You might be a business owner or marketer who wants to boost their site’s hopelessly low rankings quicker and for the long haul. Somebody tells you that the secret is search engine optimization.

Or you might already know about optimizing pages for search engines but still don't get results. SEO is the need for any website that is not there to only exist. Any website that wants to be visible to the right audience relies on SEO.

As everyone is trying to secure that top sweet spot in search engine result pages (SERP), it's natural that the work is getting tougher and tougher.

And with Google changing its algorithms using artificial intelligence and machine learning, getting ranked has become even more challenging.

Google is determined to present the most relevant search results to its users that fulfill their intent. It means you should focus on the users rather than the search engine.

Now, you should not get disheartened. Luckily, plenty of resources are available on the internet to learn basic and advanced SEO.

In this article, we will specifically discuss the SEO courses that can help your site rank not only on Google but with other search engines (youtube, bing, Yelp) as well.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Defined

Search engine optimization refers to the process of getting a site/page on top search engine results organically. We know that is a super simplified definition.

Search engine optimization has become an art and science itself. We call it science as it has its own unwritten rules and regulations that you have to follow. You also have to follow some written rules, for example, the google webmaster guidelines or what we call white hat SEO in Dubai.

And we call SEO an art because you have to use your experience to carefully craft a unique SEO strategy and keep fine-tuning it as per your business needs.

It means you need to learn the nitty gritty of SEO to master it, as it keeps changing with time.

Is There Anything Called Google SEO Certification?

It depends on what you mean when you say Google SEO certificate. Google doesn't offer any SEO courses, but you can master SEO for google by taking one from an external source and getting certification.

Google Digital Garage

Google digital garage offers a digital marketing course that includes SEO in its syllabus. However, this course is primarily a digital marketing course, including web development & design, social media marketing, and other skills apart from SEO.

A Google SEO-certified expert is a person who has completed a course that only focuses on SEO and covers all its aspects. Here are the top SEO courses with certificates.

Top SEO Certifications for Anyone Who Wants to Learn SEO Inside Out

1- Google SEO Certification by ReliableSoft Academy

If you are a beginner, “the complete SEO course” can be the best thing on your journey to becoming an SEO professional.

The reliable soft academy offers an SEO course bundle including four courses — complete SEO, keyword research, google analytics, and eCommerce SEO.

Here we are concerned with only one course in the bundle, the complete SEO course.

This course teaches you both fundamentals of SEO and advanced SEO concepts. The language is beginner-friendly, and you will learn how to set your site on the path to long-term SEO success.

Whether you need to apply optimization strategies to a new website or on an existing site, this course will be sufficient for you.

It contains 13 lessons, over 400 pages (PDF format), video tutorials, and more than 200 annotated screenshots.  The course covers mobile SEO, link building, website speed, copywriting, and security.

Alex Chris is the course instructor and a professional SEO consultant with 15+ years of experience in the SEO industry. He has provided services to multiple online companies in the most competitive industries, such as jewelry, travel, education, forex, fitness, hosting, online auctions, banking, software, and lifestyle.

These opportunities helped him to experiment with different strategies and learn how SEO works. He is also an SEO & digital marketing blogger and leading sites have featured his work, including neilpatel.com, forbes.com, contentmarketinginstitute.com, thenextweb.com, huffingtonpost.com, entrepreneur.com, searchenginejournal.com, socialmediaexaminer.com, and many more.

2- Google’s Attract & Engage Customers with Digital Marketing

Google provides digital marketing and e-commerce professional course bundle through Coursera, and “Attract and Engage customers with digital marketing” is the second course in seven courses.

Google experts will teach you about the stages of the sales funnel and digital marketing techniques to push consumers through the marketing funnel.

Other contents of the course include understanding keyword research, link building, search engine algorithms, paid search, and advertising. These fundamentals will help you attract more quality traffic to your website organically.

Moreover, The course contains practical aspects of search engine optimization, display advertising, and search engine marketing to grab your audience's attention and engage them online.

Search engine optimization is not the end of the story. You need to reap the benefits of it. This course will guide you through examples and hands-on activities to develop brand awareness, identify buyers’ requirements and evoke the audience’s interest in products/services.

The google experts will show you the best resources and tools to bring about common e-commerce and digital marketing tasks.

