Compared with other digital marketing methods, SEO has more collisions and competitions of ideas. No one can guarantee that a certain strategy is foolproof. Only the collision of ideas can lead to more creativity and experience.
Because SEO can be hugely profitable, it has also spawned a large number of influencers who provide valuable insights that businesses can apply to their own strategies. Some influencers have even received treatment close to celebrity status.
The industry is going through a tough few months in terms of talent, with celebrities like Rand Fishkin, Danny Sullivan and Matt McGee announcing their respective departures in the near future stage.
These are rich, respected tasks in the SEO world. At the same time, they are well aware that they need a new wave of dedicated SEO experts to guide and share their findings and expand their community. Fortunately, there are many good candidates here.
Unfortunately, there is also a lot of bad advice. SEO sparks a lot of conjecture in a healthy debate, and following the wrong advice can have a negative impact on any area of business.
But don't worry, the solution to your problem is at your fingertips, and below is a list of some experts and resources that consistently provide excellent, reliable, and actionable SEO advice.
Backlinko
As the name suggests, this site is mostly about telemarketing list link building. This is a necessary area of SEO, but also one of the hardest to master. With Google's Penguin algorithm now running in real-time, all SEO practitioners need to make sure their link monetization practices are clean.
Backlinko bridges this gap by providing compelling evidence demonstrating the areas driving performance, backed by case studies and in-depth research.
The blog also contains an exhaustive, permanent resource on non-link building topics, including YouTube ranking factors and a long list of 201 SEO tips.
Backlinko has some knowledge resources for all SEO and content marketers. The site's lead author, Brian Dean, publishes frequently because he has some substantial, lasting value. This goes against the regular rhythm that content publishing should have, but it seems to be working.
This is a great start for those who want to go beyond the usual SEO and find something that actually works.
Ocean SEO
Ocean SEO is a niche blog focused on providing analysis of new patents for companies like Google. It's a lot more interesting than one might think, with rare insights into how the world's most important tech companies work.
Managed by Bill Slawski, this site offers more information than most other SEO-focused blogs. Of course, not all patents are seen in product form, so we need to treat them with caution. However, as a resource for understanding the techniques and methods behind retrieving and ranking search results, Ocean SEO is unrivaled.
Combined with the evidence we can find on sites like Backlinko, this site provides a comprehensive view of how search engines really work.
Lisa Myers
Lisa Myers is the founder of UK agency Verve Search and a regular on the SEO conference scene. She presents an extensive set of cases, and most of her presentations can be found here.
Lisa's presentation covered some interesting topics, including asking SEO practitioners to inject some emotion into their content to reduce the audience. Many platforms focus on attracting authoritative backlinks through content, and this is certainly one of the most challenging and unpredictable areas of our work. Her recent talk at MozCon 2017 is definitely worth reading for anyone working in content marketing or influencer research.
Lisa Myers is also the founder of Women's Search and is certainly a great choice if you're looking for some great SEO influencers.
Dr. Pitt
Dr. Pete is Moz's resident market scientist and has been a well-known authority on the inner workings of search engines for some time.
More recently, he's focused on understanding Google's "featured snippets," another huge opportunity for SEO practitioners that we can't distill into a precise, simple formula. This guide is a comprehensive resource on the subject, and as one could hope, following the steps it outlines can help SEO practitioners improve their odds of appearing in those coveted featured snippet positions.
You can also follow Dr. Pete on Twitter, where he usually provides feedback on any specific issues in the SEO community. Barry
Schwartz Barry Schwartz is an industry veteran and one of the most reliable authorities on Google updates.
He runs the excellent Search Engine Roundtable, the best site to present any breaking SEO related news. The article here is short and to the point. The source of news stories is usually from Google's work team, so it is very reliable as we would expect.
That said, the article here is concise and contains the basic information we need to know. As such, Search Engine Roundtable is a little different than most other SEO blogs in that they choose to report v