Why learn SEO from a course?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up.

Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Brand here at Wix, and I'm been joined by she who educates the masses with all sorts of profound SEO knowledge and insights, Head of SEO Comms here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello, people of the internet. I am here, and yes, we're going to do a podcast, you said about educating. I was asked... there was a time when they were giving teacher discounts at a place where I went, and they were like, "Are you a teacher?" I was like, "I do teaching sometimes, but technically no. But many people have learned, I think..." I don't know.

Mordy Oberstein:

As a former actual teacher, let me tell you how teachers look. Because I would get the free Dunkin' Donuts thing on Teacher's Day. Let me tell you-

Crystal Carter:

Yo, that's a dub.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Let me tell you how a teacher'd look at it. "Oh, it's totally worth it now dealing with your children," because they got a free coffee.

Crystal Carter:

The coffee at Dunkin' is pretty good, so that's a win. I'll take it.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's so good.

Crystal Carter:

I'll take the W.

Mordy Oberstein:

When I go back home, I bring back bags full of ground Dunkin' Donuts coffee.

Crystal Carter:

Nice.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Very nice. Very nice.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's my life.

Crystal Carter:

Good choice.

Mordy Oberstein:

Dunkin' coffee packed in a suitcase. I'm always worried, by the way, they'll think I'm some sort of drug trafficker because that's how you hide drugs, in coffee, because it kills the smell of the marijuana and whatever.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, so you have more exciting friends than I do because I did not know that fact.

Mordy Oberstein:

A customs person told me this when he saw the coffee in the thing. Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Sure, sure.

Mordy Oberstein:

The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by the cartel. No, it's brought to you by Wix Studio where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also get an entire course of SEO awesomeness. How much does it cost? Nothing. What does it cover? Everything. Who's in it? Aleyda Solis, Andrew Cock-Starkey, Jill Quick, Judith Lewis, and so many others. Where can you find it? Over on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub. Link in the show note, which brings us to what we're covering today: what to look for in an SEO course. Of course, is there such thing as the best SEO course? Signs an SEO course may or may not be for you and what goes into creating a good course.

To help the idea of learning SEO from a course take its course, we welcome Wix Studio course instructors, Aleyda Solis and Andrew Optimisey. I apologize for a little bit of a keyword stuffing there. Plus we put the notion of learning SEO from a course to the test as more Wix Studio course instructors share their insights as Judith Lewis and Celeste Gonzalez grab the mic. And of course, we have the snappies of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So spit out that gum, sit up straight, and put your thinking caps on as SEO school is in session on this the 105th episode of the SERP's Up Podcast.

That was a lot.

Crystal Carter:

There was definitely some teachable moments in there.

Mordy Oberstein:

If you want moments, write shorter intros. With that, please welcome to the podcast, the one, the only Aleyda Solis and Andrew Optimisey.

Aleyda Solis:

Hello. Hello everybody. Mordy, oh, my god. And Crystal, I had to restrict myself to not say anything. Oh, what we have already learned already.

Andrew Optimisey:

Aloha, Mordy. Aloha, Crystal.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, hi, Andrew.

Crystal Carter:

Hello. Mahalo. Thank you for joining us.

Mordy Oberstein:

How festive of you to steer into our vibe.

Aleyda Solis:

By the way, it's one thing, right? That's so very American of you, listening about the Dunkin' Donuts coffee. Last time that I went actually to the US in July, I bought one, the already cold prepare one that they sell at the supermarket that is so very American. So yeah, I had to try one frappuccino-like just to taste it. It was so good, but it was also 240 calories or something that high. Got so many calories in a single drink. It's yummy but yes, highly, highly... I think that you can get fat just drinking that. It's crazy.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's ridiculous. Pro-tip, when you go to Dunkin' Donuts, do not think about calories.

Andrew Optimisey:

If you're thinking about calories in Dunkin', you're in the wrong place, right?

Mordy Oberstein:

You're in the wrong place. I got to have the water.

Crystal Carter:

A hilarious SEO fact before we get into things, if you look up dunkin.com, which I did, it doesn't actually go to Dunkin' Donuts or they rebranded to Dunkin'. It goes to some random consultancy and then they have this holding screen that says, "If you're looking for Dunkin' Donuts, you have to go back to the internet because this isn't Dunkin' Donuts." And then after 15 seconds, it loads to this other website. And as an SEO, I was like, "Dude, you're sitting on a gold mine. Just cash the check. Just cash the check."

Andrew Optimisey:

Sell the domain.

Crystal Carter:

But somehow he's holding on. I don't know, Mr. Dunkin, really, really... Dunkin' Logistics really, really wants to keep that domain. Anyway-

Mordy Oberstein:

Dunkin' Logistics.