The course promises to teach you the following skills:

  • Identify buyer personas and nurture your potential customer base
  • Conversion rate optimization
  • Explain the sales funnel objective and perks
  • Describe SEO’s goal and basic SEO terms
  • Basics of Google Search Console and usage of its reports to track a site’s visibility in search engine result pages
  • Basics of google ads and targeting customers
  • Understand the advantages and purpose of SEM

3- All-around SEO Training by Yoast Academy

It is an ideal seo certification for google for people with no technical knowledge. It is a free seo course containing 3+ hours of instructional videos, providing you with real value for your time.

Furthermore, the course creators have divided the videos into 39 chunks (video clips) for you to digest the material without hassle. Yoast’s SEO veterans walk you through the fundamentals of SEO as well as the pro tips in video content.

Search engine optimization is divided into three categories — on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. A savvy marketer focuses on all three of them at once.

This course can help you even if you don't have any idea about SEO’s basic concepts or technical aspects.

You will have access to quizzes to answer for practice purposes and video content as PDF files for reference when you apply the strategies learned on your site. Yoast academy allows you to access the course’s content for one year.

Isn't that amazing?

Upon completion of the course, a candidate will get a badge and a certificate to show off on their websites, resume, and LinkedIn profiles.

All Around SEO training features the founder of Yoast and an SEO expert, Joost de Valk, who discusses what he has learned from the global conferences he attends all year.

4- Clickminded SEO Certification

It is the best course for companies. The course creators have divided it into 12 chapters, and it may take approximately 4 to 10 hours to watch all the videos

According to the course developers, it is a fool-proof SEO certification that teaches you the techniques to attract quality traffic to your website in less time.

The instructor is Tommy Griffith, an SEO professional for about a decade, who has optimized websites for organizations like Airbnb and Paypal.

Here is a rundown of what you will learn in all 12 lessons:

  • The course starts with the instructor teaching bout the 12 tools they use to set up the best environment for SEO success.
  • The second section will relate to the SEO basics and remove the misconceptions about the process. Students learn how to apply the Clickminded search framework to search engines and identify the best search engine ranking they should aim for.
  • Search engine optimization has now become more user-centric than ever as google is continuously refining its algorithms to show its users the best search results. Therefore, the third section will teach you the ins and outs of building a robust data-driven tactic
  • The instructor will take you through the keyword research process step by step while doing it for a new site so that you can apply it on your site
  • The instructor tells you the way to get more online visibility by finding the document relevancy issue and the most common misconception about content optimization. Other topics covered include Latent Semantic Indexing and its significance
  • Google’s most influential ranking signal and how to impress it. SEO tools and processes to get link prospects at scale

5- Get Started with Search by Google

This is free online training, part of the “fundamentals of digital marketing certification” offered by google digital garage. It is divided into six lessons you can complete in 45 minutes in one go.

Like the other google courses, Google‘s employees are instructors of this course.

The contents of the course include:

  • History of search engines, how they changed business and other fundamentals of search engines
  • How Google finds, inspects, categorizes, and ranks web pages into a rational order when a user searches for something
  • How google works out the content of a page, which sections of the page they consider to do this. And how you can increase your page’s visibility to search engines
  • What are organic results and search engine optimization? And how quality content impacts the organic search results
  • Search engine advertising, why it is super effective, and how businesses battle for a chance to display advertisements on the search engine result pages (SERP)
  • What is Google search console and its benefits, useful features, and how to make an account on it

6- SEO Tutorials by AHREFS

AHREFS needs no introduction. It is a very useful SEO tool popular worldwide. It is not a free SEO course but a collection of courses taught by SEO guru Sam Oh from AHREFS.

If you are a newbie, don’t hesitate to start watching this course. Sam Oh is an amazing teacher who teaches basic and advanced SEO concepts and techniques in a friendly way that makes the learning experience enjoyable.

Here is an introduction to four AHREFS SEO courses which encompass the fundamentals, on and off-page, and technical SEO.

  • The SEO course for beginners helps you navigate SEO in an effortless and organized way
  • Keyword Research Tutorials teaches a couple of advanced keyword-research hacks to identify new keyword opportunities
  • Linkbuilding tutorials offer step-by-step guides to teach you several strategies to build links. The strategies taught in the course include qualifying link prospects, link prospecting, backlink analysis and process of link-building execution in bulk, ways to find an individual’s email address, the process of shooting outreach emails, scaling link-building strategies into systems, and more
  • Technical SEO Tutorials teach you the ways and best practices of optimizing your site for search engines and the process of performing an SEO audit

7- SEO Essential Certificate by Moz

Are you a non-SEO person? Then this course by Moz academy is for you. Moz’s experienced SEO consultants have developed these course lessons. You can complete the entire course in approximately 8 hours.

