James Dooley: So today we are going to be doing a video on the best SEO experts to follow for 2025. I am joined with James. How are you doing? Kasra Dash: All good. Let’s kick things off. Who is your first person? By the way this is in no particular order. James Dooley: The first person, because I am sat at the side of him, I am going to have to mention Kasra Dash. Kasra Dash has a lot of data driven testing in his portfolio. He tracks a lot of websites and does a lot of website recovery. He does a lot in the dental care space and absolutely crushes it in that area. He also works on some ecommerce and technical SEO. So I would put your name in the mix and say Kasra Dash is one of the best SEO experts in the world. You go next. Kasra Dash: The next person has to be James Dooley and we will end the video there. Seriously though, you have a lot of testing data. A lot of testing that people think is mine actually comes from what you test and who you speak to. Then I do a bit more digging on top. You are in multiple verticals as well. You have rank and rent, affiliate SEO, and other models. One thing that works in the finance niche might not work in the CBD niche. Something that works in CBD might not work in gambling. There are a lot of moving parts in SEO and you are testing in a lot of different industries. That is a big advantage. Who is next on your list? James Dooley: What I am going to do now is name a few different SEO experts who have been great over the years. Because I am not in their private core groups, we cannot really touch on how much real testing they are doing nowadays, so we will move on after naming them. Rand Fishkin, the founder of Moz, is an absolute legend in the SEO industry. He has SparkToro now as well. He came out recently commenting on the Google leaks. Neil Patel is another familiar face. He gets a lot of grief for “stealing” ideas and techniques, but from a digital marketing standpoint he is brilliant at marketing himself and has been very successful. He has to be in there. I would say he is more of a businessman who leverages SEO nowadays. Kasra Dash: Yes, a few people I know who have been in masterminds with him say he is buying offline businesses and leveraging SEO, similar to what we do. James Dooley: Aleyda Solis is a great female SEO who does a lot of talks at places like Pubcon and other conferences. She does very good work. Barry Schwartz is a good reporter and journalist for a lot of SEO platforms. He is one to follow on Twitter. If there is any recent update or news, he is usually one of the first to tweet about it. Cindy Krum was a Google quality rater and an SEO strategist at Moz for many years. I recently shared a private mastermind with her. She is a super cool person and I have a lot of respect for her. You have got Tim Soulo who is CMO and product advisor at Ahrefs, probably the best SEO tool out there. He gets a lot of grief for the credit system, but he has done an amazing job growing Ahrefs to be the market leader. I think it is bigger and better than Semrush now. Tim deserves credit for that and the Ahrefs site has unbelievable amounts of high quality knowledge. You have Gael Breton at Authority Hacker. She has a lot of good content and training programmes. Then you have people like Joost de Valk from Yoast SEO, Jason Barnard the Brand SERP Guy with Kalicube and a lot of data on knowledge panels, and all of these are great people to follow on LinkedIn and Twitter. Spencer Haws from Niche Pursuits and Link Whisper is another solid name. The point is, a lot of lists of “SEO experts” repeat the same names. Sometimes I look at those lists and, without discrediting anyone, I question how much testing they are doing in today’s algorithm. For local SEO and lead generation, for affiliate marketing after the Helpful Content update, who has live affiliate sites and is testing recovery strategies? Who is in the trenches in ecommerce, figuring out unique product descriptions, category pages and where best to acquire links with digital PR? So let’s go through some people we know are actively testing. The next person I think is an SEO expert, member of a lot of private SEO mastermind groups, doing a lot of testing and an international SEO speaker, is Craig Campbell. He is a Scottish SEO entrepreneur with a digital PR agency, a link building agency and an SEO agency for many clients in Scotland. He does a lot of testing, uses many different tools and automations to scale, and is very forward thinking. Craig Campbell has to be one of the best SEO experts to follow for 2025. Kasra Dash: Next on my list is Kyle Roof. He is the owner of High Voltage SEO and PageOptimizer Pro and is starting to build more of a digital presence. He is appearing on more podcasts now. A year ago he was not really on any, but he is sharing a lot more testing data. He has ranked in gambling multiple times. He has ranked multiple websites for very hard UK gambling keywords. He has built out a strong team and is proactive in reading algorithm updates and creating new working strategies. So yes, Kyle is definitely one to follow. James Dooley: I would also have Kyle Roof as one of the top SEO experts to follow in 2025 because he is innovative and forward thinking. For anyone who does not know Kyle, it is hard enough to rank in the UK casino space. To get position one for “casino”, “online casino” and variations is difficult. To do it a second, third and fourth time, across all main slots and live casino