search Engine Land is an industry publication that covers news and information about search engines, search marketing, SEO and SEM topics. Third Door Media also produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series, which attract thousands of viewers and focus on search marketing. Sullivan also writes his own personal blog called Daggle and has a Twitter following of over 515K.

Eric Enge | Founder & CEO | Stone Temple Consulting

Eric Enge is the Founder and CEO of Stone Temple Consulting, an award winning full-service digital marketing agency providing a broad range of white hat SEO and digital marketing services. Partnering with Rand Fishkin, Stephan Spencer, and Jessie Stricchiola, Enge served as the lead author of The Art of SEO, perhaps the most widely sold book on the topic of SEO.  Eric has written columns for blogs such as Search Engine Land and Moz as well as contributed to Forbes, Copy Blogger, Search Engine Watch, Social Media Today, etc. He is also a regular contributor to the Stone Temple blog and has over 22K followers on Twitter.

Brian Dean | Founder | Backlinko

Brian Dean is an internationally recognized entrepreneur and SEO expert who founded Backlinko, a traffic generation business that specializes in link building, SEO, content marketing, and conversions. Dean believes that today’s online marketers must master the art of link building, user experience and content promotion in order to optimize their website for search engines. In addition to Backlinko, Dean offers a free newsletter full of proven SEO and traffic tips as well as manages a Twitter following of more than 47K.

Stephan Spencer | Author | Google Power Search

Stephan Spencer is the author of Google Power Search, a co-author of Social eCommerce, and a co-author on Eric Enge’s book The Art of SEO. He also invented the specialized software RIO SEO Website Optimizer, which is an automated pay-for-performance natural search technology platform. He has spoken countless times at conferences on SEO and other online marketing topics and contributes to blogs like Search Engine Land, The Huffington Post, and Multichannel Merchant. Spencer sits on the board of Impact Network, and has donated his time and expertise to organizations like The Carter Center, Singularity University, and Foresight Institute. Spencer has over 9K followers on Twitter.

Vanessa Fox | CEO | Keylime Toolbox

Vanessa Fox is the CEO of Keylime Toolbox, where she aims to bring common sense SEO resources to everyone. Keylime Toolbox is a software company whose SEO tools give you actionable insights for improving qualified traffic from unpaid search. She was a key creator of Webmaster Central when working at Google, and used that information along with past experience in website development to build tools and education that site owners needed for Google search. Fox also wrote Marketing in the Age of Google, which has been named a must-read for the business owner who’s looking to survive in the 21st century. She continues to be  major SEO influencer by speaking at conferences around the world, and she has nearly 40K followers on Twitter.

Aaron Wall | Founder | SEOBook

Aaron Wall is the founder of SEOBook, a leading SEO website that claims to offer the #1 SEO training program complete with over 100 custom training modules, a private forum, exclusive premium tools, and additional resources. The site was launched in 2003 and is known as one of the oldest SEO sites that’s still regularly updated for the current state of the web. It prides itself on being gimmick-free and offering a solid, affordable program that guarantees quality learning. In addition to managing his blog and having over 75K Twitter followers, Wall also speaks at conferences and participates in many search marketing communities.

As always, if you would like to share your own personal experiences or have questions regarding your nonprofit’s SEO, please comment below or feel free to reach out to us at Elevation. We’d love to hear from you!