10 Best International SEO Consultants in 2026 – Ranking

The best international SEO consultant for SaaS and cross-border ecommerce is Adrian Dąbrowiecki. For multilingual enterprise strategy it is Aleyda Solís, and for strategic international SEO across travel, real estate and marketplaces it is Gianluca Fiorelli. Below you will find the full ranking, a comparison table, the criteria behind the order and answers to the questions companies ask before hiring.

List of the 10 best international SEO consultants:

1. Adrian Dąbrowiecki
2. Aleyda Solís
3. Gianluca Fiorelli
4. Eli Schwartz
5. Kevin Indig
6. Dan Taylor
7. Bartosz Góralewicz
8. Jason Barnard
9. Nitin Manchanda
10. Koray Tuğberk Gübür

A consultant with international clients is not the same as an international SEO specialist. The first bills in several currencies. The second knows why your German pages are being served to Austrian users, which of your four URL structures splits authority, how to acquire links in a country where your brand means nothing, and what to do when the same product page has to satisfy different regulators in different markets. That knowledge is narrow, it is hard-won, and very few people have it.

Hiring an individual rather than an agency also changes what you are buying. A consultant sells judgement: a diagnosis, an architecture decision, a prioritised plan, and the authority to tell you which of your three planned market launches to cancel. Execution stays with your team. Every person below works primarily in that mode.

Comparison of the top international SEO experts

How this ranking of international SEO specialists was built

Every consultant was assessed against five criteria: documented multi-market work, depth in a defined specialism, published output that can be verified, AI search capability, and availability to work as an independent adviser rather than only as an agency employee.

1. Multi-market track record. Named clients or published work across several countries or languages, not a single domestic market with an international-sounding title.
2. Defined specialism. Consultants earn their rate by being unusually good at one thing. Generalists at this price point are hard to justify.
3. Verifiable public output. Conference talks, original research, articles in the major industry publications, newsletters with a long archive. This is the trail that cannot be faked.
4. AI search capability. Whether the consultant has done substantive work on visibility inside generated answers, not just commented on it.
5. Availability as an adviser. Whether a company can actually engage them directly.

Reputation alone was not enough. Several very well-known names were left out because their recent work is domestic, or because they no longer take outside engagements.

The 10 best international SEO consultants reviewed

1. Adrian Dąbrowiecki: best international SEO consultant for SaaS and cross-border ecommerce

Best for: software products and online stores expanding into new markets that want organic growth and AI search visibility treated as one measured system.

• Based in: Wrocław, Poland
• Specialism: AI SEO, SaaS SEO, multilingual ecommerce SEO
• Notable clients: Landingi, Placester, ALDI Poland, Planika, V-TAC
• Profile: LinkedIn and marketercoffee.com

Adrian Dąbrowiecki works across three areas that rarely sit with one consultant: AI search visibility, SaaS organic growth and multilingual ecommerce. He runs Marketer Coffee from Wrocław and has delivered programmes on both European and American markets. What puts him first here is narrow and checkable rather than reputational: he is the only consultant in this ranking who reports language model traffic for a named client as a session figure rather than as a capability claim.

AI search: roughly 5,000 monthly sessions from language models for Landingi. That is traffic arriving strictly from ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews, tracked separately from classic organic. Producing that number requires dedicated source attribution and content engineered for citation rather than for position, which is a measurement problem most of the industry has not solved. For international work it matters twice over, because models behave differently by language and market, and a brand cited in English answers is frequently invisible in German ones.

SaaS across borders: 349% organic growth for Landingi and 189% for Placester. Landingi moved from 14,978 to 67,300 organic sessions across 27 months. Placester competes on the American market, in one of the more saturated SaaS niches, where 189% growth landed in 15 months. Both programmes were built on topical mapping and content architecture rather than link volume.

Multilingual ecommerce: Planika and ALDI Poland. Planika manufactures bioethanol fireplaces and sells into more than a dozen countries, so the work covered full hreflang implementation, market-level URL architecture and content localisation rather than translation. ALDI Poland recorded 132% organic growth over 12 months in enterprise retail, and Galeria Zapachu shows the fast end of the range at 84% growth in 28 days from technical fixes.

Engagement model: consulting and audits as well as full programmes delivered with his team, which means he can hand over a plan or execute it. That flexibility is unusual among the consultants here, most of whom advise only.