Crystal Carter:

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. There we go. Anyway.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay, so let's get into it. Y'all are part of our Wix Studio SEO course and which... people are taking an SEO course. You sat down and you wrote up scripts for the course. What are you hoping, what were you hoping, what are you hoping that people will get out of an SEO course?

Aleyda Solis:

My expectation was to facilitate the learning process about technical SEO, because this is a topic that I cover in my course, and to make it very actionable in a way that it was very easy to grasp the importance of technical SEO, especially something that can quickly become very complex if you don't come from the web development world. So it is very clear, the why, why it is important, why you need to learn it, what are the key concepts to understand even if you are not going to specialize on becoming a technical SEO, and what makes or breaks a website technical configuration to focus on what's actually key or most impactful?

So in the course, that was my expectation, to be... not necessarily make it the most comprehensive course ever. I think I can be a little bit... it's okay to be proud to say that I tried to really cover everything, what actually matters, but that was not necessarily as much of a point of there are so many resources and so much out there where they can learn already from that is also comprehensive, but let's make it meaningful. Let's make it easy to go through, make it a journey, and that it can be helpful for people who are just starting, people who are not already SEOs, as well as those who are SEOs and want to focus more on the technical side of things. So I believe that that is what makes a little bit of a difference between a course or other formats like a guide, a comprehensive guide, or a book even to make it easier to explain and give those details that you cannot necessarily as easily share in the text format.

Mordy Oberstein:

Before I let Angie reply, just a plug. If you're looking for a guide to SEO, check out the guide that Aleyda has at learnseo.io. Okay Andrew, take it away.

Andrew Optimisey:

So there was a couple of things for me that I really wanted to aim at, and one of the reasons it was great to work with Wix on this is because... so Wix is used by loads of different people. You get people who are building their own websites themselves who have never done any web dev before. They're running their own little shop like a bakery or whatever, and they have not a clue where to start with SEO. And then you've got big agencies who maybe know a little bit about SEO, enough to make them dangerous, but maybe they need a little bit of guidance on that kind of stuff.

So that's where I thought working with Wix with this kind of stuff would be really good, and so I wanted to demystify it a little bit because everybody hears this thing about SEO and, "Oh, it's so complex and it's so tricky and I don't know where to start and how do I do these things? And it changes so fast," and that kind of stuff around... because you said about us writing scripts and we spend a lot of time doing that kind of stuff. As soon as you write stuff down in SEO, it's out date, right? Because it changes quickly and the minute you note it down, then there'll be some update or something will change or there'll be a new platform, a new system and stuff.

So one of the things I wanted to do with the stuff that I was writing was teach people a sort of direction to travel, a way of thinking about things like... so if I'm going to show you this particular way to do keyword research and stuff, it's not that this way is the only way. It's that these are some of the things that you might want to think about and how you do this, how you think about customers and how you think about matching your content to intent and all those kinds of things where this is a good direction of travel. I always use the Wayne Gretzky thing all the time in SEO. It's don't go to where SEO is. Skate to where the puck is going. That's how you get really good as Wayne Gretzky as the ice hockey player. You go to where SEO is going. If you know where Google is heading and the directions that SEO generally is trying to go in, if you go in that direction too, you're going to be okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

That was, by the way, one of the things that we were making the course... and by the way, we didn't write the scripts. The people in our course, they wrote their own scripts. Obviously, we had a course instructor go through and they would tighten it up, whatever it is, but this is coming from... it's the latest focus on technical SEO. It's your focus on keyword research, but that was one of the things that we were thinking about when we made the course. How do we create a course in a way where if something changes, it's not out of data in an instant? Which is very tricky and very complicated. Sorry Crys, I feel like I cut you off.

Crystal Carter:

No, no. I think that the other thing that we were thinking about when... we were so grateful that you both agreed to do the course and we were so grateful that all the other folks on the course got involved with the course and everyone that has been working with us on this has a common goal, which is basically what you were talking about Aleyda and what you were talking about Andrew, which is demystifying this stuff.

There are some people... we've talked about reputational things on this podcast before, but sometimes within the SEO industry people are like, "Oh, it's so complicated." They make it so that you couldn't possibly... people speak in really big words and they speak really convoluted or they speak in jargon or that sort of thing. And everyone, we were so grateful again, that was involved with this, has a focus of, "No, we can speak in plain English, we can speak in plain language, and we can speak in a way that you can understand it. If you stick with this, you'll understand it. It's a question of whether or not you want to learn and that will make it accessible to you."

