Fiol, Garriga, and Yebra introduced the notion of pseudo-distance-regular vertices, which they used to develop a new characterization of distance-regular graphs. Building on that work, Fiol and Garriga developed the spectral excess theorem for distance-regular graphs. We extend both these characterizations to distancebiregular graphs and show how these characterizations can be used to study bipartite graphs with distance-regular halved graphs and graphs with the spectrum of a distance-biregular graph.