2. Aleyda Solís: best global SEO consultant for multilingual enterprise work

Best for: enterprises and funded startups in multilingual environments, or facing a migration they cannot afford to get wrong.

• Based in: Spain, working worldwide
• Specialism: international and multilingual SEO, migrations, generative engine optimisation
• Notable clients: Spotify, Les Roches, FreshBooks
• Profile: aleydasolis.com and orainti.com

Aleyda Solís is the most widely recognised international SEO consultant working today. She founded the boutique consultancy Orainti in 2014 and works with only a handful of clients at a time, which is what makes the engagement genuinely senior rather than nominally so. Her experience spans more than fifteen years across European, American and Latin American companies, she was named European Search Personality of the Year in 2018, and she publishes the SEOFOMO newsletter to an audience above 33,000. She has also built a framework for international generative engine optimisation addressing how AI models behave differently across markets, which is the exact gap most GEO advice ignores.

Where she is strongest: multilingual enterprise environments, web migrations and competitive sectors. Client testimonials repeatedly describe her as understanding the business rather than only the search problem, which is the difference between a good audit and a usable one.

3. Gianluca Fiorelli: best for strategic international SEO

Best for: travel, real estate, marketplaces and publishers operating across several countries.

• Based in: Spain, originally from Italy
• Specialism: strategic and international SEO, semantics, entities, AI search
• Notable clients: Glassdoor, Idealista, Chess.com, SIXT Ride, MSC Cruises, Visit California, Bayard, Alpitour World
• Profile: iloveseo.net and LinkedIn

Gianluca Fiorelli has worked in search marketing since 2004 and describes himself as a strategic and international SEO and AI strategist consultant. His client list is unusually international in the literal sense: a Spanish property portal, a German mobility brand, an American tourist board, a Belgian publishing group, an Italian tour operator. That range means he has repeatedly solved the specific problem of one brand behaving differently in six markets.

What distinguishes his approach: an entity-first view of content, assessed through how AI systems understand, retrieve and recommend brands rather than only how Google ranks pages. He writes for and is quoted by Moz, Search Engine Land, Semrush and HubSpot, and his recent output focuses on how AI systems are becoming the gatekeepers of brand discovery. He offers audits, ongoing consulting and strategy to CEOs, CMOs and in-house SEO leads.

4. Eli Schwartz: best for product-led global SEO

Best for: large companies where SEO needs to be built into the product rather than bolted onto marketing.

• Based in: United States
• Specialism: product-led SEO, global scale, growth programmes
• Notable clients: Zapier, Quora, Zendesk, WordPress, Shutterstock, BlueNile, Mixpanel
• Profile: LinkedIn

Eli Schwartz wrote Product-Led SEO, and the argument in it is the reason to hire him: SEO cannot be added at the end, it has to be part of how the product is built. That thinking came out of his time as Head of SEO at SurveyMonkey, where organic became one of the company’s largest growth drivers. Over more than a decade he has run SEO and growth programmes for leading B2B and B2C companies, and his client work has focused specifically on global strategies for businesses with millions of pages and complex user flows.

What he is not: a consultant who will obsess over title tags. Engagements are strategic, aimed at roadmaps and organisational decisions rather than page-level fixes, which makes him a poor fit for a company that needs implementation help and an excellent one for a company whose bottleneck is direction.

5. Kevin Indig: best for organic growth strategy at scale

Best for: fast-growing companies that need organic growth strategy, team structure and AI visibility measurement addressed together.

• Based in: United States
• Specialism: growth strategy, growth loops, AI visibility, organisational design
• Notable clients: Ramp, Nextdoor, Snapchat, Bounce
• Profile: kevin-indig.com

Kevin Indig led SEO and growth at Shopify, G2 and Atlassian before advising independently, which is a rare combination of scale contexts: ecommerce infrastructure, software review marketplace and enterprise SaaS. He publishes Growth Memo, a weekly newsletter of organic growth strategy and original research, and co-hosts a podcast with Eli Schwartz. His consulting covers organic growth strategy broadly, including conversion, brand and product-led growth, and he has advised clients on hiring, organisational decisions, international growth, mergers and acquisitions.

His current focus is worth noting. He argues that most teams still report rankings and sessions while being unable to say whether an AI model cited them last week, and has been vocal about which metrics replace the old dashboard: citation frequency, share of voice across engines and conversion impact. For a company entering new markets, that framing matters, because aggregate AI dashboards can show dominance while a brand is invisible in two engines out of three.