Aleyda Solis:

And I think that a big role here, at least it was when I decided to go ahead with the course, and then that I could thankfully also validate through the whole process, was the production quality that you had. I was amazed from the beginning. When we were creating the strips with the examples, the feedback that I got from you it's true that yeah, I did it, but I got amazing feedback to make it super easy to go through first and then secondly, once that we were recording, I remember in London I was mind blown by the whole production around it. So I am delighted to see the outcome now that is going to be launched, because I believe that although there are so many courses out there, there are only so very few that have this not only quality. The content and insights also make it easy for people to understand independently of the complexity and additionally, the production value is so, so high. It's going to be beautiful and can't wait to watch it, too. Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Big hearts to you as well.

Andrew Optimisey:

I think a quick note for all the other people in the Wix Studio team that worked on this kind of stuff, there was a whole bunch of your colleagues that came into town on this. Like Aleyda said, there was times when I'd been writing sections of my course and I'd get a note back saying, "This is great. How can we show it? We need something so it's not just a talking head lecturing you about SEO and here's what you should and shouldn't do. How can we demonstrate this? What does this look like?"

And it was like, "Well, I can't really do... it doesn't really work with this." "Okay, well let's think of another example that's similar, that tells the same story, makes the same point, but we can demonstrate it with data. We can demonstrate it with..." If you watch my section of the course, I use a lot of silly rambling analogies and synonyms and silly stuff like stories and things to try and bring that kind of stuff to life. But that, working with the Wix team and your colleagues really help bring that kind of stuff out and make it more of a story so it's more engaging.

Mordy Oberstein:

By the way, you read my mind. I literally wrote a note to myself while Aleyda was talking, "Oh, I need to shout out Natalie Hamouie for being the organizing force behind the entire course. Natalie, you're amazing. Both of you bring up a really good point and it's one of the things that I want to talk about in deciding whether or not to take an SEO course or not take an SEO course, or how do you know if an SEO course is a good course or not. Aleyda, you hinted at it before. When we made the course, we didn't want to make the best SEO course because there is no such thing as the best SEO course. It's a course that I think is good for you for where you're at and what you need right now for your learning journey kind of thing.

In fact, to break the fourth wall, when we were making the landing page for the course, we decided, "Well, should we include the word best?" From a pure SEO point of view if you look at what Google's showing, there's a tendency for Google to rank pages that include the word best. Super old school SEO. We said, "No, we're not going to do that because, A, old school SEO and B, It's not on brand for what we want the course to be." I don't think, and maybe you'll disagree with me, that it really is a way to produce the best SEO course. There's only a way to produce something that you think is able to reach a targeted audience at that particular moment.

Aleyda Solis:

Yeah, one hundred percent, because even if I think that we tried with this course to make it as evergreen as possible... and I remember when we were recording, one of the core metrics was about to be updated and we already talk about it as something from the past, but eventually, something else will be updated that will unfortunately and hopefully not that soon, but at some point it will, so it won't be fresh anymore. So to make it the perfect course at every single point in time, it should be completely updated and potentially even discussing or tackling things that just happened. So I believe that potentially to have the best experience, not the best course, the best learning experience, you should take a course but also complement it with podcasts like this one where you discuss the latest in SEO, the trends, the updates, the news, what is happening, and what matters right now.

And what I believe is critical to make the course a great learning experience is to tie it with the SEO day to day, to make it impactful and actionable. Because I believe that what it really let's say challenged me at the beginning of my SEO learning journey was that for me when learning, guides out there, it was very non-tangible and very hard to think of scenarios or circumstances where I will, for example, want to add a nofollow on links or willingly noindex pages at the time and things like that. So providing the scenarios, examples that are usual, common, that people will run into when doing audits or analyzing or assessing opportunities, and also given the very realistic and reasonable idea that it's too idealistic and potentially not reasonable to think that a website will be perfectly optimized ever, but to give a sense of this is the actual goal, this is how you should align everything, and you don't work in a silo too because it's not only about being technical optimized and this ties to revenue and this ties to major bigger goals that are not only SEO-related and stuff like that.

I think that that makes all the difference. And many years ago I wrote an SEO fundamentals book in Spanish. And through the years I have gotten people who have told me, Spanish speakers telling me, "This is the book that made the difference when I learned it, not because it discusses new things, but the angle that you took was different, was actionable, and makes sense. All these concepts actually now made sense." So I believe that this is what makes a course or the learning journey through a course better in general and more impactful and actually helpful in your learning journey.

