If you want to learn SEO, you can put it all together from blog posts and videos or take a take SEO Course. But what about one SEO Certification?
After hours of research SEO Certifications and accept three of them (see my three Certificates), my opinion is this:
Most SEO Certifications are not worth it.
I explain why this is so in this article. But first, let’s get to the basics …
SEO Certifications are awarded to those who have a SEO Course and demonstrate their knowledge in a test or quiz.
It’s the last part that sets one apart SEO Certification from SEO Course.
For something to qualify as one SEO Certification:
- There must be a quiz / test that you may or may not pass.
- After passing the quiz / test, the course provider must present you with proof of performance – usually in the form of a certificate or badge.
This could look like this:
Kind of.
Google offers a free Certification “Basics of Digital Marketing” via the digital Google garage. It comprises 26 modules, ~ 14 hours of material and covers many aspects of digital marketing three of them are exclusively dedicated SEO. It is accredited by the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe and The open university.
Google also offers that ‘SEO Basic certification in the digital garage. It’s free, contains ~ 2.5 hours of material, and covers the four main aspects of. from SEO (On-page, off-page, keyword research, technical) and was created by the University of California, Davis.
If you want to get to know Google Analytics, there is also that Google Analytics certification. Read these to learn more about how to pass the individual qualification exam and where to find your certificate.
If you want SEO Certificate to add to your resume and LinkedIn to receive job vacancies, I have bad news for you: most employers don’t care SEO Certifications.
How do we know?
We have 15. asked SEO Hiring managers for the skills and requirements they consider important when hiring an employee SEO Specialist. 86% said that SEO Certifications are not important, the rest say they are only moderately important.
No hiring manager said they were very important.
But that’s not the only reason SEO Certifications are probably not worth it for most people. Here are a few more:
SEO Certifications do not guarantee a good SEO education
Get one SEO Certificate does not necessarily mean that you have learned something useful. It just means that you’ve learned something. So don’t let the charm of a certificate tarnish you while studying SEO. If the curriculum doesn’t look helpful, don’t bother with it.
SEO Certifications only teach you theory, not practical skills
If you want to become one SEO Expert, my advice is to start building a website ASAP after learning the basics of SEO. That’s because you can only get this far if you know the theory. If you get your hands dirty trying to rank a website, you will learn more than one SEO Certification.
SEO Certifications take a long time
See the length of the Google Digital Marketing Certification above: There are 14 hours of material. This is not a negligible expenditure of time SEO Certification. There is an opportunity cost here as that time you could spend building and evaluating a website. As I said above, this is probably a better use of your time if you already know the basics. know SEO.
SEO Certifications usually focus on the basics
There are probably a few SEO Certifications that delve deep into one area SEO like keyword research or technical SEObut the ones I came across were pretty straightforward. It doesn’t matter if you’re new SEO, but there are faster ways to learn the basics, such as our beginner’s guide, too SEO or our short ‘SEO for entry-level video courses.
SEO Certifications are often just marketing tricks
Past SEO Certification earns you a certificate (and sometimes a badge). You can show this on your resume, LinkedIn profile, on your website, wherever. This increases the brand awareness of the creator of the SEO Certification. I think that’s why many of them are easy to pass. Passports lead to brand awareness.
After countless research SEO Certifications and I’ll take three of them in my opinion there is no “best” SEO Certification. ‘ I cannot recommend any of the graduates – at least not just for certification.
If I were to judge these “certifications” according to their study content, it would look different.
Each of the ‘certifications’ I got had videos well produced, explaining concepts well, and sharing them accurately SEO Total knowledge. Googles SEO Basic certification had annoying background music and looked a bit dated but that’s a minor point.
It was the exam and certification aspect that, in my opinion, let all of these courses down.
For starters, if you fail the exam, you can retake it shortly after (between 0 and 12 hours) your first attempt. This may sound positive if you want to pass, but it only degrades the value of the certification. If it were for university exams, the job market would soon be saturated with graduates and degrees would lose a lot of their value.
But that fact was nothing compared to the trials themselves …
Here is just one of the questions about one of the exams:
If you are new SEO, the problem here is this All links are “useful” to a site’s authority. That doesn’t mean that all kinds of links will help you rank higher on Google, but that has nothing to do with the authority of the site.
Here is another question from another exam:
This isn’t really a true or false question like Google is recommends that you use hyphens instead of underscores in URLs.
Here’s another question, this time from Google SEO Basic certification:
You can see I got the answer wrong. I suspect the correct answer is “Website Keyword Optimization” but I really have no idea what that means. It sounds like something you’d see on the Warrior Forum in 2009.
In short, the certification aspect felt like an afterthought on each of the certifications I completed. It felt like someone created the course and then hired someone with far less knowledge to look at the course and create an exam.
Does that mean that applies to everyone SEO Certifications?
Probably not. There are many others SEO Certifications, so paid certifications may be of higher quality.
Here are a few paid ones SEO Certifications that arose during my research:
To be clear, I haven’t taken any of these certifications. They are just the ones I found who actually are SEO Certifications (no courses) and were created by well-known companies / people.
If you’re wondering why I didn’t add other popular resources (e.g. Brian Deans’SEO That Works ‘), which often appears on lists of’SEO Certifications ”, it is because they are not certifications. These are courses. There is no exam or certificate.
Our SEO Course for beginners is the same. It doesn’t have an exam or certificate at the end, but it’s a great place to start if you’re new to it SEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsVTqzratPs
Final thoughts
Most SEO HR managers see certifications as unimportant when it comes to hiring SEO Specialists, and I agree. I wouldn’t look SEO Certifications on CVs when I am hiring because I know many of them pass through a mixture of trial and error and common sense.
So here’s my advice:
If you want to grow SEO Knowledge, find a good one SEO Course (here is our free one) and then do what you have learned.
If you want to get a job‘do the same because results speak louder than a’SEO Certification. ‘
Any questions? Disagree with my opinion? Let’s discuss on twitter.