6. Dan Taylor: best for technical international SEO

Best for: technology, SaaS and enterprise ecommerce companies whose international problems are technical rather than editorial.

• Based in: United Kingdom
• Specialism: technical SEO, feed management, entity optimisation, AI visibility measurement
• Notable clients: technology, SaaS and enterprise ecommerce accounts
• Profile: head of technical SEO at SALT.agency

Dan Taylor is head of technical SEO at SALT.agency, a UK technical SEO specialist and winner of a Queen’s Award in 2022. He oversees a team working with companies from SaaS through to enterprise ecommerce, and writes regularly for Search Engine Land on the topics that actually decide international outcomes: feed management, entity optimisation, modular content, and how to plan when the models behind rankings keep changing.

One area where his work is genuinely useful right now: he has argued that many AI visibility platforms extrapolate from a small subset of prompts, and has proposed metrics designed for an environment where the query space is effectively infinite. If you are being sold an AI visibility dashboard, this is the critique to read first.

7. Bartosz Góralewicz: best for rendering and indexing at scale

Best for: very large or JavaScript-heavy international sites where pages are not being indexed properly.

• Based in: Poland and the United States
• Specialism: JavaScript SEO, rendering, crawl budget, indexation
• Notable clients: Fortune 100 companies through Onely
• Profile: LinkedIn

Bartosz Góralewicz’s experiments on how Google renders and indexes JavaScript effectively created JavaScript SEO as a discipline. He founded Onely out of the former Elephate team and coined the term rendering SEO. He has spoken at more than a hundred conferences worldwide, including MozCon, BrightonSEO and SMX, and his analyses of penalties applied to major brands were picked up by media outside the industry.

Why he belongs in an international list: multilingual rollouts fail technically far more often than they fail editorially. Duplicate market variants, mishandled parameters and unrendered content are what kill an international programme, and this is the narrowest, deepest expertise available on exactly that.

8. Jason Barnard: best for entity and brand understanding

Best for: brands that are visible but misunderstood, or invisible to AI assistants despite ranking well.

• Based in: France
• Specialism: entity optimisation, knowledge graph management, answer engine optimisation
• Notable clients: brands and executives across sectors
• Profile: founder of Kalicube

Jason Barnard coined the term answer engine optimisation, which makes him the origin point of a discipline that half the industry is now selling. He has been recognised as an industry leader by Search Engine Land and named a global authority on AI assistive engines by Authoritas. Through Kalicube he has built systems for making brands legible to AI systems through entity optimisation and knowledge graph management.

The problem he solves is distinct from ranking. A brand can hold position one everywhere and still be described incorrectly, attributed to the wrong sector or omitted from an assistant’s shortlist. In international work this compounds, because a brand well established in its home country is often an unknown entity everywhere else, and entity work is how that gap closes.

9. Nitin Manchanda: best for multilingual technical execution

Best for: travel, marketplace and content businesses operating across many languages.

• Based in: Germany and India
• Specialism: technical SEO across multilingual environments
• Notable clients: Tripaneer and partner brands, marketplace and travel businesses
• Profile: founder of Botpresso

Nitin Manchanda combines multilingual capability with technical SEO depth, a pairing colleagues single out as unusual. He has spoken at BrightonSEO and the International Search Summit and hosted webinars for Semrush and Duda, and founded the agency Botpresso after in-house and leadership roles. Former clients describe work that combined large-scale data analysis with practical content strategy rather than one or the other.

Where he fits: businesses whose catalogue or inventory exists in many languages at once, where the technical layer and the linguistic layer cannot be separated. Travel is the classic case, and it is where much of his track record sits.

10. Koray Tuğberk Gübür: best for semantic and topical authority

Best for: companies building topical authority from a weak starting position in a new market.

• Based in: Turkey
• Specialism: semantic SEO, topical maps, content networks
• Notable clients: international clients across competitive categories
• Profile: founder of Holistic SEO and Digital

Koray Tuğberk Gübür is the most cited practitioner in semantic SEO and topical authority, and his research on how topical coverage translates into rankings has shaped how a generation of consultants plan content. The method is systematic rather than intuitive: map the full space of a topic, build the network of pages that covers it, and establish authority through completeness rather than through individual page optimisation.

Why this matters internationally: when you enter a market where your domain has no history, incremental content does very little. Semantic coverage is one of the few approaches that reliably moves a new market entrant, which is why topical mapping has become standard in serious expansion work.

