SEO Courses Your Team Needs To Take This Year

So, you want to improve your company’s SEO.

Search engine optimization can feel like a bit of an elusive concept to those who aren’t familiar with it, but once you get the hang of it, it can have immense rewards. SEO plays a major role in driving organic traffic to your website.

But how exactly do you and your content marketing team maximize your SEO? Here’s a few online SEO training courses that your team can take to learn the ins and outs of optimization.

3 Free SEO Courses to Test Out

1. Moz Beginner’s Guide to SEO

Moz is an inbound marketing and software company that specializesin all things SEO.

They started out as a blog and online community, but after launching their Beginner’s Guide to SEO, they grew into the tremendously successful company that they are now. They’re known to be one of the top go-to resources for information on SEO.

Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO is thorough and easy to read. It’s broken up into seven chapters, starting with why SEO is important in the first place and how search engines crawl your website, to keyword research and how to best implement learned tactics. There’s even an SEO term glossary at the end.

Want something more? Moz also offers a free online SEO training course with 3.5 hours of video lectures, which you can access on pretty much any device - phone, tablet, computer or TV. Over 180,000 people have taken the course, and it has received high reviews from those enrolled.

If you’re serious about upping your SEO game, Moz is a must for your team.

2. HubSpot Certification Courses

Technically, HubSpot is an inbound marketing software company. But in actuality, they’re so much more than that.

HubSpot provides free online video courses in various aspects of marketing through its educational platform, HubSpot Academy. Video content and transcripts are available, and there are even study guides for the exam that you take at the end of each course. After you take the exam, you receive a certification of completion from HubSpot!

HubSpot has a number of different SEO courses and single lessons, including an hour long course on SEO to build sustainable traffic for business growth.

This course goes over link building, topic clusters, and building search authority. HubSpot Academy also has individual lessons to teach you about specific topics like SEO for guest blogging, finding the right SEO strategy to fit your business, and improving your link building strategy. 

The courses are taught by various HubSpot team members who are specialists in each field, and they really know their stuff. The information is presented well and is easy to digest throughout the videos.

That being said, there is a lot of content covered in each course, so we recommend that you break up the training over a few days or throughout a week rather than sitting down to try and do it all at once. This will ensure that you really absorb everything that you’re learning.

3. WordStream’s SEO Basics: Complete Beginner’s Guide to SEO Optimization

This is more of an informational article than a training course, and it’s a lot of content to get through on a single page, but WordStream’s free SEO guide has an abundance of information to offer.

It starts by covering why SEO is important and carries you through the full process, all the way to tracking and measuring the results of your SEO efforts.

There’s a table of contents at the top that gives you an idea of what you’ll learn throughout the eight sections, and you can always click on one of them to jump directly to that chapter of the page.

This is a lot of content in one place, so we recommend taking down some notes on the key tactics and practices that feel most pertinent to you and your goals. It also provides loads of linked resources for additional learning and images to help guide you through complicated technical processes that it touches upon.

2 Paid SEO Training Courses to Try Next

1. DistilledU's Basic and Advanced SEO Courses

Price: 3 Free Demos, then $40/month for full access to both courses and the video library

Distilled is an online marketing agency with offices in New York, London, and Seattle. Their online training platform, DistilledU, has been used by companies like Adobe, eBay, and CapitalOne.

They offer a basic, SEO 101 course and a more advanced, Further SEO course, both of which are rated 4.4/5 stars from over 34,000 reviews. The guided video lectures for each course range from 35 minutes to seven hours. 

There’s also an additional video library with over 130 hours of content broken up into specific categories like “small business,” “link building,” “general marketing,” and “content and creative strategy”.

Their content and videos are presented by various marketing specialists, like Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz.  

2. Coursera SEO Specialization

Price: 7 Day Free Trial, then $49/month

Coursera is an online learning platform founded by two Stanford professors back in 2012. As of June 2018, the platform boasted 33 million users. It’s used by both individuals and organizations looking to further train their employees, including companies like P&G, Loreal, Danone, and Airbus.

If you want to enroll in a real, college-style educational online course to learn the absolute ins and outs of SEO, check out Coursera’s SEO Specialization program, offered by the University of California Berkeley.

The entire SEO specialization program is composed of six different courses:

• Introduction to SEO
• SEO Fundamentals
• Optimizing a Website for Search
• Advanced Content and Social Tactics to Optimize SEO
• Advanced SEO Strategies
• Website Optimization Client Report Project

The program is 100 percent online with video lectures, but it includes elements likes practice quizzes, graded assignments with feedback, and additional course reading. You can do the program at your own pace, but they estimate that it will take about 4 months to complete, considering if you dedicate six hours per week to lessons and assignments.

At the end, you receive an SEO specialization certification that you can include on your resume, LinkedIn profile, and anywhere really!

It’s taught by three different instructors: Rebekah May, the SEO Manager and Lead SEO Instructor of Lead-Qual, Eric Enge, CEO of Stone Temple Consulting, and Dave Lloyd, the Senior Manager of Global Search Marketing.

There are an abundance of online resources available to help you build your SEO skills, so make sure that you're utilizing them!

Putting out quality content is a great first step, but unless you're using proper optimization tactics to ensure that your content is reaching its audience, it won't acquire the reach and engagement that it deserves.