Crystal Carter:

I think that that's such an important point because there are a lot of people selling very expensive courses with terrible motivations right now. So I think the motivations that you're talking about are so important, to help people actually know how to do it and learn the fundamentals and learn tying it to value of the business and not to, "You can do SEO and you'll make $1 million tomorrow." There's so many people, particularly on TikTok, there's a lot of people selling this digital marketing course and, "I will make da da da da da, and just DM me and I'll tell you all of the secrets and da da da."

And then you see there's 17 videos that are all the same thing of all these people saying this stuff. And I'm sorry, if you are somebody who's listening to this and you've seen one of those courses, I'm sorry, but it's a pyramid scheme. That's what's going on there. So they're not going to teach you how to do digital marketing properly. That's something else. Beware the motivations of the folks that are trying to sell you something. And our motivations are to help people learn SEO. That's our motivations.

Andrew Optimisey:

One of the things that I liked about, again, working with Natalie and the rest of the Wix team, was there was this effort to make the lessons stand alone. Although there is... again, they've made a lot of efforts to then join things up when it's been like, "If you learned a little bit about this, you might want to learn more about it in a later section or in Judith's section," those kind of things. But because they broke the courses up so I don't just rattle on about keywords for hours and hours, there's discrete chunks where it's like, "Here's some basic stuff and here's some middle of the road stuff, and then if you want to go even further with it, here's this bit too." And again, that was something the Wix team were really keen to push me on it. "How do you go even further?"

"So this is the one-on-one stuff, this is..." But what if you're like, "This is all really basic," and you skip that because you're already fairly experienced in SEO, but you just want more? "Where do I go next?" So that's one of the things I quite liked about it and then you can cherry pick if you are completely new to SEO and you just want some fundamentals. So again, we talked about the baker that runs the shop. They've got a ten-page website. Technical SEO is probably not going to move the needle for them unless they're doing some absolutely fundamentally awful things, if they have noindex'd their website. So you're going to need some of the technical stuff. So you need enough to make you not completely invisible to Google, but if you're getting onto canonical tags and really complex technical stuff, that's probably not going to make the difference for a ten-page website.

What might make the difference is some really good content or building your basic link structures, all those kinds of things. So that's the kind of thing we should build. "Right, you need two stories from this section, two from this section, and two from this, and that's enough for now. Then you can get going and then when you want more, there's more too. So you can come back for those things too." When you get to your 8 million page website because you scaled it up and you are now dominating the world, you're going to need the heck out of the technical section because if you've got that size site, there's no way you're getting anywhere without a solid technical structure.

Crystal Carter:

I think the other thing that's about that was when we were thinking about the structure of the course, they were like, "Oh, we need something for beginners or something for advanced." And the thing about it, in SEO, sometimes you're a beginner and advanced at the same time. When GA4 comes out, everyone's a beginner at GA4. They're just having to start again with this new piece of technology. We have AI stuff and there's people who are very, very advanced with one type of SEO skill, but maybe you're getting started with AI or maybe they're good at one part of creating content with AI and then they're not so great at this other part of AI. So it is important that you can jump across to different sections and it is important that you can jump to all of those.

But I think certainly one of the things with learningseo.io, which is a great resource as well from Aleyda Solis, has a map of even if you jump around, you can see the gaps. So you can see like, "Oh, well I learned this part, but apparently I didn't learn these two parts that lead up to that." Similarly, our courses is that way as well. So you can see the whole and also you can also take it off and go, "All right, I know that. I know that. Okay, I don't know that. I will watch that one." Or you can take the whole thing all together. You have the option.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's very purposeful because way, way, way back when this was first a concept, one of the reasons why I wanted to do this was because when I started learning SEO, I started learning SEO and I think one of the first things I saw was... I don't know if they still have it or not. The periodic table that Search Engine Land had, that was one of the first things that I saw. And as I started diving into SEO more and more and more, I felt like, "I don't feel like I see the full picture. I feel like I see a little bit here, I see a little bit there, and I don't even know what I'm missing, but I feel like I'm missing something. There's a gap." So I wanted to do a course because when you do something like a course, you can at least walk away feeling like there's obviously going to be more to learn, but there shouldn't be these wide gaps anymore that I feel like, "I don't know where I'm supposed to go next," or, "What did I miss that I shouldn't have missed?"

And to zoom out, it kind of goes back to what Crystal was saying before and what Aleyda and Andrew, you're both saying, it goes back to motivations. When you're looking at an SEO course, I'll give you a pointer. Whether you're taking our course or somebody else's course or whatever even that's not about SEO, look who's behind the course. Who are they and what are they about? Because that'll dictate everything about the course. That'll dictate whether or not... I gave Andrew a hard time about his assessment saying, "Drew, let's make it a little bit harder, a little more nuanced, and blah, blah blah." By the way, if you think you had it bad, I was giving Itamar Blauer the hardest time because he was doing a section on third-party SEO tools and it can be very straightforward. "No, let's give actual cases and examples and let's try to give scenarios so this way, you can take what he was talking about and apply it somewhere else."

