All the SEO Training Courses We Could Find

ow! There are A LOT of SEO training courses out there. A year ago when I first started working on ours, I think there were 2 or 3. Now they're popping up all over the place.
So here's the deal: Obviously we have a dog in this fight and we think our course is pretty rad. But I tried to be as unbiased as possible in providing guidance to help you pick a course that's best for you.
You'll see below, I actually recommend other courses in quite a few cases. So check them all out and decide for yourself.
This depends on what you need, so I thought of all the people that might be reading this and what they might need. I've broken down what I'd recommend based on who you are.
You just want a basic primer on SEO but you don't need to really execute.
Maybe you're a manager or an account executive and you just need some basic entry-level information but you don't want to read through a thousand blog posts and organize the information yourself. You want something super simple and ideally free to just give you the really basic info.
In that case check out one of the Moz trainings: Either the free Moz training on the Moz website or the free Moz course on Udemy. Moz puts out some good info.
You're a content writer, content / PR team, or an in-house marketing team. You control content on a website and you're trying to maximize the SEO visibility for that site and the content you're creating every day or content that already exists.
You probably don't have time to learn every little technical detail about SEO. You need training that's primarily content-focused.
If that's you, our course (UFO) is probably the best fit.
I spent 2/3 of my time for a full year designing an SEO training course primarily for content teams and in-house marketers.
It also includes a certification.
SEO is really hard when you're a new organization. If you've decided you want SEO to be a key part of your growth strategy, and you have a budget, just hire us to help.
If you don't have the budget to hire help and you want to learn yourself, you'll need backlinks to get the results you're looking for. If that's you, I'd recommend Brian Dean's course.
Just be aware, you have a grind ahead of you. But hey, isn't pain what we signed up for as business owners?
This is a tricky one. You definitely want a certification. Our course has a certification. So do the paid Udemy courses, ClickMinded also does.
If you're willing to put in the time, the Coursera course taught by Eric Enge in partnership with UC Davis would probably look the best on a resume.
If you literally just want to say you're SEO certified in the cheapest, quickest way possible, you might want to take one of Udemy's paid courses.
If you're somewhere in between those two ends of the spectrum, check out our course (UFO) or the SimpliLearn course. They're both about the same price and both have certification. Ours will probably give you more actionable knowledge. SimpliLearn looks more corporate, which may be a good thing if you need that.
You probably want a certification.
You may be willing to travel or do in-person.
You probably have a bigger budget than if you were paying out of pocket.
BrainStation is probably your best bet if you want in-person.
Our course (UFO), ClickMinded, Coursera / UC Davis, or SimpliLearn if you want online.
Those all have certifications, although future employers may put just a little more clout in either the in-person training with BrainStation or the online training with Coursera / UC Davis.
Whatup fam.
Honestly you should take Brian Dean's course first, unless you're already a backlink-building all-star. Then either Bruce Clay's course, our course, or all three. Those will all be good if you can afford them.
Brian Dean's course for link building.
Our course for SEO theory and how to think about SEO and content. How to prioritize, how to sort through all the fluff.
Bruce Clay's course for insight into enterprise SEO and networking (it's in-person). Plus, it's Bruce freaking Clay. You get to learn from an original SEO gangster.
And then maybe BrainStation's course for networking also. It's pretty long, which may be just what you want depending on your experience.
The major benefit of our course is that it's a relatively low monthly fee, and it includes coaching. So you don't just have to hope you'll understand everything and be able to implement it, we'll help ensure that happens.
I built this course to teach my team SEO because SEO is just taught wrong pretty much everywhere in my opinion. Everybody basically just regurgitates what they read online or heard at conferences.
Most SEO info out there is about ranking factors and meta titles and all this stuff that is certainly important, but it's not going to teach you HOW to actually execute on SEO.
You can memorize all "200 Google ranking factors" and you aren't going to be any closer to executing on an SEO strategy.
This course teaches you how to think about SEO from the user's perspective, not from the perspective of some automated Google algorithm.
And that's because Google's algorithm is just measuring users. So if you understand users, you basically future proof your SEO knowledge. If you make users happy, you make Google happy.
I took this course way back in the day, although I don't appear to have access anymore so I can't say what the newer version is like, but version 2.0 was fan-freaking-tasitc.
If the new version is like the old one, it's definitely more on the advanced side. It's heavily focused on link building and using content to generate links. So, if you don't need that then this probably isn't the course for you.
But if you're a smaller company and you're pushing SEO as a primary marketing strategy and you're smart and willing to put in the work, this is probably the course I'd recommend because when you're new, SEO is really hard and backlinks are crucial if you want to outrank larger, more established competitors.
I'd also recommend this course for anyone who wants some more advanced link building training. So if you do SEO for a living or if you're in a hyper competitive niche and you really need link building to get that edge, this is a great course for that.
The version I went through probably isn't what most brands or established companies need - backlinks are typically not the primary challenge for those guys.
