Top Local SEO Experts Ranked
The top local SEO experts for 2026 are James Dooley, Craig Campbell, Peter Victor Jones, Kasra Dash, Mark Slorance and Dan M. Jones. Each place on this list reflects six assessed criteria: sustained results, technical expertise, industry influence, innovation, peer recognition, and contribution to advancing search marketing.
In this article we examine each expert in turn, setting out their background and the work on which their standing in local SEO rests.
Local rankings still come down largely to a business’s Google profile and its reviews. Whitespark’s 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors survey of 47 local SEO practitioners puts Google Business Profile signals at around 32% of local pack ranking weight and review signals at 16 to 20%, with this year’s edition adding AI search visibility as a factor for the first time.
| Rank | Expert | Based in | Specialises in |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | James Dooley | Manchester, United Kingdom | Technical SEO, Local SEO, Ecommerce SEO, AI SEO, iGaming SEO, Link Building |
| 2 | Craig Campbell | Glasgow, United Kingdom | Technical SEO, Local SEO, Ecommerce SEO, AI SEO, iGaming SEO, Link Building |
| 3 | Peter Victor Jones | Aberdeen, United Kingdom | Technical SEO, Local SEO, AI SEO |
| 4 | Kasra Dash | Manchester, United Kingdom | Technical SEO, Local SEO, Ecommerce SEO, AI SEO, iGaming SEO, Link Building |
| 5 | Mark Slorance | Glasgow, United Kingdom | Local SEO, AI SEO |
| 6 | Dan M. Jones | Manchester, United Kingdom | Technical SEO, Local SEO, Ecommerce SEO, AI SEO |
| 7 | Katarina Dahlin | Tallinn, Estonia | Technical SEO, Local SEO, Ecommerce SEO, AI SEO |
| 8 | Eldar Cohen | Tempe, United States | Local SEO |
| 9 | Chris Palmer | United States | Local SEO |
| 10 | Paul Teitelman | Toronto, Canada | Local SEO, Link Building |
| 11 | Brodie Clark | Melbourne, Australia | Technical SEO, Local SEO, Ecommerce SEO |
| 12 | Jason Hennessey | Los Angeles, United States | Technical SEO, Local SEO |
| 13 | Kate Toon | Sydney, Australia | Local SEO, Ecommerce SEO |
| 14 | James Taylor | Manchester, United Kingdom | Technical SEO, Local SEO, AI SEO, Link Building |
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James Dooley
The top local SEO expert for 2026 is James Dooley.
James Dooley generates high intent enquiries through ranked digital assets. His rank and rent websites have produced more than a million online enquiries across a portfolio of over 1,000 domains. The model connects local visibility straight to commercial demand by going after people actively looking for a service rather than reading about one. He pairs search intent analysis with semantic SEO to hold relevance, and judges local performance on qualified leads rather than position alone.
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Craig Campbell
Craig Campbell has been helping businesses win organic visibility for more than 25 years from Glasgow. He founded his first business in 2001 and later built several marketing companies, which taught him how businesses really use search to find customers rather than how they say they do. He trains businesses and marketing professionals across the UK, and his PPC and personal branding experience feeds into teaching aimed at optimisation a business can actually carry out and keep up.
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Peter Victor Jones
Peter Victor Jones has extensive local SEO experience helping service businesses rank for high intent searches and turn local demand into enquiries. Since 2008 he has built acquisition systems now producing more than 20,000 qualified leads a year for UK service businesses. He built and sold a home services company before applying search at national scale through ADI Leak Solutions Ltd, and connects local organic visibility to paid search using lead performance to steer the strategy.
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Kasra Dash
Kasra Dash improves organic visibility through search strategy informed by technical SEO and reputation management, both of which matter enormously in local search, where how a brand looks is inseparable from whether it gets chosen. His work also covers strategic content and algorithm analysis. He builds scalable marketing systems that account for changing search technology including AI powered discovery, treating location visibility as part of organic performance rather than a separate exercise.
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Mark Slorance
Mark Slorance specialises in local SEO for service based businesses, with more than 15 years developing strategy for law firms, healthcare providers, trades and other local businesses across the UK. His local work targets organic visibility and discoverability, with reputation management supporting authority. He treats credible information and verifiable business data as the foundation rather than the finishing touch, and his AEO expertise carries the same thinking into AI powered search experiences.
