SEO Courses

Most SEO courses sold online are a waste of money. I have spent hundreds of pounds on Udemy courses that promised 'mastery' and delivered nothing but outdated tactics and generic advice. The free courses from Semrush Academy, HubSpot Academy and Ahrefs are better than anything you pay for. They are updated regularly, taught by people who actually do SEO for a living, and include practical exercises that force you to think. The Semrush SEO course, for example, walks you through keyword research, on-page optimisation, technical SEO, content strategy, and link building across 50+ lessons. It takes about four hours, and you get a certificate at the end. HubSpot Academy's SEO training is shorter but equally solid for beginners. Ahrefs has a free course that focuses on the technical side and the logic behind ranking. The catch is that these courses are designed to promote their own tools, but that is a minor trade-off because the tools themselves are industry standard. I still use the keyword research framework I learned from the Semrush course. The real problem with paid courses is that they rarely update their material. I bought a highly-rated SEO course on Udemy in 2020 that still taught reciprocal link exchanges and keyword stuffing. That advice would have got my site penalised. The free courses from major platforms are updated regularly because they have a reputation to protect. If you are starting out, do not pay for anything. Start with the free ones and only consider spending money once you have outgrown them, which may take a year or more. The time you save by avoiding bad courses is worth more than the cost of a good one.

Courses matter in two specific situations. The first is when you need a certificate to get past HR filters. I have seen job descriptions for [SEO specialist](/seo-specialist/) roles that explicitly ask for a HubSpot or Semrush certification. If you are a junior trying to break into the industry, that piece of paper can open the door. I have also seen [SEO jobs](/seo-jobs/) on LinkedIn where the first filter is 'Has a certification in SEO'. The recruiters do not know that the certification is free, so they treat it as a signal of commitment. The second situation is when you are moving from a generalist to a specialist role. For example, if you want to become a technical SEO freelancer, the Ahrefs course on technical SEO is more focused than any generic paid course. I have a [career in SEO](/career-in-seo/) and I still take a new course every six months or so, not because I need to learn the basics, but because the search landscape shifts. Google's algorithm updates, new features like SGE, and changes in how users search all mean that what worked last year may not work now. Courses from the tool providers are usually the first to reflect those changes. The free courses at [SEO education](/seo-education/) platforms like Moz and Search Engine Journal are also good, but they are more article-based than structured courses. If you are a freelancer, a course certificate can also help you win clients. I have a client who only hired me because I had a certificate from Semrush displayed on my LinkedIn profile. That certificate cost me nothing but took four hours. It was the best return on time I ever got.

I used to think that completing a course meant I knew SEO. I spent £200 on a Udemy course that claimed to be the 'complete guide to SEO mastery'. I finished it, felt confident, and then failed to improve a single page on my first client project. The course had not been updated in two years. It taught tactics that Google had already penalised, like exact match domains and low-quality directory links. I learned the hard way that a certificate is not a substitute for experience. The second mistake I made was assuming that the order of lessons in a course was the right order to learn SEO. It is not. Most courses teach keyword research first, then on-page, then technical. But in practice, you often need to fix technical issues before you can even rank for keywords. I wasted time doing keyword research for a site that had a crawl budget problem. No amount of content could fix that. I now teach beginners to start with a technical audit, then move to on-page and content. The third mistake was ignoring the practical exercises. I would watch the videos and think 'I get it', but I never opened a spreadsheet or ran a tool. The real learning happens when you do the work. I now force myself to replicate every exercise in the course on a real or sandbox site. The fourth mistake was thinking that one course was enough. SEO is too broad for a single course. I now take a mix of courses: one for fundamentals, one for technical, one for content, and one for analytics. I also supplement with Google Search Central documentation and the [SEO certification](/seo-certification/) from Google itself, which is also free. The biggest lesson is that courses are a starting point, not a destination.