Is SEO a Hard Class?

The difficulty of learning SEO will largely depend on the subjects and topics that your chosen course covers. Beginner SEO classes that cover basic topics like keywords, organic search, fundamental strategies, and how to track and analyze your results will be fairly easy to learn, even for those completely new to the field. Advanced courses covering topics like using dynamic parameters for pagination, embedding original images in your content, and getting backlinks from unlinked brand mentions will be more challenging to learn as they’ll take a certain level of knowledge and skill in SEO. Ultimately, though, anyone with enough passion and commitment can become an expert in SEO. 

What is Hard about Learning SEO?

While SEO is ‌considered easy to learn, there are some challenging components that you’ll encounter. Below is a list of the top difficulties, but keep in mind that each of these are conquerable with the right attitude and a top-quality class. 

Amount of Information:

SEO involves learning a lot of digital marketing strategies, and the internet is full of conflicting information about best practices. Digital marketing is also an ever-evolving field, so staying up to date on current strategies and trends can seem overwhelming at first. Attending a structured course will help you hone in on the subjects and strategies that are most relevant, allowing you to master a few of the basic principles to build your confidence and make yourself more adaptable in future SEO projects. 

Technical and Creative Skills

SEO requires both technical and creative skills to optimize websites for search engines. SEO strategies often change, and rankings can fluctuate. Your technical skills, like your ability to track and analyze data, will be crucial to your work as they’ll help guide your future campaigns and strategies. Creative skills are useful when thinking about web page layout, writing engaging copy, and creating fresh campaigns that capture current trends in digital marketing. 

SEO Tools 

The field of SEO involves leveraging various tools to improve your ranking on top search engines. Below are three tools considered essential within the field of SEO. Mastering their interfaces and strategizing when and how to use each of them can be a challenging endeavor.

• Google Analytics: Used in almost every industry, this tool helps you identify content and pages on your website that are ranking well or getting shared a lot. It can also help you pinpoint which pages keep people on your site longer or achieve more conversions than others. By providing metrics like page views, bounce rate, and conversion rate, Google Analytics can help SEO experts identify areas for improvement. It’s a commonly used tool among SEO professionals, so mastering it will be essential to your success.
• SemRush: A popular tool among professionals,SemRush is an all-in-one tool suite for improving online visibility and discovering marketing insights. It offers tools to help companies run digital marketing strategies, such as SEO, content marketing, social media, and pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, and can help users manage all aspects of their online visibility.
• Moz Tools: Another helpful tool that grants you the power to optimize your website by measuring, evaluating, and monitoring the onsite and off-site aspects. It helps businesses track various aspects of SEO campaigns. Moz offers a rank tracking feature that lets you see where different pages on your website are ranking for different keywords.

SEO Vocabulary 

Beginner SEO novices will want to start with learning foundational SEO vocabulary (and their importance) like those terms listed below. SEO involves its own language and becoming fluent in the terminology can take some time, which may be challenging for some. 

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The tactics you use to optimize your website to ensure you provide the high-quality information searchers look for and rank higher in search results for specific keywords so people can find your content.
• On-page SEO: Any optimizations you’d make within your website to improve search rankings, like the keywords used in your content or back-end elements like site structure.
• Off-page SEO: Any actions you take to improve your search engine rankings outside your website, like backlinks from other websites or guest blogging.
• Link building: Getting links to your website from other high-quality websites to build authority and credibility.
• Keyword research: The process of finding keywords people enter into search results related to your business to help you inform the words to use in your website pages and content.
• Organic/Organic results: Any results in SERP that are unpaid and that appear because of a page’s relevance to the search query.

How Can I Make Learning SEO Easier?

There are a lot of educational resources out there to read and watch that will help build your understanding of SEO. From free trainings, courses, and webinars to video tutorials and books, knowledge is truly at your fingertips. But, if you’re looking for the options that can help you learn at a faster pace, certain options may be better for you than others. 

