12 Best SEO Courses (Free & Paid) For 2023
There’s a unique language that governs internet traffic and prioritizes some websites over others. You might have heard of search engine algorithms, but how do you learn to optimize your website traffic using their metrics?
In this article, we’ll cover the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) in affiliate marketing and offer a list of some of the most popular SEO courses on the market. If you’re interested in SEO for eCommerce instead, learn more with our Etsy SEO or Shopify SEO guides.
Select a course for the fundamentals, get a possible SEO certification, and start building an effective SEO strategy.
Pick an SEO learning program relative to its level of complexity, your available budget, and the time you’re willing to invest to ensure your affiliate website is fully visible to relevant users.
What Is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s a process in digital marketing that aims to improve a website by increasing its visibility and ranking on search engines. SEO is an informational language with its own rules, structures, and trends.
Often, the objective of an SEO strategy is to modify a website – its content and page structure – so it fulfills the quality metrics maintained by search engine algorithms such as Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.
These often complicated digital algorithms value some websites over others based on key metrics. They track and study your page content, website architecture, offsite data, and your existing user traffic through multiple factors:
- site click-through rates
- web page meta tags
- received organic traffic
- page loading speeds
- top keyword usage and frequency
- link building, and referring domains
These, among other factors, are what an SEO course material tries to analyze in more detail, offering insights into the SEO process and how to interpret the search engine information available. Eventually, this helps you develop a basic understanding of how to set up a blueprint to increase traffic and visibility.
Why Is SEO Important?
Learning SEO is a crucial step for affiliate marketing. Bringing in a higher volume of visitors through an optimized site will open your business to a larger pool of potential customers, increasing your percentage of conversions, sales, or sign-ups.
You can develop excellent and insightful marketing content for your affiliate business. Still, without the bridge of an SEO framework, no one will find your website unless you’re willing to pay a considerable amount to sponsor it and take a loss on your final profit.
Even if you already have a high click-through rate, your site architecture needs to be well-linked, easy to navigate, and relevant to the user’s primary search intent, which is all improved by SEO best practices.
User search intent is what a user types in the search bar to move to a specific website, find relevant information, or make a transaction. If a user finds your link but clicks away because it doesn’t fit their intent, the algorithm will devalue your website. SEO specialists define four different types of user search intent:
- Informational – user wants to supplement their knowledge or receive an answer to a specific question.
- Navigational – user is looking for a specific website they already have in mind, like a social media page, marketplace, news site, etc.
- Commercial – user is looking to compare prices, brands, or specific design features they value most in a product or service.
- Transactional – user is looking to purchase a product and is ready to go to check out.
Affiliates need to target an intent – usually commercial or transactional – and prioritize specific keywords in their content to bring the most relevant information to the user.
The more users click on your site, the longer their visit, and the more your website is linked on other pages will show the algorithm that you have authority over a subject and are more likely to bring value to the end user.
SEO training courses can help you streamline that process and compete with other affiliate websites. Consistently updated SEO techniques and tools help you track what users are searching for, what search engines prioritize in your content, and how best to market and build a website around it.
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Top 12 Best SEO Courses for 2023 (Free & Paid)
The SEO industry has made impressive strides in working out the often hidden nature of search engine metrics through their tools and tutorials. Learning through a dedicated SEO training course is one of the best ways to practice successful site building, content marketing, keyword research, and trend analysis.
We know that each affiliate has different requirements for their page SEO, and we’re well aware that this is a complicated topic with more facets than you may be willing to delve into. Each option offers its own unique benefits and constraints.
That’s precisely why we’ve made a list of twelve online courses that work great for both SEO beginners who want a free and basic grasp of SEO fundamentals and seasoned professionals looking to optimize their digital marketing strategy with paid tools.
Yoast is a free SEO training platform with a series of beginner-friendly courses with intuitive and simple language. Its main free course is in video format with key terms and helpful graphics. Get a solid understanding of SEO basics through their blogs, webinars, and Yoast SEO Academy training.
You can start by discovering how search engines work and learning quick tips to improve your website. Continue to their articles or Yoast Academy to train your SEO skill with the fundamentals of Google analytics, putting together content, and the technical aspects of page optimization.
Along with SEO resources, the website has tools to streamline your SEO strategy; however, these are paid services to help you manage a website’s SEO long-term. First, we recommend Yoast’s in-depth ultimate guides about site structure, blogging, SEO copywriting training, and keyword research.
- Level: Beginner-level SEO concepts.