And you don’t need to subscribe to Moz SEO’s pro version. The course features techniques that can be applied with the help of any SEO tool.

After you have gone through all the material for the course, you will need to give an exam to get an SEO certification for Google, containing 50 questions.

It's an in-depth course divided into these six parts:

1- Understand the fundamentals

2- Develop keyword strategies

3- Apply on-page optimization tactics

4- Effective linkbuilding strategies

5- Make efficient reporting strategies

6- Final exam

All courses are instructor-led, on-demand courses. The first one covers the basics of search engine optimization.

The second course teaches theories and frameworks to implement using a keyword research tool. The instructor uses Moz's keyword explorer to evaluate and apply keywords, but you can implement the concepts into any keyword tool.

Then you learn crucial on-page optimization best practices applied in the MozBar and Moz’s Campaign tool.

The instructor discusses the components of backlinks and their importance. They apply the theoretical concepts in MozBar and Moz’s link explorer.

Finally, you will learn the process of setting up and cleaning your information by including filters within your Google Analytics.

The instructor creates reports to give a practical demonstration of the theories taught. You also get a downloadable SEO worksheet.

8- SEO Fundamental Course by Semrush

As the name implies, this course covers all the fundamentals of search engine optimization presented by none other than Semrush, one of the biggest names in the SEO industry.

It is a free SEO course taught by Greg Gifford, a popular SEO professional who works for Semrush.

You might want to learn SEO from A to Z or have the know-how of SEO but want to polish your skills. The course will teach you the secrets of how to steal traffic from your competitors using search engine optimization techniques.

Course creators are competent Semrush professionals. They joined hands with the creators of the course “SEO Toolkit” to supply viewers with the latest and most relatable knowledge on Semrush tools.

The best part: the course contains a section called “get expert tips” in which experienced SEO pros will reveal their tricks and case studies to allow you to use their experience in your projects with Semrush SEO tools.

The course consists of 31 videos on the following topics:

  • Page speed, PWAs, and AMP
  • Introduction
  • On-page elements
  • Another introduction
  • Search engines and their working style
  • Indexing, crawling, and ranking
  • Writing and optimizing content
  • Local content
  • Link building
  • SERP Layout
  • Intro
  • Local links and citations
  • Two intro videos
  • txt and sitemaps
  • Status Codes
  • Other local factors
  • International SEO
  • Keyword research
  • Structured data
  • Link Analysis
  • Duplicate content
  • Other ranking signals
  • Bad links
  • Anchor text
  • Site inspection for an audit
  • HTTP
  • User experience focus
  • Site speed
  • URLs
  • Responsive sites

9- Advanced SEO Certification by Market Motive Certification

This is an excellent advanced SEO course. You need to attend or view later live online classes led by an instructor of about 15 hours in total. And you get self-paced video content for a total of 30 hours.

Stephanie Hamel and Matt Bailey are the instructors who have hands-on expertise in SEO and web analytics. Matt Bailey is an internet marketer, author, and president of SiteLogic.

This course assists professionals in boosting the online visibility of their web pages in organic search results. After completing the course, a student can apply the learned SEO theories in industry-related simulations.

Furthermore, students will learn how to research for, find, use and manage suitable keywords for a specific niche when creating content.

You will also learn how to use analytics to check if your strategies are working and which aspects need improvement. The best part is: You get about 20 industry-based real-life projects.

This is a perfect course for all those digital marketers passionate about learning SEO strategies to improve their page’s user experience. This course will give you the courage to apply several unique solutions to fix issues.

The following are the prerequisites to get a certificate:

  • Finish 85% of the course
  • Complete three projects
  • Pass one simulation examination with at least a 60% score

The course provides you with updated material, quizzes, and downloadable workbooks. This course will supply 360-degree learning on SEO concepts and techniques.

You have to get enrolled in Self Paced Learning or Online Bootcamp program.

Self-paced learning program provides you access to the course material for 180 days and charges USD 299, while the Online Bootcamp program furnishes 90 days of access for a USD 399 fee. The course developers offer a 7-day money-back guarantee.

Bottom Line

We hope that you like our selection of the best SEO certifications for anyone who wants to jump into the SEO industry or is already inside but want to brush up on their skills.

The range of courses discussed in this article includes free and paid courses, but this isn't important. You should first go through the curriculum of all courses to see what each offer.

Then, pick one course that suits your needs better and teaches you all that you need to know. However, we recommend enrolling in one, which includes a test at the end.

You can also benefit from a course that shows practical demonstrations of the theoretical techniques and best practices applied by the industry’s top tiers.