So you should talk to Itamar, Andrew, because I was giving him... putting through the ringer of trying to... no, but because of what Aleyda was saying before, you want to try to have it scenario-based whenever you can. You want to try to make it as practical and real-world whenever you can, because when you walk away learning SEO from a blog post or from whatever it might be, a webinar, that's one of those gaps. And the reason why I felt we did a good job with this was because the people behind the course, whether it's us on the Wix side or whether it's y'all as the instructors are people who at one point or another struggled with learning SEO and it was meaningful to do something for somebody who is currently struggling to learn SEO.

Aleyda Solis:

Just to also potentially close the circle regarding motivations, because I think that is also very, very important. When someone takes a course, you need to invest a little bit of more time, I have to say, and attention than what takes to go through a guide for example, or skim reading an e-book, something like that. But you actually need to put a lot of more focus, and many times also not a trivial investment for many people. And motivation is key here of what you want out of that. For many, it will be, "Okay to start understanding what is this about, complement my already existing experience, or because I feel that I need to take my skills on these topics to the next level, there are certain areas or configurations or elements that I don't know yet how they tie in or how I can connect them to what I do in the day to day."

So these are fantastic. Also, I have to say something, right? It was a few years back when I was giving this pro bono course about technical SEO, and I asked a little bit about the feedback regarding the motivations of the people learning very honestly, and I think it's good, right? It's okay. It's understandable. Some of them say, "I want to start with technical SEO and focus more on technical SEO rather than content in all the areas, because I have heard that because it is more complex, it pays better, and I see the salary ranges out there and they are higher." And I was like, "Look, this is legit. This is completely reasonable." Just make sure that it's not only about the pay, because realistically it's true that many of these more specialized roles, depending a little bit on the type of specialization can end up paying more, but it pays more because these are on companies that have bigger SEO departments and hire very specialized people.

These very specialized people have already had a very big journey and a lot of experience not only that area, but understand well the overall process, the fundamental... and how that area actually has an impact that makes money and drives revenue and achieves goals at... very likely at an enterprise level. So this ties in on how important it is to understand that you don't work on a silo, so even if you want to only focus on technical SEO or link building or content or whatever, it is fundamental that you have... how important is your specific or particular area within the SEO context and the context of the business that you're working in, because that is what actually makes a difference at the end of the day. Not necessarily how complex it is, only because... and you understanding the concepts and nailing the concepts and knowing how to code in case you do technical SEO, but actually moving the needle and changing what actually matters to drive the impact that these bigger companies are willing to pay big bucks for. And this is it, right?

Crystal Carter:

And I think the other thing that also comes with that is, of course, if you're working to get a job in the industry, having a course, doing a course can be super useful. And if you're trying to get a job or you're planning to increase your skillset so that you can get a pay raise or so you can get whatever, that's totally valid because we live in the world and then people got to pay the bills. I totally get that. But what's also important is that if that's only your motivation, very often you might get bored or tired of SEO fairly quickly. You have to be a little bit curious as well because it can be very complex and you have to be the person that goes, "But why? No, but why? No, but really, but why?" over and over and over again until you figure out what it is.

And I think one of the only ways that you can do that alongside a course is to be building, be testing, be looking at things in real life. So throughout the course, we have examples of how you can implement things on Wix Studio, how you can implement things across your Wix website, et cetera, et cetera. These are ways that you can get started with trying out content. So if you don't have your own website, it's fairly straightforward to get set up on Wix to building a website. Pretty straightforward. And a lot of the technical things are built in to help you get going with that, and it means that you can test and you can iterate. If you don't have your own website, then I highly recommend while you're doing this course, getting involved with a website so you can say to the people who... your football team or your neighbor or something you volunteer with, "Can I help you with your website?"

And chances are they'll go, "Yeah," because nine times out of 10 they're not doing anything with it. And you can have a look in their Google Search Console, you can set them up on GA4. You can have a look at whether their links are working. You can crawl their site map, you can use some of those tools, but it really helps to understand the concepts if you're able to see them in real time, particularly with technical SEO and also with content. When you're looking at how people respond to content and how Google ranks content, you can't see that without seeing that in the wild. And it's a live ecosystem, so you have to be involved with it. And I highly, highly, highly recommend doing SEO in parallel with the course.

