13 Free SEO Courses, Beginner to Advanced

Being stuck at home due to Covid-19 is an excellent time to improve your search engine optimization skills.

The following seven learning sites offer, collectively, 13 free SEO courses. Some include free certificates of completion to showcase your new skills on LinkedIn or elsewhere.

Coursera

Coursera’s instructional material — from single courses to master’s degree programs — comes from universities and individuals around the world. Many of the paid courses are available to audit for free, enabling you to download the materials and consume the content without earning a certification. SEO offerings include:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Specialization. Offered through the University of California, Davis, this collection of four courses includes an introduction, the fundamentals, on-page optimization, and advanced content and social media strategies.

• Advanced Search Engine Optimization Strategies. This single class covers technical, international, mobile, and social strategies for increasing site traffic. It also includes tips on how to measure and communicate the success of your SEO program.

LinkedIn Learning

LinkedIn Learning (formerly, Lynda.com) offers a one-month free trial. Afterward, the price is $19.99 a month for unlimited access. The 865 SEO-related videos include:

• Improve SEO for Your Ecommerce Site. This is one of the few SEO courses on any learning site that focuses on ecommerce.

• SEO: Videos. Google includes videos in organic search results. This class explains how to make your videos rank well, as well as using them to attract customers.

• Advanced SEO: Developing an SEO-Friendly Website. This deep dive into technical SEO focuses on crawling, indexing, structured data, and code optimization.

Udemy

With more than 100,000 paid and free video courses, Udemy has something on just about any topic. This includes more than 600 SEO videos, including:

• SEO Training Course by Moz. This three-and-a-half-hour collection of Moz’s popular Whiteboard Friday videos consists of seven sections with topics that include strategy, audits, and reporting.

• SEO Link Building Basics. This one-hour class addresses analyzing backlink profiles, competitive link research, and link prospecting.

HubSpot Academy

This free training site from HubSpot, the marketing platform, includes course certifications that integrate with LinkedIn profiles. The instruction applies to any site, with or without HubSpot. Aside from its value as an online learning site, it’s an excellent example of SEO and content marketing.

• SEO Training Course: Building Sustainable Traffic for Business Growth. This series of 22 short videos teaches SEO basics and offers a case study on the SEO program for HubSpot’s own blog.

• Creating Topic Clusters and Pillar Pages. Creating in-depth, relevant content on the topics searchers want to know is critical to long-term organic-search growth. This 45-minute video explains how.

• Learn What Content Marketing is and How to Do It: Over six hours, you’ll learn about content marketing — to engage and attract potential customers.

eMarketing Institute

eMarketing Institute offers free downloadable ebooks paired with free online tests to verify learning. When you pass the test, you’re rewarded with a free certificate.

• SEO Certification Course. The 14 chapters in the 156-page ebook cover beginner-level content such as how search engines work, keyword research, on-page optimization, and link building.

Other certification courses from eMarketing include ecommerce, blogging, paid search, and content marketing.

Udacity

Udacity offers free and paid content for developers and technical SEO practitioners.

• Website Performance Optimization. Google created this free, intermediate-level course on optimizing the speed of your pages and site as a whole. You’ll invest six hours and tackle a final project to complete the course.

Udacity also offers a 40-percent discount on premium programs, including its Digital Marketing Nanodegree. The course covers seemingly all aspects of digital marketing — with a single class on SEO — over three months, part-time.

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Springboard

Springboard offers paid online learning and career placement services with a technical focus on design, coding, data science, and analytics. It also offers free “learning paths,” including one for SEO.

• Search Engine Optimization Learning Path. Across eight sections and 53 resources, this track takes 44 hours to complete. Most of the content — tutorials, best practice documents, case studies — comes from leading sites such as Moz, HubSpot, and Backlinko. It is an excellent compendium of the best resources on SEO.