Who are the SEO People and where can you find a good one in 2027?

Somewhere between the invention of the internet and streaming or whatever you did on your phone this morning, a profession emerged. Nobody asked for it. But now It has its own conferences, its own celebrities, its own LinkedIn arguments, and its own collective dread every time Google sends an update. That profession is called SEO. The SEO People are also a web agency from Colchester, but that's not the story.

There are approximately 1.5 billion websites in the world for SEOs to work on.

Most of them are ghost towns. Abandoned blogs, bankrupt e-commerce stores, domain squatters waiting on a payday that will never come. Parked pages and broken dreams.  Nobody cares about that either, that's not the story.

The story is there are people who spend their professional lives trying to get websites to appear near the top of a search engine. They call themselves SEOs and I am one of them.

What is SEO?

Google, defines the job on its own website:

“SEO, short for search engine optimization, is about helping search engines understand your content, and helping users find your site and make a decision about whether they should visit your site through a search engine”

So: help a machine understand a webpage, then convince a human to click on it. That is the job. In full. There is a pseudo-science to it, but if you spend enough time in it you will realise that nobody truly knows anything, and by then you are already deep inside the enclave and it is too late.

The different types of SEO people

  • Freelancer 
  • Consultant
  • In-house specialist
  • Agency SEO person

The Paid Version of SEO

There is also a paid version, where companies give Google money to appear higher up the results without doing any of the first bit. This is called Paid Search. SEOs consider this cheating. Paid Search professionals, in return, consider SEOs to be people who do in three years what they could accomplish in an afternoon with a credit card.

The SEO Ecosystem

In any functioning first-world economy, an industry will eventually grow its own infrastructure. SEO is no exception.

There are SEO tools

Expensive ones, with monthly subscriptions that track rankings, audit websites, and produce reports the client will not read. You may have used some of them.

There are Global SEO Events

Multi-day conferences in convention centres where attendees network, attend panels, and argue about whether a Google update was a core update or a spam update.

Brighton SEO,
Athens SEOI lost interest after I learned about SEO week. A whole week dedicated to SEO.

There are SEO influencers

People with large followings who post Linkedin about algorithm changes with the urgency of a breaking news anchor. There are levels to this, trust me - some SEO influencers only other SEOs, some don't even practice anymore, some make content on how to do SEO for other SEOs and do webinars to a handful of people.  Some run communities and speak at events. Some just shitpost on linkedin.

Who are the most influential people in SEO?

If you were to ask the internet they'll give you a standard answer of people like:

Neil Patel - Founder of NP Digital & Crazy Egg
Rand Fishkin - Former CEO of Moz
Barry Schwartz - Founder of Search Engine Round Table
John Mueller - Senior Search Analyst at Google.

Other big names and my personal favourites are as follows:

Lily Ray
Mark WIlliams Cook
Duane Forrester 
Fery Kaszoni

If you're going to start follwing SEO people, its a good idea to follow multiple SEO thought leaders because they all have different specialities and takes on things.

Alternativley you could just go about your own life and find the answers to specific SEO questions when they arise.

There's also a movie of all things:

There are SEO courses.

Many courses. I've done some of them. Courses, ranging from a tenner on Udemy to several thousand pounds for a programme with a name like The SEO Authority Accelerator. There are Google certifications. Google offers qualifications in using Google products, then they change everything and offer new courses.

There are existential threats to SEOs, all the time

At regular intervals, the SEO industry faces a moment of collective reckoning. Each one is worse than the last one

  1. First it was social media. Why rank on Google when you can build a following?
  2. Then it was smartphones, known in the industry as Mobilegeddon
  3. Then it was voice search. Nobody types anymore, they just ask their speaker. (of course people still type.)
  4. Then platforms like Instagram TikTok, any new social media any new format
  5. Then it was zero-click searches. Google started answering questions directly in the results, meaning users never clicked through to a website at all.  People stopped doing their own research

With each threat, The SEO industry described it as a crisis. The industry continued. Legend has is, that prior to all this, there were threats from Google itself, with animal names. Penguins, Panda's Possums,

Now it is AI/GEO/HEO - and other acronymns

Google is answering even more questions without the user visiting a website, ChatGPT is answering questions without Google being involved at all. Other language models doing the same, people taking irt as gospel that a language model has the right answer, while that might be true, it isn't the full story. Many SEO influencers have posted about this with expressions of deep concern. But the fundamentals remain the same. (mostly)

What do SEOs do all day?

It depends. there are, as mentioned, 1.5 billion websites. A significant number of those have had an SEO audit. Possibly several. That is what SEOs do. They also do a lot of

  • Reports 
  • Site tweaks and maintenance
  • Spreadsheets on performance
  • Keyword Research
  • Content Strategies
  • Manage SEO Tools
  • Call's get scheduled to talk through the findings.

If that didn't answer your question, the real answer to what SEO's do all day is often incremnetal things on a website that have a big impact over time.  

Most people on earth have no idea SEO even exists.

They type something into Google, they click a link, they do not think about what had to happen for that link to appear. The SEO industry would like you to know that quite a lot happened, and it can get gimmicky really quickly.

Where do you find a good SEO person?

Good SEO people are in agencies, working independently as consultants, hidden inside marketing departments or posting unsolicited advice on LinkedIn, you don’t need to be inside the enclave to find one.  Finding one is easy. Finding a good one is harder.

Recommendations are a good place to start, or if they are putting their money where their mouth is,  You can also search for independent consultants, specialist agencies or people with experience in your industry, that could be worth its weight in gold.The important thing is not where you find them. It is what happens when you ask them questions.

How can you tell whether an SEO is any good?

A good SEO should be able to explain what is wrong, what they intend to do about it and why it matters to the business. Ask them:

  • What would you prioritise and what would you ignore?
  • How will we know whether it is working?
  • What happens after the audit?
  • Can you show me an example where your work produced a measurable result?

They will not be able to guarantee a particular ranking. Nobody controls Google apart from Google, and even that occasionally appears doubtful and if they tell you otherwise, run! What they should be able to do is connect the work to something useful: more relevant traffic, more enquiries, more sales or more people finding the business, these are good starting points.

Be cautious if somebody guarantees the top position on Google

Or if they talk exclusively about traffic or produce an enormous audit without learning about your goals. Ultimately you want more business. Or opportunities arising from more people finding you, otherwise what is the point?

Audits containing 400 problems are not necessarily more useful than audits containing ten things, It may simply contain 390 things that will make no meaningful difference.

The best SEO is not always the person with the biggest following, the most certificates or the most expensive collection of software. It is usually the person who can identify what is stopping your website from being found, explain it plainly and help you get it fixed. This might not be the heaviest hitter, but the person who is most closely aligned with your needs.

You don’t need to embed yourself in SEO to get SEO done

You don’t need to enter the enclave to get started, you don’t need to get lost in podcasts, conferences or anything else. 

You just need to get in touch or start with an audit.

Audit your site