Andrew Optimisey:

And one of the things I liked about it was... so when you work with people who are part of a digital marketing role rather than an SEO specialist, is that they have to wear lots of hats. And much as they would love to know all of SEO, I very much doubt anybody... there'll be some people that will sit there and just smash through the whole course in one go. They'll have a lot of free time, but it's like you can kind of cherry-pick a little bit. So there's going to be times when there's a project coming up where we have the budget and we have the developer time, and we have the resource to go after content, so this is the thing we're going to focus on, this particular topic area, and my boss has said, "Right, we've previously worked on dog food. Now we're doing cat food content."

"We need content right now. How do we do the..." and so you can then go and if you've not done content, if you're more of a technically minded SEO and you haven't really done content stuff before, or maybe you are one of these T-shaped digital marketers who's good at lots of things but only super deep on one or two things, you can choose a bit of the course that best suits the project you're going to work on. And then maybe later down the line, there'll be more budget and it'll be, "Okay, well actually we found that there's all these issues going on in Search Console and technically our website's falling over and it's really slow, and what do we do with these kinds of things?" "Okay, I don't really know enough about... so I'm going to go and I'm going to watch this section of the course and I'm going to learn about these things that I need to scale up a little bit more on."

So then you can make better use of your time. So when you do get that project that comes up and works in that particular area, you can make sure that you're thinking about all the things that you should need to cover in that section so that project really works. And so that works for, say, digital marketing teams, those mom and pop shops we talked about, but then also those people that are working in those bigger companies that maybe it helps to then have that sympathy and empathy with the people that you are working with. If you're a super great technical SEO and you've got these content people banging on you all the time about, "Can we get this done? Can we do this?" And you're like, "Oh." If you can watch that bit of the course, then maybe you can understand a bit more about where they're coming from and then you can have a bit more of a useful conversation rather than just banging heads all the time.

Mordy Oberstein:

You took our course and you transcended it from being learning about SEO to making the world a more harmonious and better place. There's no better place than-

Andrew Optimisey:

We can all be friends.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, other than saying thank you both so much for being a part of the course, thank you to Mike Stepney, to Itamar Blauer, to Jill Quick, to James Clark, to Judith Lewis, to Celeste Gonzalez, to everyone who helped on the back end of the course, and Debbie Chu obviously as well. Thank you so much for being a part of the course and thank you, Aleyda and Andrew, for not only being a part of the course, but being a part of our little podcast.

Andrew Optimisey:

Thanks.

Aleyda Solis:

Always a great time.

Mordy Oberstein:

All right, thanks again so much, Aleyda and Andrew, A, for sitting down with us here in this podcast and for of course being a part of our course. So we spent the entire episode until now talking about... or working with the assumption that taking an SEO course is a good idea and it represents a good way to learn SEO provided it's the right fit for you, if the course is the right fit for you. But is that actually the case? Let's challenge some assumptions about our new SEO course with a special edition of It's New.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's New, being the course is new, by the way. The SEO learning from a course is not new, but our course is new.

Crystal Carter:

It is new. We spent a lot of time on it and it's new, fresh out the box.

Mordy Oberstein:

You know what's funny? Because for me, it doesn't feel new because I've been working on this thing for months. It's old.

Crystal Carter:

I think that's because anything good takes a little while to cook. You got to let it cook.

Mordy Oberstein:

Really? My great popcorn is delicious. Takes, I don't know, a minute and a half.

Crystal Carter:

To be fair though, somebody prepped it beforehand. They put all that delicious buttery stuff in the bag. I don't know what's in that stuff, but it's delicious. I can't even cope.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's basically butter-flavored cancer.

Crystal Carter:

I don't know, but I literally... I've pulled it off before.

Mordy Oberstein:

Did you ever-

Crystal Carter:

And just eat the butter.

Mordy Oberstein:

You scraped... you take the popcorn and like a lunatic, scraping the inside of the bag like a scratch and sniff?

Crystal Carter:

Mm-hmm.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

It's delicious.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's so good.

Crystal Carter:

No regrets.

Mordy Oberstein:

What are we talking about again? Courses.

Crystal Carter:

Courses, of course.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay. So why is this a special edition of It's New? It's because we asked Celeste Gonzalez and Judith Lewis, who are another two of our course instructors, about why learning SEO from a course is a good idea. You might say that's biased. We say that's good marketing, but you can listen to what they had to say and make your own decision. Here's Celeste on why taking an SEO course is a good way to learn SEO.

Celeste Gonzalez:

Learning SEO through a course provides you with a structured foundation that hits all essential topics. A course offers expert guidance from knowledgeable professionals, so you'll get real insights and practical tips that you may not encounter until you can get hands-on experience.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much for that, Celeste. Yeah, that's a great point. But that last thing she mentioned is a really, really good point because the hands-on experience is where you fundamentally... you have to have hands-on experience. There's no way around that. However, if you don't have it, getting a course is good a foundation for when you do have it. But more importantly, I think is, while you are... let's say you're building your own website on Wix or Wix studio and you're doing that hands-on work to learn SEO. You do need reference points to go back to. It's like, "All right, I have it all in my head. Now I just have to implement it." If it were that easy, you wouldn't need a course, but you need to go back like, "Okay, now I ran into a situation. What does Celeste say in the course about that? Okay, fine. Now I'll do this."

Crystal Carter:

Right, and I think also sometimes when you do a course, particularly with SEO, you can layer your learning and you can layer your implementation. So maybe when you first go over the course, you're thinking about on-page SEO, and you're like, "Cool, I can do title tags," and you do title tags and then you learn more about the keyword research and stuff and you're like, "Oh, okay, I can add this to the title tags." Or you go back to the same piece of content after you learn more about technical SEO and maybe you're like, "Oh, I can add this technical element to this page as well." And there's basically... things will be fresher to you when you listen or when you go back to them again and they will appeal to you in different ways, so it's good to be able to go at your own pace. It's like listening to jazz. If you listen to jazz, sometimes you listen to the piano player, sometimes you listen to the saxophone player, and sometimes when you do that, it feels like a brand new song.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Well first of all, it's like when I listen to my kids. Sometimes I listen to the one and I tune out the other one. But also, glad you said your point about what you just said because here's Judith Lewis about why you should take an SEO course, and I'll think you find great minds think alike.

Judith Lewis:

So I was asked, what are some of the advantages of learning SEO from a course? I used to teach courses in person and in the pre-pandemic days, and it was really difficult, I think, for some of the students to keep up, especially with the advanced elements of the course. When you're learning SEO from a course online though, you can pause, rewind, and listen to that section again. It's really hard to pause me, rewind me, and listen to that section again in a classroom, so one of the best advantages of learning SEO from a course online is that you get to pause, rewind, and listen again. And I might be biased, but I feel like my section of the course is one you're going to want to listen to over and over again, and it's my hope that you'll refer back to it time and time again.

Mordy Oberstein:

Hey, well first off, thank you Judith, and see? Great minds do think alike. That's just exactly what Crystal said. And by the way, Crystal did not know that Juidth said that. That's the first time Crystal heard the recording.

Crystal Carter:

This is true, but in my earlier discussion with Aleyda, I also said this: it's worth following along and going through some of the steps, going through some of the implementation if you can, while you're doing the course, and that's really great for rewinding and stuff. We also say this about some of the webinars is that, sometimes people say, "Oh, I'm not sure I understand the concept." I'm like, "Watch the whole thing." And this is one of the ways I learned personally. "Watch the whole thing, get the full scope of how it's all going to roll out, and then if there's the particular concept that you're not sure about, go back to that." But sometimes having a full idea of the full picture can help you to understand what one particular element might be, so it's great to be able to go at your own pace. I love online learning for that. It's really, really, really great value.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I like this... for an example, you can go and dive into one thing, come back out. You don't have to go in chronology... I learn like that. I don't like going in chronological order sometimes. I pop in here, pop out, pop in somewhere else. So courses are great for that, for the reasons that you're saying. You know who's basically an SEO course in his own right?

Crystal Carter:

Who's that?

Mordy Oberstein:

seoroundtable.com is basically one giant, unorganized SEO course.

Crystal Carter:

It is really like a time capsule. He really just keeps all of the things that happen on Google is on there, so if you want to know when this feature came out, you will find it on Search Engine Roundtable.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, for sure.

Crystal Carter:

If you want to know when Google announced this thing... whenever I have to do research on historical things of, "This came out here, this came out then, that happened then," if you want to see the evolution of a feature, that's where you go.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's why I like the old design of seoroundtable.com because it felt literally like a time capsule. And with that, here's this week's Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. This one comes at you from Barry Schwartz over on Search Engine Land: Google rolls out new AI organized search results, AI overview links. So there's a bunch of changes here. Some of these were announced previously at some of Google's events like first of the AI organized search results. Google announced they were going to do this... I think it was back at Google IO? I've seen a similar format when they were talking about releasing... or when they released Google Gemini itself, but basically we've seen this in local space before, by the way. So new, but not new-new. The example here, by the way, is from a recipe query. So you could get the SERP organized according to, let's say, different topics.