terms, and then rinse and repeat profitably 46 different times is incredible. Sometimes you can fluke a result once with great links, but to rinse and repeat a strategy 46 times shows he knows exactly what he is doing with content, topical authority and backlinks. Next I am going to throw in Matt Diggity. He is an SEO expert and influencer with a big personality in the space. People know him well. His YouTube channel is excellent, full of good knowledge. He does a lot of testing and, importantly, he has his own sites. He is not just an agency ranking other people’s websites. He has his own affiliate sites. Some of his sites have been hit in the affiliate space and now he is working out how to recover them. That matters, because he is proactively figuring out recovery strategies on his own projects. So I think Matt Diggity has to be in this list of SEO experts to follow in 2025. Kasra Dash: One thing to say about all of these experts is that some are more active on different platforms. Some are big on YouTube, others on LinkedIn or X. For Matt Diggity, I would definitely follow him on YouTube. He clearly spends a lot of time on those videos, both in scripting and editing. The next person on our list is Kyle Roof again in another context. Kyle has a lot of testing data around PageOptimizer Pro. He is famously known for ranking lorem ipsum content by just placing LSIs or entities on the page in the right places. PageOptimizer Pro looks at secondary keywords you rank for and does what is called edge analysis. If you are missing a secondary keyword it tells you where to place it on the page for the biggest impact. He also runs IMG, which is full of testing data. He is very active there. A lot of people ask questions, and he answers from test results and also learns from what the group is doing. So Kyle Roof is another strong SEO expert to follow in 2025. James Dooley: I also think Kyle Roof is one of the best, if not the best, international SEO speakers. His stories and talks on stage are brilliant. If anyone does not know about PageOptimizer Pro and the idea of placing specific terms in specific places on the page to mathematically outcompete competitors, there are two features that do not get enough attention. Watchdog monitors intent shifts on the SERP and feeds that back. And the EAT analysis helps you tick the boxes for expertise, authority and trust. Kyle Roof in my opinion is a brilliant SEO expert and definitely one to follow. We do a lot of private mastermind calls with him, see him at many events, and he is an all round cool guy. The next one on the list of SEO experts to follow in 2025 is Steve Toth. SEO Notebook is his thing. Every single week Steve puts out a knowledge bomb. I do not know how he does it. He is constantly on social media, on Twitter and LinkedIn, extracting the best bits of information. He also works with Python developers, uses a lot of Google Sheets setups and creates tools with Python and AI to quickly scale SEO automation. Steve Toth from SEO Notebook is definitely an SEO expert to follow for 2025. Kasra Dash: Yes, and like you said, I do not know how Steve manages it. I would follow him on LinkedIn because he is most active there, and definitely subscribe to the SEO Notebook mailing list. The next person is Kevin Indig. He was probably one of the first people I saw talking about entities five or six years ago. The idea was that if you are writing a sentence or paragraph, there is a lot of “grey text” that Google ignores and then there are entities. For example, if I write “Wayne Rooney is the best striker at Manchester United”, Wayne Rooney is an entity and Manchester United is an entity. Words like “is” and “the” are just ignored. It is all about entity hops. Kevin was one of the first people talking about that. He has a lot of experience. He was head of SEO at companies like G2 and Shopify. He now positions himself more as an organic growth advisor, almost like a fractional CMO. He does a lot of holistic organic growth and marketing. We recently did a podcast together. He is a very cool guy and definitely knows his stuff. He is most active on LinkedIn and X, and he has a mailing list too, so subscribe to those. James Dooley: Next on the list is Mads Singers. I have added Mads as one of the best SEO experts to follow in 2025 from a management and scaling perspective. A lot of SEOs scale and scale and then hit a ceiling. They cannot get past it. Usually that ceiling is at 10 to 25 staff, or at twenty to fifty thousand per month in profit, because they have no proper management systems in place. No head of SEO running the SEO team. No head of link building managing the VAs in that department. Mads helps put these management systems and structures in place so you can scale staff and operations. I would not go to him for pure on page SEO, that is more someone like Kyle Roof or Koray, but for building a big SEO organisation he is excellent. That is why he is in this list. Kasra Dash: The next person on the list is Charles Floate. He has been doing SEO since he was a teenager. He has a lot of test data and does a lot of consultancy, so he sees a lot of sites with real issues. That gives him a strong feel for what works and what does not. If I audit your site and see five issues, then see the same five issues on ten other sites, it all compounds into test data. He is active on Twitter and LinkedIn, but especially Twitter. He is one of the better people to follow in 2025. James