Live training and bootcamps, whether attended virtually or in-person, tend to be the easiest way to learn SEO. Live online classes offer instant feedback from your teacher and interactions with other students, creating the opportunity for a deeper understanding of the coursework. These classes are ideal for students that thrive in a structured learning environment with routine accountability check-ins. If you encounter any challenging material, you can ask questions in real time instead of spending unnecessary time figuring it out on your own. This collaborative environment is available for both full-time and part-time classes and provides structure and accountability, two things that can help you succeed. 

Also known as self-paced, on-demand classes offer the most flexibility of any class option without sacrificing in-depth curriculum. Not only can you learn from wherever you want, you can also learn whenever you want. There are no due dates or scheduled class times, so you can take your time on challenging topics or skip over ones you’ve already mastered. These classes are ideal for learners with complicated schedules who need to squeeze their studying in around their work and other obligations. You’ll need to be an independent and self-motivated student to succeed in an on-demand class. It’s very easy to lose momentum or fall behind when you don’t have any outside accountability, so these courses tend to take longer than a structured live course. 

Free resources like The HubSpot blog and YouTube can be helpful supplemental resources while you’re enrolled in a course. HubSpot Academy offers free courses in SEO that are ideal for beginners. Udemy also has various free courses and tutorials that can be completed in one to three hours, and even has short little instructional videos on specific topics like SEO for commerce, Google Keyword Planner, and the basics of conversion tracking. Coursera is another option, with various training sessions and videos lasting from just a few minutes to a few days. While great as bonus learning materials, free resources aren’t recommended as your primary source of education, as they’ll lack the immersive experience that a structured course offers.

Best Ways to Learn SEO Without Difficulty

As previously mentioned, live classes are the best way to learn SEO with the least difficulty, thanks to their many benefits. From the accountability of scheduled class times and due dates to real-time interactions with expert instructors to access to mentoring and networking, online or in-person live classes provide you with top-notch curriculum and personal support to help you confidently master SEO. Below are a few of the top courses you can take that offer these benefits.

Noble Desktop offers a variety of classes, both live online and in-person in New York City. Their SEO Bootcamp covers the fundamentals of SEO with hands-on lessons in search engine optimization and competitive keyword analysis Led by an expert instructor, this class offers small class sizes, setup assistance, and a free retake should you wish to revisit any of the material. The course also includes a seven-day free trial of SemRush, the top keyword research tool.

If you’re looking for something more robust, Noble also offers a UX & UI Design Certificate that covers design concepts, industry tools like Figma, and research methodologies for creating successful user experiences. UX (User Experience) focuses on designing apps, websites, and other products that are easy and pleasant for people to use. UI (User Interface) focuses on the appearance of apps, websites, and other products, so they are beautiful and visually effective. UX/UI and SEO are complementary fields; having a better understanding of the user’s experience can help guide your SEO strategy. 

Additionally, their Digital Marketing Certificate will provide you with a holistic understanding of all parts of marketing, including SEO. You’ll develop an actionable, multi-tiered campaign and optimize it through search engine optimization (SEO), social media, paid search, content marketing, and email marketing. You’ll also learn to increase your return on investment by using technology to determine key performance indicators, monitor web analytics, track conversions, and create reports with Google Analytics. Tracking your successes and failures will be hugely important as an SEO professional. 

Google Analytics Bootcamp will teach you how to use Google Analytics and its applications for marketing, including tracking data, interpreting reports, and optimizing performance. Google Analytics is often used by SEO experts to help identify content and pages on a website that is ranking well or getting shared a lot. This course will cover setting up an account and understanding what you should be tracking. You’ll also discover the exciting features of GA4, including its data model and advanced methods for tracking events that matter to you. (This course is part of the Digital Marketing Certificate, but can be taken as a standalone course.) 

While not specifically focused on SEO, Web Development with HTML & CSS is a valuable course for any SEO professional, as they’ll often have a hand in website development. This class offers hands-on experience coding websites from scratch, all the way through uploading to make the site live. You’ll learn best practices for structuring and tagging the content of your webpages with HTML, and styling the content with CSS. Using HTML, you’ll learn how to create webpages with text, images, and more. With CSS, you’ll style the content, create centered page layouts, add background images, style navigation, and make the page responsive. Optimizing HTML and CSS is paramount to ensuring not only an attractive design but also excellent SEO performance.