I think the example they have is around cooking cherries, if I'm not mistaken? Or cherry tomatoes or sauce recipes or whatever it is. I think it was... right, vegetarian appetizer ideas. There we go. And you can see a carousel of top recipes. You could explore by ingredient, so they have cheese or crackers or avocado. You can explore by the ingredient that way. Then they lay out the SERP with maybe guides to cooking the best vegetarian appetizer. They're basically breaking down the SERP according to the various subtopics, the various intents. I like it. I think it all makes it very much more usable as a user trying to find something, trying to explore something, and I think this is a great case of AI being implemented the right way. I think you're going to see this expand all over the place. There're going to be Solace already in local.

We're seeing it now with the recipe query. I like it. I think it's great. I think it aligns with Google, which I mentioned originally showed with Gemini in their demo, or its demo back then. Okay. Google also said the new way of linking and citations in AI overviews that we talked back in August. Barry says that that format's going live across the board, so that seems great. Also, here's an interesting one. Google's saying, "Yeah, going to get some ads in the AI overviews." In fact, if you head over to Search Engine Journal, Brookes Osmundson says, "Google officially launches ads in AI overviews." You can see, by the way, in the example that they have there, how it'll actually look. It looks pretty interesting. Basically you have a query for whatever, like... I don't know, how do you get a grass stain out? You have your AI overview summary, and in this case, at the bottom of the AI overview is a little sponsor label with that typical product carousel sponsor products.

So that's what it looks like in this particular case, so that's really interesting. Should make folks like Greg Finn pretty happy. I suspect Google also announced updates to its Lens features and how you can search with Lens and shopping with Lens. So for example, yeah, you could have always taken a snapshot with the Lens of a product and said, "Hey, find me more examples of that product." But now Google's saying you can also do the same thing, but now get more context about the product along with it when you search for it. So that's great, a bunch of additions on the AI front. Super cool, super awesome. Links to the show notes. That's this week's Snappy News. Thank you again, Barry, for all the great news you provide. By the way, I'm going to break a fourth wall here. We record the news afterwards. After this, and I always thank Barry anyway because I know I'm going to inevitably use an article from Barry. Also thinking to anyone else I might have quoted in this week's episode.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Thank you for the news and for being newsworthy. Well done.

Mordy Oberstein:

Did I tell you? Behind the scenes, when we did the hundredth episode, we had Barry on for the news and I'm like, "Oh, there's nothing going on this week." I'm like, "Barry, I don't know what to cover. There's nothing happening." It was Labor Day week, we lost a day. Barry was like, "No, I got you. Big news is coming." I'm like, "You know, you asked for SEO news and the great Barry in the sky makes it rain."

Crystal Carter:

He does.

Mordy Oberstein:

And it turns out there's a day the core update finished rolling out, so we covered that.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, absolutely.

Mordy Oberstein:

Barry makes it rain SEO news.

Crystal Carter:

Every time.

Mordy Oberstein:

Every time. Okay, so that brings us to the last part of our podcast with the Follow of the Week. I'm cheating a little bit this week.

Crystal Carter:

Why?

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm having a lot of buttered popcorn from the microwave. I'm cheating.

Crystal Carter:

Are you not just going to shout out yourself? I think it's like that Snoop Dogg song where he's like-

Mordy Oberstein:

That would be so narcissistic.

Crystal Carter:

Snoop Dogg got that award and he was like, "Last of all, I'd like to thank... first of all, I'd like to thank me and myself for all the hard work that I did, for all the sleepless nights and for everything." And I was like, "You know what?"

Mordy Oberstein:

You're not wrong.

Crystal Carter:

"Sometimes you're like that."

Mordy Oberstein:

You're not wrong.

Crystal Carter:

"Sometimes you're like that." You do need... Obviously, thank other people as well, but you do need to thank yourself as well a little bit.

Mordy Oberstein:

All right. All right, so we'll do it like this then, okay? We're going to recommend you follow all of the course instructors, so Aleyda Solis, Andrew Optimisey, Judith Lewis, James Clark, Jill Quick, Itamar Blauer, Mike Stephanie, Debbie Chu, Celeste Gonzales, Crystal Carter...

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. And if you want, you can follow me at your own risk.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, that's right. Literally, we were so honored and one of the things that's great about working with this team is that we get to do cool stuff like this, and it's such an honor to be able to be like, "Hey, do y'all want to do our course?" And all of these fine SEOs said yes, which is amazing and I'm so honored because literally they're some of the best folks.

Mordy Oberstein:

And we didn't have to threaten anybody. That's such a Mordy comment to make. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week in the new episode as we dive into AI overviews and the data behind them. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and whatnot over at the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.