Also note that Brian follows the ole' internet marketer's playbook and only opens the course to new customers every so often so you have to join the waitlist and there isn't much info on the site about lessons or the structure of the course or even how much it costs or when you can take it. You basically have to subscribe and then just wait.
But Brian's stuff is definitely worthwhile.
This "advanced in-person search engine optimization training course provides intensive SEO training by industry veteran Bruce Clay, the recognized Father of SEO."
Bruce Clay is an enterprise SEO firm. They're pretty well-known and respected. I'd say if you're looking to actually DO enterprise SEO for a living, this might be a good course to look at.
Definitely expensive though.
I don't know much about BrainStation but they seem legit.
They have a lot of testimonials from people at legit companies that have taken their training like Google and Lululemon.
Can learn online or in-person. Price appears to be the same either way.
Has 5 week or 10 week in-person training.
Online training is live so you can ask questions I assume.
Price is typically what you'd expect for any live training. Pre-recorded obviously tends to be cheaper than live, whether online or off.
This course also goes into analytics and SEM which is nice if you need that, but that's a lot of info and if you don't need all that it's pretty broad. You can't possibly learn SEM and SEO and analytics deeply in that time. But if it's really good you may get to an intermediate level of knowledge in that time. Plus, all this stuff is so intertwined it can be beneficial to keep your education broad.
This is a 5-course specialization track on Coursera offered by UC Davis. The 5 courses that make up the specialization are:
This seems like a solid course if you want to spend the time to get a good foundation and you want a recognizable name on your certificate.
The instructor, Eric Enge, is pretty well-known in the SEO space. He's got a YouTube channel with a bunch of SEO videos here.
Like I said, this completion certificate is probably going to sound better on a resume since you can probably name drop Coursera and UC Davis, so if that's what your after, consider investing the time in this long specialization.
ClickMinded is an SEO training course created by Tommy Griffith, former SEO manager at Airbnb.
I've personally taken this course. It's good. It's basic, but it's good. It won't give you anything life-changing or really change the way you think about SEO but if you're looking for the basics presented in a good way from someone with experience at one of the most well-known unicorn startups in the world, this is a good one. Tommy also has other courses besides just SEO (copywriting, SEM, etc).
A free online SEO learning center covering a wide range of topics. This is pretty well-done if you just want no frills basics and you don't need a certificate. They also have a 1-hr guide to SEO as sort of a quick intro or refresher course if you're short on time. This is not all video. It's some pre-recorded video, some text-based content / guides, and links to some blog posts on the Moz site.
Basic intro to SEO from Moz on Udemy. I believe it's a collection of their Whiteboard Friday videos. The value here is they've organized everything for you already so you don't have to sort through hundreds of Whiteboard Friday videos on the Moz blog.
This course was created by Hubspot and is taught by Hubspot employees.
It's basically a lead gen tool for Hubspot. That's not necessarily a bad thing, just something to be aware of. Like the saying goes, if it's free then you're the product.
It might be really good though. Hubspot definitely rocks it in SEO.
This is a free course from Yoast. Joost de Valk founded Yoast, which I believe was what he called his super popular WordPress SEO plugin but he's since practiced a little concentric diversification and grown that business into a few different areas. They now have a training program you can subscribe to for $499/yr that includes all their different training courses, but you can take this one for free apparently.
SimpliLearn is an online training company focused on digital marketing and technology. I don't know much about them. They do appear to be legit. They have some partnerships with Purdue and IBM. They do have a course taught by the Purdue University Dean of Science, so do your own research but at a glance they look legit.
My guess is this course is fairly basic. They have a chapter on duplicate content which is probably not something I'd focus an entire chapter on these days, but what the hell do I know? I'm just some guy on the internet.
This is a free 60 minute webinar SEO training. Obviously, you can't learn much in 60 minutes, but as an introduction to SEO, assuming it's live (and it looks like it is), it might be pretty useful. It looks like it's put on by an SEO company in Boulder. The webinars appear to be live on specific dates that align with conferences.
I actually went through this course a bit because I was curious what a free Udemy course was like. It's about what you'd expect. Not terrible, it's just that nobody's going to put a ton of work into a free course, so this appears to be a mishmash of presentation videos from other courses or presentations this author created.
Video 3-27, for example, ends with him saying he's going to show you how to do something in the next video but then the next video goes into a completely different topic.
But hey, it's free and maybe you'll learn something.
Lynda has a wide variety of SEO training lessons, but this isn't really an SEO training COURSE per se. Lynda (now LinkedIn learning) just has this landing page but it's really just a collection of a number of courses related to SEO, SEM, analytics, etc. You can subscribe to LinkedIn learning to access all their courses. I don't believe they offer certificates right now.
This is a free course Neil put together on YouTube, although it's not really an organized course. His course page is just linking to his YouTube channel, so he's just trying to grab traffic for "SEO training course" and send it to his YouTube channel. Right on. To each his own. I have it here in case you want to check it out: