What should you expect from an SEO course?

At first glance, optimizing a website for search engines may seem like an easy process to understand and follow. Scratch the surface, though, and you discover that SEO is a complex, long-term process whose main characteristic is that it keeps changing (as a side note, in 2019 alone Google made 3,243 changes to its algorithms).

SEO means expertise, time, effort and a coherent, well-thought-out strategy. When it is backed by all of the above, SEO becomes one of the investments that can deliver the highest ROI (return on investment) for your brand or business.

If you have found this article, you most likely want to learn SEO and find out whether your expectations of the SEO course you have chosen are realistic.

So below, we go over a few expectations that people taking SEO courses usually have, and how realistic they are.

• “One month of SEO courses is enough to become an SEO expert, right?”

At one point, American tycoons Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos got into a fierce dispute. The subject of the conflict? A vacant NASA site that Musk wanted for SpaceX (one of Musk’s companies) and Bezos wanted for his company, Blue Origin.

What could have been a simple competition over infrastructure quickly turned into a real public war when Musk said the chances of Bezos launching a suborbital rocket in the coming years were as low as “discovering unicorns dancing in the flame duct”. 

Why are we telling you this story? The reason is simple: the same goes for an SEO course. Your chances of becoming an expert after just one month of SEO are as high as Jeff Bezos’s chances of launching a suborbital rocket. Or, if you prefer, as slim as finding unicorns in a rocket’s flame duct.

SEO strategies and best practices are learned over time and, what’s more, “SEO learning never stops”: it is not a process that starts at one point and ends at another on a timeline.

As mentioned above, Google makes several thousand changes to its algorithms every year, which means an SEO specialist has to keep learning new things that help them come up with better and better strategies.

• “…but the trainer on the SEO course promised I would become an expert in a month”

When a trainer promises you will become an expert in a short time, the wisest thing you can do is walk away while you still can. Whether we are talking about trainers or agencies, every now and then you will meet people who promise you exactly what they think you want to hear.

“Want to be an SEO expert after just one month of training? We promise that is exactly what will happen!”

“Want your business website to rank on page 1 for a competitive keyword in just one week? We’ll do it in a week!”

The truth is that a good trainer will tell you right from the start that your expectations are unrealistic, just as a good agency will tell you that 100 other competing websites also want to rank for the same keyword and are already optimized for it.

• “I will find out that some things are not at all what I thought”

Correct. If you start out expecting an SEO course to teach you things that contradict what you thought you knew, you won’t be disappointed. This applies, of course, only if you are at the beginning of your SEO journey.

A quick example: most people who want to learn SEO walk into the classroom and, in their very first conversation with the trainer, get the following question: “What do you think is more important, ranking or keyword research?” Most students choose ranking.

During the course, however, they learn that many years ago organic search results were monolithic: every SERP (search engine results page) looked fairly similar for every user, regardless of their location or search history. Today, however, the SERP is different for every Google user. How content ranks depends on many variables, from search history and location to the type of search performed (e.g., web, images, news, video, shopping, etc.). So ranking well for a word that generates little to no relevant traffic is a waste of budget and effort.

So the right answer would have been keyword research: instead of focusing on rankings and their inherent volatility, it is always better to work on growing relevant traffic.

So SEO courses will take apart many of the things you thought you knew and help you gradually reach the “deeper” side of SEO.

• “It looks very complicated, it is bound to be a failure”

If you start an SEO course assuming it will be a failure just because it looks very complicated, then it most likely will be. That said, failure in general is not necessarily a bad thing. Failure is an important part of eventual success.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google’s founders) tried to sell their brand-new company for less than two million dollars, but the buyers turned them down, saying it “doesn’t make money”. Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper because he lacked “imagination and had no original ideas”. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team because his coach thought he “didn’t have enough talent”. One of Thomas Edison’s teachers told his parents that their Tommy was too stupid to ever learn anything. “The Lost Get-Back Boogie”, the book by James Lee Burke (a Pulitzer nominee), was rejected 111 times. Several TV networks turned down the American series “Seinfeld” because it had “an unclear story and very unpleasant characters”. To this day, on the wall of Jerry Seinfeld’s bathroom hangs a note on which the actor wrote down his first impression after the pilot episode: “Very weak. In the survey at the end, the audience said they did not want to see a follow-up…”

What do the people above have in common? They are stubborn. They don’t give up. They don’t accept defeat. They try. They fall. They get up. They try again. They fail again. But this time they fail a little better than the first time. And then they fail better and better. Until they manage to get there.

All the professionals or experts you admire in any field have one thing in common: they are not afraid of failure. They obsessively follow their passions and see failure as just another chance to get where they want to be.

That could be you too. “Ever tried? Ever failed? Try again. Fail again. Fail better!” Whether it is about life in general or about an SEO course.