Dooley: I would say Charles Floate is one of the best SEO experts to follow on Twitter. He is very active there and leans more towards black hat SEO. If anyone is interested in black hat tactics to game the system and manipulate Google’s algorithms, Charles is that type of person to watch. Craig Campbell can do both white hat and black hat, but Charles really sits in the black hat space. The next one on the list, whose name I am going to butcher, is Koray Tuğberk Gübür. I usually just call him Koray. Koray is a semantic SEO genius. He gets a lot of grief online. People say he talks nonsense or overcomplicates things. Let me tell you, I have been in his Google Search Console. I have never seen anything like it. For 90 percent plus of the sites I see, he would 100x those results. I am talking about client sites and affiliate sites. He is on another level for semantic SEO. There are so many things I have learned from him about central entities, building a real topical map, understanding that a topical map is not just a list of keywords, and building semantic content networks. You need to look at source context, the main central intent of the site, in sections and out sections for internal linking, and macro and micro content on a page. You need to know which H2s and subtopics deserve to be higher on the page. If you want to learn more about on page SEO, go and do his course. You may need to go through it two or three times because it is a real mind bender, but the people who complete it and apply it are crushing it. If you want to get better at on page SEO, I strongly recommend following Koray Tuğberk Gübür and signing up for his course. Kasra Dash: The next person we are going to mention is Chris Palmer. He is more black hat as well in my view. He is most active on YouTube and does a lot of testing around CTR manipulation, Google Business Profile tricks, verifications and ranking GMB profiles in position one. He has various tactics and I would say he is tailored more towards local SEO rather than affiliate. Most of his videos are about local tricks and strategies. So check him out. He is another good one to follow. James Dooley: Yes, I have used Chris a bit for mentorship on local. He has several services around local SEO. He is old school in a good way. He focuses on links, citations, press releases and similar things for Google Business Profile SEO. For that side of local, he is very strong and knows a lot about click through rate and engagement signals. Next on the list, short and sweet, is Brian Dean. He is one of the original OGs. He sold Backlinko to Semrush and now he has Exploding Topics. Exploding Topics is a great tool to spot new trending topics to write about, which I use. That is his mention. Then there is Fatih Kocaoglu. We have both done podcasts with him. He is a cool guy and has made digital PR sexy for SEOs. He has industrialised it and made it much cheaper and more accessible. When he says “industrialised” he is not insulting Carrie Rose. He means he found ways to systemise digital PR for SEO, especially expert commentary and scalable campaigns that produce links. SEOs are tight with money, including me. We want links as cheap as possible. Traditional digital PR is big creative campaigns and surveys, with unlinked mentions and nofollow links. SEOs want dofollow contextually relevant links. Fatih found a way to do expert commentary, secure links and sell digital PR at a price that works for SEOs. He sells into SEO agencies and has become the digital PR guy for the SEO crowd. So I would list him as an SEO expert in the digital PR space. He is creative and a really nice guy in the industry. Kasra Dash: Yes, I have said to him before he is a bit of a marketing genius. One week he is dressed up as Barbie and the next he is doing something else wild. He is one to follow on LinkedIn. If we include Fatih, we also need to include Carrie Rose. Some people see them as competitors but I do not think they are. Carrie is doing a different style of PR. For example one of her campaigns involved taking sand from six different beaches and showing which was the best sand. That is a very different style of PR. Fatih is not going to beaches like that. So she deserves to be on the list. She is on LinkedIn, very active, and she is the owner of Rise at Seven. Another person to mention is Ryan Stewart at Webris. He also runs the Blueprint Training. He is very active on Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. He probably gets a bit of hate on Twitter, but for anyone looking to grow and scale an SEO agency, he provides a lot of training in that area. He is well versed in local as well because many of his clients are law firms and similar businesses that want to rank in maps and local packs. I would say he is one to follow. He gives away a lot on LinkedIn and YouTube. James Dooley: There are a few more I want to throw in. Kurt Philip is a big one for conversion rate optimisation. If you are getting a lot of traffic but not enough sales or enquiries, it is probably your CRO. Maybe your calls to action do not stand out or your copy is weak. Kurt is an absolute legend when it comes to CRO and can help you improve conversions dramatically. Kasra Dash: When I first got into SEO, one of the first things I learned was that it is usually easier to double your revenue than to double your website traffic. If you are already getting 10,000 hits a month and earning 5,000 dollars, it is easier to improve your