- Price: Free basic courses and Premium plan with all access. Yoast Premium + all Academy courses paid via a $99/year subscription.
- Duration: All SEO fundamentals in under 2 hours. Advertises becoming an SEO expert in 12 to 16 hours.
Udemy is an excellent platform for finding courses online in almost every category. Their free SEO tutorial is a relatively fast-paced but hugely informative video by the SEO toolset platform Moz, whose speaker gives a graphic run-down of SEO fundamentals in seven digestible sections.
Moz’s SEO specialist first introduces how to develop an SEO strategy with helpful steps, then outlines structuring and doing an SEO audit. The tutorial continues with lectures on keyword research, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and link building and concludes with SERP features and reporting metrics.
With its compact structure, the Udemy SEO course is great for all-in-one access to the very fundamentals of SEO without any distractions. However, the course might not be as useful for complete beginners and tends to run into some complex terminology.
- Level: Intermediate-level SEO concepts.
- Price: Free to enroll.
- Duration: Seven sections with 18 lectures for a duration of 3h 25m total.
Ahrefs is one of the top-reviewed SEO platforms on the market, priding itself on search engine scores that often outperform other best SEO course websites. Ahrefs has a distinct and clean style and comes with ultimate guides, tracking tools, built-in software, and advanced SEO techniques.
The Ahrefs Complete SEO Training Course is a quick but professional video lesson plan. Like us, it first describes SEO and why it’s important. The course continues with dedicated lessons on successful keyword research, then covers on-page SEO optimization, link building, and concludes with the basics of technical SEO.
Ahrefs is not only a huge repository of information with expert marketing professionals, but it’s also a proven case study. The Ahrefs team has used its own SEO knowledge to develop one of the most visible and user-friendly SEO websites currently available.
- Level: Beginner-level SEO concepts.
- Price: Free to view.
- Duration: 14 tutorials at exactly 2 hours.
Semrush is a digital marketing platform with a clear-cut interface. It has a large list of resources, including blogs, eBooks, webinars, and its dedicated Semrush Academy and course catalog. It has some of the most well-known experts in the SEO game.
The Semrush SEO Crash Course with expert SEO specialist Brian Dean outlines a direct action plan with five comprehensive SEO lessons. The course structure starts with an SEO beginner introduction, then moves on to keyword research, optimizing content, link building, and monitoring your results.
Semrush has had long years of experience and is a valuable source of information and popular SEO tools. The Semrush marketing campaign has spread like wildfire and is hard to miss once you’ve filled your cookies with SEO terminology.
- Level: Beginner to intermediate-level SEO concepts.
- Price: Free to enroll.
- Duration: Five tutorial sections in 4 hours.
HubSpot is a company that promotes business growth and creates software specializing in customer relationship management (CRM). The platform has partnered with Moz to create a concise yet extensive SEO course module. You can access other free courses through the HubSpot Academy website.
The SEO course is structured primarily to help you evaluate and improve your website functionalities in search engine results, going over link building, blog writing, and other intuitive examples of good SEO strategies.
HubSpot has a series of spot-on articles about all things eCommerce and marketing. Their course outlet offers valuable examples, visual guides, and quizzes on search engine basics in your affiliate content marketing strategy.
- Level: Intermediate-level SEO concepts.
- Price: Free to enroll.
- Duration: Four lessons over 20 videos in 1h 35m.
Hosted by the website Coursera, the University of California Davis offers a full course of academic study in digital marketing and content development at the end of which you can be entitled to legitimate SEO certifications.
The UCD SEO Specialization is a much more thorough exploration of how SEOs work in their profession, develop reports, and engage in competitive website analysis. Their full course offers to teach skills in SEO, search algorithms, mathematical optimization, keyword research, and different types of online marketing.
Note that this SEO course recommends at least two years of business experience and takes much longer than a rudimentary run-down from one of the other SEO courses online. However, it does frame itself as a more educational background experience.
- Level: Beginner-level SEO concepts.
- Price: Free to enroll.
- Duration: 5-month course, suggested at a pace of 6h per week.
Neil Patel Digital is an organization run by a credited marketing influencer and a team of SEO professionals. Their platform provides services for up-and-coming website designers and managers, offering digital marketing tools and SEO training.
The SEO Unlocked course is a weekly module designed to help you set up an SEO framework from the ground up, with a comprehensive itinerary of resources in three executable phases.
Patel leads us through SEO terminology, keyword research, on-page and off-page optimization, and SEO auditing in the first two weeks. The next three weeks of training overview best content marketing practices and further tips to optimize your content. Finally, Patel develops a guide for Google SEO analytics and ways to improve your branding and customer experience.
