Best SEO Courses

Best SEO Courses

Benzinga Money is a reader-supported publication. We may earn a commission when you click on links in this article. Learn more.Are you a website owner or marketer who needs a little help with search engine optimization (SEO)? You might already realize that SEO has a huge impact on most online websites and businesses. It doesn’t matter whether you’re new to SEO, have been learning for a few years or consider yourself experienced. There’s always something new to explore and learn. 

That’s why many people to turn to online SEO courses to get the knowledge they need to go up in the rankings. Here are some courses Benzinga suggests.

Quick Look: Best SEO Courses

Here are our picks for the best SEO Courses:

What Makes an SEO Course Great?

When you do an SEO course search online, you might become overwhelmed by the number of options available. Online SEO courses can be an effective way to learn more about SEO, but all SEO courses aren’t the same. We’ll explain how to choose the best SEO courses for you.  

Knowledgeable Instructor

What type of experience does the instructor have? Look carefully at how long the instructor has been doing SEO work and what his or her success rate is. Most importantly, read reviews from past students to see what they have to say about the class and how well it improved their SEO.

Whitehat Techniques

There are some bad actors out there that practice “black hat SEO” techniques. Steer clear of classes that teach techniques like purchasing links or using deceptive clocking techniques. Instead, look for a course that shows you how to implement whitehat techniques like improving meta tags, helps your site’s navigation and improves the quality of your content. 

Recent Material

Google sometimes changes its algorithm for ranking sites, so that means you need to stay on top of your game. You may have SEO experience, so why not take a class every couple of years to ensure that you keep up with the latest techniques and strategies?

Our Top Picks

Here are Benzinga’s choices for the best online SEO courses. We’ve sorted the classes by price point and by skill level — beginner, intermediate and advanced — so you can decide on the right SEO course for your skill level and budget. 

We’ve picked out the best SEO courses from the following sources:

• Udemy
• LinkedIn Learning
• The University of California – Davis
• ClickMinded

SEO Course for Beginners

These courses are best for people who have no experience at all with SEO. These classes will teach you the basics and help you build on fundamental SEO knowledge. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Specialization by the University of California – Davis

• Who it’s for: Beginners with at least 2 years of business experience
• Price: Free

Six courses are included in this specialization, which will teach you a variety of things, including the theory behind Google and other search engine algorithms, on-page and off-page optimization, optimizing for a local and international audience and more. You’ll complete a comprehensive capstone project once you’ve completed all 6 courses. This means you’ll put your skills to the test in an SEO consulting task.

The course takes about 7 months to complete — as long as you spend 7 hours a week doing it. You can make the course work for your deadlines and spend more or less time each week as necessary. At the end of the specialization, you’ll earn a certificate that you can show on LinkedIn and as proof of your skills learned. 

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SEO: Ecommerce by LinkedIn Learning

• Who it’s for: Beginner learners with an online store
• Price: $14.99

Learning SEO for an online store requires different skills and strategies than you would need for a WordPress website. SEO: Ecommerce helps to address these unique needs and challenges that online stores have. 

This 2-hour course will show you how SEO affects the buying process and it’ll teach you how to use rich media, A/B testing with Optimizely and use simple and long-tail keywords. Once you’ve completed the course, you’ll get a certificate that can be displayed on LinkedIn.

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SEO For WordPress by Udemy

• Who it’s for: Beginner learners who have a WordPress website
• Price: $199.99

SEO for WordPress provides a guide on how to get onto the first page of Google. It’ll help you drive traffic to your website. You don’t need to have any technical knowledge to excel in this course. The instructor walks you through everything in the 10-hour course, including:

• How to choose the right website host and WordPress plugins
• The difference between white hat, gray hat and black hat SEO
• Performing keyword research and how to write website content that increases your SEO. 

Reviews of this course mention how well the instructor explained the material. One reviewer said it helped clear up past mistakes with SEO, and he has seen considerable improvements over the last couple of months.

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These intermediate SEO courses are best for people who have a bit of SEO experience but haven’t gotten the results that they want yet. These courses can help to clear up any confusion you might have.