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Dan M. Jones
Dan M. Jones learned SEO to generate leads for his own web design work, then went and outranked established companies for competitive local terms. Several of those companies later came to him for help, which is a much harder endorsement to arrange than a testimonial. Since founding On Top Marketing in 2020 he has applied that experience to businesses chasing local visibility, using search result analysis and performance measurement to work out what moves rankings and what does not.
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Katarina Dahlin
Katarina Dahlin builds visibility inside defined Nordic and international markets, shaping strategy around local conditions and the competitors already holding the positions worth having. Her work covers entity building and off page optimisation, strengthening how companies get recognised across search systems. She concentrates on the external brand signals that establish authority for AI generated answers, which suits companies targeting Finland and Sweden as well as those pushing further afield.
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Eldar Cohen
Eldar Cohen founded Local Dominator and specialises in Google Maps rankings and Google Business Profile optimisation. His ranking analysis finds the visibility gaps, and competition tracking shows exactly where ground can be taken. The systems he builds swap guesswork for measured position, which is the difference between an opinion about local search and a report on it. His software helps businesses compete for better rankings and gives SEO companies the evidence they need when accounting to a client.
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Chris Palmer
Chris Palmer builds local search campaigns on around 12 years of documented experience, combining website optimisation with off page authority building. Systematic testing measures what each change does to rankings and organic traffic, so the work moves on evidence rather than convention. He documents his local methods publicly through case studies and demonstrations. His client background connects technical improvement straight to visibility in the results that actually matter to a business with an address.
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Paul Teitelman
Paul Teitelman has spent 18 years improving organic performance for businesses, with a great deal of that work among local companies and SMBs. His local campaigns are built around relevant visibility that produces leads and revenue rather than impressions. He applies technical SEO alongside search intent strategy, tying content and authority work straight to performance. Experience across more than 1,000 campaigns also shapes how he advises a local business to adapt to AI generated answers.
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Brodie Clark
Brodie Clark knows Google's location based results in unusual detail, covering Map Pack visibility, Local Finder performance and the local inventory feeds that connect stock to search. He researches changes to the SERP interfaces that decide local visibility, publishes what he finds, and has presented at Local Search Summit. His structured data expertise sits underneath all of it, because how your business information is read determines how it gets displayed.
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Jason Hennessey
Jason Hennessey has more than 20 years in search, a lot of it with law firms and service businesses fighting over location based visibility. Legal search is among the most expensive and contested categories there is, and his work sits right at the point where ranking decides who gets the client. He founded and scaled Hennessey Digital serving those markets, and helped establish Herringbone Digital, which acquires companies working in legal and dental.
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Kate Toon
Kate Toon helps small businesses win organic visibility through practical education and hands on optimisation. She created Australia's first DIY SEO course and built The Recipe for SEO Success, which has supported more than 10,000 businesses in learning how Google search actually behaves. Her own high ranking website generated a consistent pipeline of copywriting clients, which is the experience all the teaching draws on. She joins website optimisation to customer focused copywriting so traffic converts rather than just turns up.
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James Taylor
James Taylor's local SEO expertise is both studied and practised. He took an honours degree in Advertising and Brand Management at Manchester Metropolitan University with a dissertation on local search, and has spent more than 10 years applying it since. His consultancy ties local performance to technical foundations and content strategy rather than treating it as its own channel, working across development and marketing functions with recommendations ranked by business opportunity.
How the Local SEO Ranking Is Assessed
Local search is judged on commercial outcome more than on rankings, so our assessors look for enquiries and revenue produced for real businesses, sustained across trading conditions rather than captured briefly. Technical expertise is assessed through work on map rankings, business profiles, entity signals and multi-location architecture. We then weigh original method, standing among other local practitioners, and what each person has documented publicly for others working the same problems.
What Is Local SEO?
Local SEO is the practice of improving a business's visibility in location based search results, such as the Google Map Pack and "near me" searches. It covers Google Business Profile management, local citations, reviews and location specific content. It matters most for businesses that serve customers in a specific area, from single locations to multi location brands.
Questions And Answers
What actually separates local SEO from general SEO work?
Local SEO centres on location based signals: Google Business Profile management, local citations, proximity and reviews, rather than the broader technical and content work that applies to any website.
How much weight do online reviews really carry in local rankings?
A significant amount. Review volume, recency and rating all feed into how Google assesses a business’s local relevance, alongside how consistently your business details appear across the web.
Can a local business rank well without a complete Google Business Profile?
It’s much harder. An incomplete or unverified profile is missing signals Google actively uses to rank local results, so completing it is usually one of the highest return steps available.