- Level: Beginner to intermediate-level SEO concepts.
- Price: Free to view.
- Duration: 7-week course, with varying lengths of video guides in presentation format.
Simplilearn is a free course website with a full cast of industry professionals, free resources, and tutorials for the online job market. Every course offers a declaration of completion certificate.
The Advanced SEO Course covers SEO terms in self-paced video lessons, aiming to focus on teaching SEO, web analytics, content marketing, keyword research, URL management, and website optimization.
The course follows a familiar framework of breaking down terms, defining how search engines work in practice, and moving on to technical SEO – website architecture and analytics tools.
- Level: Beginner to intermediate-level SEO concepts.
- Price: Free to enroll for 90 days.
- Duration: 13 lessons over the course of 36 hours with a quiz at the end.
Robbie Richards is a professional marketing manager who has consistently created successful marketing campaigns for small businesses and large brands alike. His organization has grown into a sizable team of SEO-certified marketing specialists.
The SEO Playbook has a waitlist, but once you’re in, it delves into a large library of course materials with a step-by-step process for each executable SEO technique with the goal of developing a search-engine-optimized website.
Richards hosts a group of like-minded people looking to improve their SEO skills with a growing library of playbooks and tips for success. His SEO education aims to grow your business with access to pre-built templates for automated SEO management.
- Level: Beginner to advanced-level SEO concepts.
- Price: Enrollment is based on a waitlist.
- Duration: 14 hours of video training through 23 in-depth modules.
Reliablesoft is a digital marketing agency providing a range of SEO consulting, social media and pay-per-click marketing, and web development services with an approachable and applied method.
Their Complete SEO Course bundle includes step-by-step instructions to make your website SEO friendly, followed by an actionable SEO blueprint that you can directly implement into your strategy.
Reliablesoft creates courses with multiple learning styles in mind, offering video, text-based, and screenshot annotations. For a fair price, you can purchase their full bundle of updated material, including multiple digital marketing courses.
- Level: Beginner to intermediate-level SEO concepts.
- Price: $60 per SEO course with possible bundle deals.
- Duration: Four courses with 34 lessons with a learning length of 60 days or less.
SEO Blueprint training is a preppy and memorable SEO learning platform that encourages you to set reliable goals and find practical ways to increase your organic website traffic and online presence.
SEO Blueprint 2 is their newest course module with new market insights curated by step-by-step videos, checklists, worksheets, and a community of thriving entrepreneurs.
This course selection comprises a more niche outlook on SEO trends with insights into new concepts that spur you to learn SEO techniques that beat the competition and find original answers to existing problems.
- Level: Beginner to advanced-level SEO concepts.
- Price: Full community training purchase for $597 or a one-on-one course professional package for $4,597.
- Duration: 175 step-by-step lessons with 27+ hours of training.
Traffic Think Tank is another well-designed SEO training platform with a dynamic learning scheme that moves to accelerate your SEO skills regardless of prior knowledge. TTT’s community program keeps SEO learning lively and reliably answers any specific questions you may have during the course.
Choose between beginner, intermediate, and advanced courses. Define key SEO concepts, content marketing, link building, keyword research, technical SEO, and full SEO automation for larger business scaling.
- Level: Beginner to advanced-level SEO concepts.
- Price: Self-guided learning for $99/month and a full-guided accelerator for $119/month.
- Duration: 200+ hours of training across a vast library of resources.
Grow Your Skills and Become an Affiliate
Learning to develop a strategic SEO skill set is nothing without a practical way to use it and earn money. See if you have what it takes to become an SEO professional by joining the Printify Affiliate Program.
From sign-up to payday, our affiliates enjoy a 5% commission from each sale they make advertising Printify’s print-on-demand eCommerce service.
Sign up, apply for an affiliate position and use your SEO insights to create marketing content with a bespoke Printify affiliate link, promo codes, 90-day cookie life, and dedicated support.
Look to earn an average of $1000/month from your existing audience and continue growing your website traffic.
Study Away
Check out some of the best free SEO courses currently available or access new learning modules through dynamic paid programs with professional assistance. Learn SEO from veterans in the field who, through their own insights, have made some of the most clever marketing and web page optimization campaigns.
Start using your SEO course knowledge immediately and join the Printify Affiliate Program. Log into your existing Printify profile or sign up directly. Reach out to our dedicated Printify Affiliate Manager for any help during your application process – [email protected]
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Written by
Janis Lazda
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