SEO Audit Masterclass by Udemy

• Who it’s for: HR professionals
• Price: $199.99

A bestselling course, SEO Audit Masterclass, delivers information discovered in a case study and research. You’ll learn how to identify problems and discover missed opportunities. 

This class is perfect for HR professionals who plan to hire someone to handle SEO. You’ll learn the right questions to ask and how to monitor the teams’ work. After all, how can you know if your new hiree is doing a great job if you don’t understand SEO yourself? 

Throughout this 7-hour course, you’ll learn how to to do an SEO audit in 2019. 

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SEO 2020: Complete SEO Training + SEO for WordPress Websites by Udemy 

• Who it’s for: Intermediate learners who use WordPress
• Price: $199.99

This bestselling course from Udemy gets updated often so you know that you’re getting the most recent SEO tips and tricks. In fact, the reviews for this particular course highlighted the recent material and how easy it was to implement the material taught in class on their own WordPress pages. 

By the end of the 8.5-hour course, you’ll learn more about SEO factors, increase the speed of your website, rank high on Google and index your site. The instructor also reveals several of his favorite SEO tools (free on WordPress) so you can master SEO on your website.

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SEO: Keyword Strategy by LinkedIn Learning

• Who it’s for: Intermediate learners who want to focus on keyword strategy
• Price: $24.99

This course focuses on how to use keywords on your website effectively. Keywords are one of the basic foundations for succeeding in your online marketing efforts. 

By the end of the 4-hour course, you’ll have a firm understanding of how keywords work and be able to implement long-tail keywords, phrase patterns and plurals in your SEO strategy. You’ll also be able to measure keyword trends and competitiveness to ensure you are choosing the right one for your website. 

A certificate of completion will automatically go on your LinkedIn profile. 

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Advanced SEO Course

Are the techniques you are currently employing on your website effective but not performing as well as you want? If so, these advanced SEO courses can help boost your ranking and help you understand what you’ve been doing wrong. 

Advanced SEO Keyword Research by Udemy

• Who it’s for: Advanced learners who want to focus on keyword strategy
• Price: $29.99

This course helps you maximize the effectiveness of your keywords. You’ll have much better SEO results when you find the right keywords that can help convert traffic into repeat customers.

The 3-hour course shows you how to use keyword targeting tactics that can drive more traffic to your website and leapfrog your competitors in the rankings. You’ll also learn about the ranking strategies on different sites like Google, Amazon and YouTube. You’ll also get to learn from real-life case studies to help you gain a deeper understanding of what it takes to be successful at implementing SEO strategies. 

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Technical WordPress SEO by LinkedIn Learning

• Who it’s for: Advanced learners who use WordPress
• Price: $19.99 per month

Technical WordPress SEO shows you strategies that will optimize your WordPress site from top to bottom. You’ll learn different technical strategies that help you improve your site’s ranking on search engines. 

For those who are struggling to know which tools and plugins to use, this course provides some guidance. The instructor highlights a few of the tools that allow you to do it all with SEO, including Yoast SEO and RankMath. By the end of the course, you can create Robots.txt and a sitemap to help improve the performance of your site and increase your search engine rankings. 

Get this course.SEO Training Course by ClickMinded

• Who it’s for: Advanced learners
• Price: $997

Taught by the SEO project manager at Airbnb, the course claims that it will teach you to generate 10 times more traffic from Google. The course includes tons of actionable steps to take, including:

• On-page optimization
• Off-page optimization
• Keyword strategy
• Technical optimization
• Algorithm updates
• Competitive analysis

You can start the course for free, but you’ll only be able to access the first section: Introduction to SEO. You’ll be able to decide if you like the course and want to commit to the upgrade. 

Get this course.

Find the Best SEO Course

SEO can be very tricky to learn on your own. Many people who claim to be experts don’t have a strong idea of what works and what doesn’t work. Taking an online SEO course can be helpful and give you access to the newest techniques. Choose your course carefully and put the strategies you learned into practice to see an increase in your search engine rankings.