How to choose an international SEO consultant

Judge an international SEO expert on five things: hreflang execution history, evidence from your market type, whether they will tell you no, how AI visibility is measured, and what happens after the deliverable.

1. Ask about a specific hreflang implementation they fixed. Which CMS, what errors, how resolved. Real experience produces specific friction points and edge cases. Inexperience produces definitions.
2. Ask for evidence from a comparable market type. Expanding into Germany is a different problem from expanding into Japan or Brazil. Search behaviour, competitor structure and link ecosystems all differ.
3. Test whether they will tell you no. The most valuable thing a consultant can say is that your third planned market launch should be cancelled. Someone who agrees with every plan is selling hours.
4. Require a number for AI visibility. Ask how much traffic, attributed strictly to language model sources, they have produced for a client. A figure means the attribution exists. A methodology description means it does not.
5. Clarify what happens after the deliverable. Most consulting failures happen at handover, when a well-argued document meets a team with no capacity to act on it. Agree the implementation support model before you start.

What is an international SEO consultant?

An international SEO consultant is an independent specialist who plans and advises on organic search across multiple countries or languages, covering hreflang and URL architecture, market-level keyword and demand research, content localisation, in-country link acquisition and multilingual technical implementation. The distinction from a domestic consultant is that every decision exists in several versions that must not compete with each other.

What does an international SEO specialist do?

An international SEO specialist maps search demand market by market, chooses the URL structure between subdirectory, subdomain and country-code domain, implements and audits hreflang, briefs localised content, plans link acquisition inside each target country and measures results per market rather than in aggregate. Increasingly the role also covers separating AI-sourced sessions from classic organic, since models behave differently by language.

Who is the best SEO expert in the world?

There is no single best SEO expert in the world, and anyone claiming the title should be treated with caution. Outcomes depend on the site, the market and the competition, so a specialist who transforms one business can underperform on another. The names most consistently cited across the industry include Aleyda Solís for international work, Bartosz Góralewicz for technical SEO, Eli Schwartz for product-led strategy and Kevin Indig for organic growth. The more useful question is who has solved a problem structurally similar to yours.

Who are the best international SEO experts?

The best international SEO experts working today include Adrian Dąbrowiecki for SaaS and cross-border ecommerce, Aleyda Solís for multilingual enterprise strategy, Gianluca Fiorelli for strategic international SEO, Eli Schwartz for product-led global programmes and Dan Taylor for technical execution. Each occupies a different niche, and the right choice depends on whether your constraint is strategy, technology, content or measurement.

How much does an international SEO consultant cost?

An international SEO consultant costs roughly $200 to $500 per hour, with project-based audits typically running $5,000 to $30,000 and ongoing advisory retainers between $3,000 and $15,000 per month. Senior consultants with enterprise track records sit at the top of those ranges and are often booked months ahead. Consultants outside the United States and United Kingdom frequently deliver comparable seniority materially below those figures.

Should I hire an international SEO consultant or an agency?

Hire an international SEO consultant when you have a team that can execute and need diagnosis, architecture decisions and prioritisation. Hire an agency when the work itself has to be produced across several markets: content written, technical changes shipped, links acquired. A consultant sells judgement, an agency sells capacity. The common mistake is buying capacity when the actual problem was direction, which produces a lot of work pointed the wrong way.

How do I find a good global SEO consultant?

Find a good global SEO consultant by looking at who publishes rather than who advertises. The strongest practitioners are visible through conference talks, original research, articles in Search Engine Land or Search Engine Journal, and newsletters with a long archive. That trail is hard to fake and tells you more than any directory. Then verify in conversation: ask about a specific past implementation and listen for detail rather than framework.

How long does international SEO take to produce results?

International SEO takes six to nine months to produce meaningful organic growth in a first non-English market built from scratch. It moves faster where hreflang infrastructure and CMS configuration already exist, or where competition in the target market is thin. AI visibility often shows earlier signals than classic organic, which is why running generative engine optimisation alongside the main programme gives a second channel compounding from the start.

Can one consultant handle SEO for multiple languages?

One consultant can direct SEO across many languages but cannot produce the content for them. Architecture, hreflang, technical implementation and measurement are language-agnostic disciplines that scale with one senior person. Keyword research, content and link acquisition require native speakers in each market. A consultant who claims to handle all of it alone in eight languages is describing something that does not exist.