Understanding search engine optimization is critical for modern marketing students and professionals. This collection of resources is narrowed to those I trust, use, and recommend and I hope you find it helpful.
Learning SEO
Learning SEO – A great resource that aggregates SEO topics and links to many different educational resources around the web.
Moz Beginner’s Guide to SEO – I recommend this as a free online starting point for understanding SEO as a beginner. Easy to read, share, and link to.
SEMrush Academy Courses – Free online video courses taught by SEO experts on a variety of topics. Students can also benefit from passing the free certification exams at the end. Check out the fundamental SEO course and no true SEO training is complete without some serious technical SEO.
Google Search Central – Google’s own guidance about search and SEO for webmasters. Note that there are sometimes large distinctions about what Google officially recommends and what search marketers are doing to stay competitive.
Search engine news sources: Google Search Central Blog (Official), Search Engine Land, and Search Engine Roundtable. These can assist with staying updated on developments in the search engine industry (although it should be noted that the ability to differentiate between big news and small news is a skill that comes with patience and experience).
Teaching SEO
SEO: Strategy & Skills – We wrote (and continually update) a full online SEO textbook, complete with lesson plans, slides, quizzes, and assignments. Our aim was to create a really accessible resource that doesn’t require the instructor to have an SEO background (but still wants to be in command of the class and help prepare students for SEO careers).
How to Teach SEO Like You Know What You’re Talking About (2018) – My webinar (65 min.) provides an overview of how I approach teaching SEO in my own digital marketing course. It can give you an idea of how you might approach the topic, whether you have several days or simply part of a class.
Learn to Teach SEO: The Lightning Workshop (2021) – My interactive workshop (51 min.) showcases a very solid way to teach SEO in a short amount of time using a simplified competitive analysis that I walk through. If you only had 1 class to teach SEO, I would teach something like this skill.
The YouTube SEO Project – I created this project to give students the chance to learn and experience SEO for themselves by researching, creating, and promoting an optimized YouTube video. My experience is that it is easier for students to see rankings and search traffic traffic in a short period of time using a video on a brand new YouTube channel than trying to do the equivalent on a brand new website. Here’s a webinar to help professors run this project. (Estimated project length: 2 weeks)
SEO Tools
With an assumption that you have no budget for paid SEO tools, here are some I recommend that provide many of the basic functions that students can benefit from using.
- Keyword Research: KeywordTool.io and AnswerThePublic (idea generation), SearchVolume.io (search volumes)
- On-Page Audits: Screaming Frog (Free Version) for content/code and Web.dev for speed/usability/accessibility
- Off-Page Link Analysis: Moz Link Explorer
Having specialized in SEO before my PhD and having assisted several students with placement into SEO roles after graduation, some of the prominent tools and skills that you should consider integrating into a more complete SEO training include: SEMrush/Ahrefs/Moz (keyword research, link analysis, rank tracking), Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Screaming Frog/DeepCrawl, WordPress/Shopify, and web programming languages (HTML, CSS, JavaScript).