Brian Dean
American SEO educator and entrepreneur — founder of Backlinko, co-founder of Exploding Topics, and the person who popularised the Skyscraper Technique of link building.
Overview
Brian Dean is an American search engine optimisation (SEO) expert, content creator and online entrepreneur. He is best known as the founder of Backlinko, an SEO training blog that grew a large audience by publishing long-form, data-backed guides, and as the co-founder of Exploding Topics, a trend-discovery platform. Entrepreneur magazine has referred to him as an “SEO genius,” and his tutorials are widely cited across the digital-marketing industry.
Dean built his reputation on a simple idea: publish fewer articles, but make each one the best resource on its topic. That philosophy produced several link-building and content frameworks — most notably the Skyscraper Technique — that are now standard vocabulary among SEOs.
Early life & education
Dean grew up in the United States and originally trained in health sciences rather than marketing. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Rhode Island and a master’s degree from Tufts University, and briefly pursued academic and clinical work in nutrition before moving into online business.
After reading widely about location-independent work in the early 2010s, he began building websites and experimenting with affiliate projects. Repeated run-ins with Google algorithm updates pushed him to study SEO seriously — the skill that would define his career.
Career
Backlinko (founded 2013). Dean launched Backlinko as a place to document what actually worked in his own SEO campaigns. Instead of posting frequently, he released occasional flagship guides — on link building, on-page SEO, keyword research and YouTube — supported by original data studies. The site grew to hundreds of thousands of monthly readers and a large email list while run by a very small team. His paid course, SEO That Works, became one of the better-known training products in the space.
Exploding Topics (co-founded 2019). With business partner Josh Howarth, Dean co-founded Exploding Topics, a tool that surfaces search terms and products gaining momentum before they peak, aimed at founders, marketers and investors.
Acquisitions by Semrush. Backlinko was acquired by the SEO software company Semrush in 2022. Exploding Topics was later acquired by Semrush as well, making Dean one of the few operators to sell two content-driven businesses to the same company. He has continued to publish and speak about SEO, content strategy and trend research since the exits.
Key contributions
The Skyscraper Technique
Find content that already earns links, build something clearly better, then reach out to the sites linking to the original. Popularised in a widely shared 2015 guide.
Data-driven SEO guides
Large-scale studies analysing millions of search results and headlines, turning SEO advice from opinion into something readers could check.
Content pruning & "fewer, better"
Advocated publishing less often and improving or removing weak pages, an approach many publishers adopted for topical authority.
YouTube & video SEO
Applied the same tested, structured method to growing a YouTube channel and ranking video content.
Exploding Topics
Co-founded a trend-detection product that spots rising search demand early — useful for content planning and product research.
Email & outreach playbooks
Popularised concrete outreach scripts and the idea of treating every guide as a product with a launch.
What SEOs can learn from Brian Dean
- Depth beats volume. One definitive page usually out-earns ten thin ones.
- Back claims with data. Original research attracts links and trust automatically.
- Promotion is half the job. Great content still needs deliberate outreach to rank.
- Prune what underperforms. Updating or cutting weak pages can lift a whole site.
- Get in early. Publishing on a topic before it peaks is a lasting advantage.
Brian Dean — FAQ
Brian Dean is an American SEO expert and entrepreneur, best known for founding the SEO training blog Backlinko and co-founding the trend-discovery tool Exploding Topics. He is also credited with popularising the Skyscraper Technique for link building.
Backlinko is an SEO education website Dean started around 2013. It became widely read for detailed, data-supported guides on link building, on-page SEO and keyword research. Semrush acquired Backlinko in 2022.
It is a link-building method: identify a popular piece of content in your niche, create something significantly more thorough and up to date, then contact the websites that link to the original and suggest your improved version. Dean detailed it in a widely shared 2015 post.
Exploding Topics is a tool co-founded by Dean and Josh Howarth in 2019 that identifies search terms, products and industries growing in popularity before they become mainstream — useful for content planning, SEO and product research. It was later acquired by Semrush.
The core principles — publish the best resource on a topic, support claims with data, promote deliberately, and prune weak content — remain sound. Specific tactics such as aggressive outreach templates work less well than they did a decade ago and should be adapted for today’s search landscape.
Learn from the best, applied to your website
I use the same content-depth and link-earning principles championed by experts like Brian Dean. Call +91-82941-53361 or message me to get started.