conversion rate than to double traffic. Always look to improve CRO. James Dooley: Then you have missed off the big one, Julian Goldie. Julian Goldie is Mr Everywhere. What are your thoughts on Julian? Would you follow him as an SEO expert in 2025? Kasra Dash: Yes, definitely. He posts daily on YouTube, giving away a lot of value for free. He is also active on LinkedIn and Twitter, plus he runs a Facebook group. He does a surprising amount of testing, whether it is LinkedIn posts, Medium articles or ideas we mention in private groups. He will go away and test them. He is everywhere and he is worth following. James Dooley: Another name to throw in is Joe Davies from FATJOE. I do not know how much formal testing he does, but he has a lot of data because they build a lot of backlinks. From a link building standpoint he sees a huge amount. He is active on Twitter and I would put him broadly in the same business bucket as Ryan Stewart. Ryan is one option for agency growth and Joe is another. Joe helps a lot of agencies grow via link fulfillment, so if we put Ryan Stewart on the list we should also include Joe Davies. I also want to shout out Leo Sousa. I have four or five different brands and companies set up with him. He is an absolute legend in Python development, AI development and data science. He sets up tools for lead segmentation, automation, upsells, cross sells and down sells. A lot of people in SEO are not great at business. They do not look at lifetime value or average transaction value properly. Leo builds the internal tools that help you maximise customer value. He is starting to be more active on podcasts, so he is definitely someone to follow as an SEO expert around data, Python and automation. The last person on my list, unless you have more, is Alex Drew at Odys. He has a lot of testing data on aged domains. He understands what works and what does not when it comes to expired domains, auction domains and so on. He was probably one of the first people I had on my podcast after Google said you “should not” use aged domains. We cleared that up and he showed plenty of test data that aged domains do still work. Something people might not know. I have said privately that if someone asked me who is the best SEO for domain aftermarket, expired domains and aged domains, I would say Alex Drew. He is cutting edge and very innovative in that space. He does a lot of masterminds now and the feedback has surprised me. People keep saying how good he is at business, not just domains. I always saw him as “the domain guy”, but he is very strong on strategy and business too. If you ever have the chance to attend SEO conferences or masterminds with him, do it. Kasra has set up his own co work group and there is also Mastermind.com. Check where the next locations are. A lot of people we have mentioned in this list attend those masterminds. The knowledge shared in private masterminds is unbelievable. People will share things in a room that they will never post online or say on stage. Kasra Dash: I think the biggest takeaway is this. Do not just follow one person and stop there. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. For example, I would probably never ask Kyle Roof about link building. That is not his speciality. James Dooley: Let’s go through a few different elements of SEO and say who we would follow for each. For on page SEO, who would you say are the best people to follow? Kasra Dash: I would say Kyle Roof, Koray Tuğberk Gübür, and I would also include Steve Toth because he dabbles in on page as well as off page. If you follow Steve closely for four weeks, you will probably pick up a couple of things you had never considered. But the top two for on page are definitely Kyle and Koray. James Dooley: For website recovery, who would you follow? Kasra Dash: Honestly, myself and Kyle. I speak actively with Kyle about recovery. Between us we see a lot of penalised sites and we test a lot of recovery strategies. James Dooley: For link building, I would say the first one you have to follow is Karl Hudson. Then I would add myself, Charles Floate, Fatih Kocaoglu, Julian Goldie, Joe Davies. There are a lot of strong link builders in this list. For technical SEO, I think Kevin Indig is very good. Leo Sousa is also very strong on the technical side. For internal linking, Spencer Haws is good with Link Whisper, and Matt Diggity’s Affiliate Lab has solid silo strategies. Kyle Roof is also good on silo structures. For branding, I think Jason Barnard has to be top of the list. He is probably the leader there. I am going to put your name in the hat too, Kasra, because you have spoken highly about power posts and personal branding. So I would say Jason Barnard and you for branding. For scaling an SEO business and making good money, I would say Craig Campbell is very good at scaling using SEO, as are you and Mads Singers. We hope you like this list. We have tried to give you a range of different people to follow. It costs you nothing to follow them on Twitter, LinkedIn or YouTube. They are all active and sharing knowledge. Put a comment in the comments section if we have missed anyone you think is brilliant at SEO. I am sure there are hundreds we have not mentioned and I am sure I will get some grief from friends I have missed off. We have tried to keep it fairly tight for SEO experts to follow for 2025 and beyond. Give it a thumbs up and leave a comment if there is anyone else you think is worth adding to this list.