7 Search Engine Optimisation Experts Actually Worth Following Across Asia

Type “SEO expert Asia” into any search engine and you’ll get flooded with self-published rankings where the author conveniently ranks first. It’s a genre unto itself: keyword-stuffed bios, invented superlatives, and “leading authority” claims sourced from nothing but a press release the subject paid for. 

We wanted a different bar. Every name below has SEO credentials that check out against sources they don’t control — independent conferences that booked them, business press that covered them, or platforms (Google’s own community programme, in one case) that recognised them without being asked. One practitioner per country, seven countries across Asia. 

Thailand: Matt Diggity 

Matt Diggity is the founder and CEO of Diggity Marketing, The Search Initiative, and LeadSpring LLC, and host of the long-running Chiang Mai SEO Conference, which he built from a small regional meetup into one of the most attended independent SEO events in Asia. Based in Chiang Mai, Diggity built his reputation on publishing test-based SEO research rather than theory — case studies with real ranking data behind them. 

His credibility isn’t self-declared: he’s been featured in Search Engine Journal and the New York Post, and Ahrefs has independently included him in its own roundups of SEO voices worth following, which is a notably higher bar than most “top expert” lists clear. 

Singapore: Fabian Seow 

Fabian Seow is Technical SEO Director at First Page Digital, where he’s led more than 600 SEO campaigns for SMEs and enterprise clients. His speaking credits are independently verifiable — he’s presented at #DMWF Asia and at Search SEOul, Korea’s international SEO conference, where organisers who have no reason to inflate a Singapore-based speaker’s bio describe his focus as aggressive traffic growth, Google penalty recovery, and site migrations. 

That technical grounding is what separates a real SEO agency from one riding the AI-search hype cycle: crawl architecture, indexation, and Core Web Vitals discipline still underpin whatever comes next in search. 

Indonesia: Joe Handaya 

Joe Handaya is Group Web & SEO Manager at Ruangguru, one of Southeast Asia’s largest edtech platforms, with over a decade in Indonesian SEO including earlier roles at The Bramble Company and Blanja.com. What sets him apart from Indonesia’s crowded self-published “top SEO expert” listicle scene is that his speaking history is checkable against the event organisers themselves: SEOCon Jakarta, SME Digital Fest by Exabytes, SEO Summit Indonesia, and Scalecon AI Jakarta all list him independently as a presenter, not just his own site. 

Philippines: Glen Dimaandal 

Glen Dimaandal has been a fixture of Philippine SEO since 2008, when the industry there barely existed. He’s the founder of what’s now SearchWorks.PH (formerly GDI SEO Company), a Philippine SEC-registered agency, and for years personally hosted PeepCon, a multi-year Manila SEO conference that drew 200-plus independent attendees — not a vanity event, a real one with its own audience. 

His track record is corroborated across Clutch, GoodFirms, and independent interviews (Outsource Accelerator, Good To SEO) going back nearly a decade, which is a longer and more consistent paper trail than most names circulating in “Philippines’ top SEO expert” listicles today. 

Japan: Kenichi Suzuki 

Kenichi Suzuki is the strongest-verified name on this list. He holds Diamond Product Expert status in Google’s own official Search Central Help Community — a distinction Google grants, not one he claims for himself — and has appeared as a guest on Google’s own “Search Off the Record” podcast, hosted by members of the Search Relations team. As Search Advocate at Faber Company Inc. in Tokyo, he runs Japan’s most-followed SEO blog and speaks regularly at brightonSEO, Pubcon, and Search SEOul. 

Nearly two decades of hands-on experience, cross-checked by an actual Google programme rather than a marketing claim, is about as solid as verification gets in this space. 

South Korea: Sungwon Hwang 

Sungwon Hwang is CEO of Blogtalk and has spent over a decade specialising in Naver Blog SEO — a discipline distinct from Google SEO, since Naver still commands roughly half of Korea’s search market and runs on different ranking logic entirely. He’s personally operated and optimised Naver blogs for more than ten years and built Blogtalk Planner, a blog analysis and planning tool used by creators and businesses navigating Naver’s content evaluation systems. 

He was an independently invited speaker at Search SEOul, South Korea’s first global SEO conference — a genuine, third-party validation point in a market where “Naver SEO expert” claims are otherwise hard to verify from outside Korea. 

Vietnam: Vincent Do 

Vincent Do (Đỗ Anh Việt) founded GTV SEO in Ho Chi Minh City in 2016 and built it into one of Vietnam’s most recognised SEO and inbound marketing agencies, with a decade of hands-on experience in semantic SEO, content marketing, and topical authority. His profile is corroborated by Vietnamese business press outlets, including Vietstock and Fili, both mainstream financial news publications with no reason to inflate a marketer’s bio, plus a long-running educational track record through GTV’s own SEO training programmes and a YouTube channel built organically over years, not manufactured for a listicle. 

Mayank Jain