SEO
Courses on technical SEO, content strategy, link building and search performance measurement.
Verified courses first, then the rest of the category
Fifteen lessons on link building, presented as the advanced counterpart to the introductory module inside Ahrefs’ beginner SEO course. Free, and explicitly aimed at people past the basics.
Verification record: TMC-2026-00018Verified Re-check due Direct course review
Twelve lessons on optimising for answer engines rather than for the classic ten blue links, which is one of the newer areas where published training is still thin. Free on the Ahrefs Academy.
Verification record: TMC-2026-00019Verified Re-check due Direct course review
The longest course on the Ahrefs Academy at forty lessons and close to five hours, covering blogging as a business acquisition channel rather than as writing practice. Free.
Verification record: TMC-2026-00009Verified Re-check due Direct course review
A short video course from the team behind the Ahrefs toolset, covering the four areas a new site owner has to get right: finding keywords worth targeting, on-page work, building links, and the technical basics that decide whether pages can be crawled at all. Fourteen lessons totalling roughly two hours, published without a sign-up or an Ahrefs subscription. Examples are demonstrated in the provider's own tools, which is worth knowing before starting.
Verification record: TMC-2026-00008Verified Re-check due Direct course review
Answer engine optimisation, one of the newer subjects where published training is still thin, taught here at over an hour. Free from Webflow University, with an account offered to track progress.
Not independently verified
Applying AI tooling to search work, one of the newer subjects where published training from an established SEO company is still scarce. Included in the Yoast premium plan, which the academy prices at 118.80 US dollars per year for every course plus the company plugins.
Not independently verified
Nine lessons on adapting search marketing practice to AI-mediated search, taught by Leigh McKenzie. Short at around forty minutes, and free with a Semrush account.
Not independently verified
The broad SEO course in the premium plan, covering the subject as a whole rather than one technique or one plugin. Included in the Yoast premium plan, which the academy prices at 118.80 US dollars per year for every course plus the company plugins.
Not independently verified
Search work for online stores specifically, where product and category pages create problems a content site never meets. Included in the Yoast premium plan, which the academy prices at 118.80 US dollars per year for every course plus the company plugins.
Not independently verified
A product orientation to the Semrush toolset in twenty-one short lessons, rather than a course about search marketing as a subject. Free, though a Semrush account is required to start it.
Not independently verified
The agency-facing version of Semrush’s product orientation, same length at twenty-one lessons, framed around client work rather than a single site. Free with a Semrush account.
Not independently verified
A product course rather than a subject course: sixty-two lessons walking through the Ahrefs toolset itself, which is worth knowing before starting if you were looking for vendor-neutral SEO training. Free, with a separate certification exam of sixty-seven questions.
Not independently verified
A short product course on Ahrefs Brand Radar, running to ten lessons and under half an hour. Free on the Ahrefs Academy, and narrow by design rather than an introduction to the wider subject.
Not independently verified
Running search across languages and regions, covering the structural decisions that are expensive to reverse later. Included in the Yoast premium plan, which the academy prices at 118.80 US dollars per year for every course plus the company plugins.
Not independently verified
Twenty-four lessons on keyword research, taught by Alex Lindley and demonstrated in Semrush’s own tools. Free with a Semrush account.
Not independently verified
Keyword research treated as its own discipline, which is where most search strategy is actually decided. Included in the Yoast premium plan, which the academy prices at 118.80 US dollars per year for every course plus the company plugins.
Not independently verified
A very short technical course, seven lessons and roughly eleven minutes, on using the Ahrefs API. Free, and narrow enough that its length is the main thing to know about it.
Not independently verified
Search optimisation for a business with a physical location, where the ranking factors differ substantially from the general case. Included in the Yoast premium plan, which the academy prices at 118.80 US dollars per year for every course plus the company plugins.
Not independently verified
Twenty-three lessons on on-page work and AI search, taught by Alex Lindley through the Semrush toolset. Free with a Semrush account.
Not independently verified
Colorado Boulder on paid search and display, the two formats most advertising budgets still go through. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
UC Davis’ SEO specialization, one of very few university-taught treatments of search optimisation rather than vendor training. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
Google's own orientation to search optimisation, published in Search Central rather than sold as a course. Eleven sections cover how Search finds and organises pages, what a site owner can influence, how images and video are handled, and a deliberate section on the things Google believes are not worth focusing on. It is documentation rather than video, open without an account, and its authority comes from being written by the search engine itself rather than from inference about it.
Not independently verified
Under an hour of video covering the SEO workflow end to end: what search optimisation is, finding keywords, writing pages for them, earning links, and checking whether any of it worked. Taught by Backlinko's Brian Dean and published free by Semrush, with a certificate on completion. It is a compressed overview rather than a full curriculum, with five substantive lessons. Demonstrations use Semrush's own tools, and the final segment is promotional.
Not independently verified
Writing for search and for readers at the same time, treated as a writing discipline rather than as keyword placement. Included in the Yoast premium plan, which the academy prices at 118.80 US dollars per year for every course plus the company plugins.
Not independently verified
About this subject
Courses on search engine optimisation: how search engines find and understand pages, what makes content worth ranking, how links are earned, and how any of it is measured. SEO is unusual as a subject because the system being taught is owned by someone else, changes without notice, and is never fully documented. That single fact should shape how you read every course in this category.
Guidance
Verification tells you that a course delivers the material it advertises. It cannot tell you whether its methods will rank anything. These are the things worth checking yourself.
Nobody teaching SEO controls the ranking systems, and nobody outside them knows exactly how they work. A course can teach you what is understood, what is observed and what is officially documented. A course that guarantees a position, a traffic figure or a timeline is describing something it cannot deliver, and that is a reason to look harder rather than to buy faster.
Search changes continuously, and some of it changes fast enough to invalidate tactics within a year. Material on crawling, indexing and site structure ages slowly. Material on specific ranking factors, tools and result formats ages quickly. Where a provider publishes a last-updated date we record it; where they do not, the listing shows only the date we checked the page.
Much of the best free SEO training comes from the companies selling SEO software, and it is often genuinely good. It is also, unavoidably, teaching a workflow that runs through their product. Learn the concept and then decide about the tool, rather than the other way round.
Technical SEO, about crawling, indexing, structure and speed, and content SEO, about what a page says and who links to it, are different work and often different people. A course titled simply SEO may be almost entirely one of them. Read the syllabus rather than the title.
Some techniques taught in this field carry a real risk of penalty, and some are simply the sort of thing you would rather not explain to a client. Prefer courses that state the risk of a tactic honestly and say which practices are against a search engine published guidelines.
Standards
The published standard applies unchanged. These are the checks that tend to matter most in this subject.
A verification says nothing about whether the techniques taught still work, whether they are safe to use, or whether they comply with any search engine current guidelines. Search systems change independently of both the course and this directory.
Questions
No, and a course claiming otherwise is claiming control over a system it does not own. Where public marketing makes that kind of promise it is exactly the sort of statement a verification examines.
Check the last-updated date where the provider publishes one, and prefer material on fundamentals if it is older. A verification here is dated too, and it stops being current at its re-check date rather than standing indefinitely.
They are often excellent and usually free. Just read them as training in a workflow that includes their product, and separate the concept from the software before you commit to either.
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