Learn SEO: what to learn where, and in which order

Learning SEO means learning three separate subjects. Technical work, content on your own website, and everything that happens outside it.

The three parts need different sources. For two of them the best manual comes from the search engine operator itself, free of charge. For the third there is none, because it depends on other people's websites.

This article sorts the entry point. For each field it says what belongs to it, where you learn it, and how you know you have understood it.

It is written for beginners, for people moving over from online marketing, for founders deciding whether to build SEO in-house, and for marketing leads about to hire an SEO manager.

One note up front, because it explains the structure. GetMentioned is a link building agency with its own placement marketplace. Full service in link building, not full-service SEO. For two of the three fields we are the wrong teacher. There we name the best freely available sources, the ones we use ourselves. For the third we write from our own work.

What SEO is and what learning it involves

The abbreviation and the subject

SEO is short for search engine optimization. It covers the work of making a page on the World Wide Web findable through search engines.

The goal is a position in the search results that reaches users. The results page of a search engine is called the SERP, short for search engine results page.

What people call SEO basics is a small set of principles and a large set of details. The principles change slowly, the details constantly.

Who this entry point is for

The article addresses four starting positions:

• You are an SEO beginner and want an order to work through.
• You come from online marketing and want to sort your SEO knowledge.
• You run a company and have to decide between building and buying.
• You are an SEO manager and want evidence instead of claims.

For advanced readers the order changes. The fact-check section further down is written for both groups.

The order the three parts come in

Technical work first, because a page that is not indexed appears in no ranking. Content second, because it decides which search queries the page fits. The third part last, because it takes the longest.

That order applies to work on a website. For learning it only half applies. Without the vocabulary of the third part you follow half of any professional discussion.

The three pillars of SEO, fact-checked

"The three pillars of SEO are on-page SEO, off-page SEO and technical SEO." That sentence appears in almost every beginner article. It comes from the industry.

On 20 August 2026 we checked two Google pages in full text. The SEO Starter Guide and the Guide to Google Search ranking systems, both marked last updated 10 December 2025.

The words on-page, off-page, technical SEO and pillars appear on neither page.

What Google's documentation has instead

The Starter Guide is organised by work steps. Help Google find your content, organise your site, make it useful, optimise images and videos, promote your website.

The ranking systems guide lists 17 active systems. Among them are BERT, RankBrain, deduplication systems, freshness systems and "link analysis systems and PageRank". Four further systems are listed as retired, including Panda and Penguin.

Neither page groups these systems into pillars.

What the model is still good for

As a map it works. It describes who does what inside a team, and it separates tasks that need different skills. That is exactly why we keep using it in this article.

As a statement about how Google calculates, it does not hold. Using it that way attributes a model to Google that Google does not use.

The first lesson for beginners

With every SEO rule, check who set it. Three questions are enough:

• Does the claim appear in the search engine operator's own documentation?
• Does it come with a number, a method and a date?
• Or does the text only quote another guide making the same claim?

That check is the one SEO skill that does not expire. Everything else in this article is material you can look up.

The three fields and who teaches you each one

The right-hand column is the reason this article is built the way it is. For the first two fields we write no guide of our own, we hand you the addresses where the subject is covered properly. That documentation is free and kept up to date.

Learning technical SEO from other people's sources

What belongs to technical SEO

Technical SEO makes sure a search engine can fetch a page, understand it and index it. The field covers a short, clearly bounded list of topics:

• crawling, the retrieval of pages by the bot
• indexability, the admission into the index
• XML sitemap and robots.txt as the controls for it
• website structure and internal linking
• page speed, measured through the Core Web Vitals
• rendering on small screens
• structured data for the search results

For beginners the field has one advantage. Almost everything in it can be measured. A page is indexed or it is not.

The sources we use ourselves

All three are free. Google calls Search Console "a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site's presence in Google Search results". The current Core Web Vitals thresholds are LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds, CLS under 0.1.

Why we write no guide of our own for this

Work on a client's website is outside our trade. Site structure, technical SEO and page speed are not ours, and we do not publish content in a client's CMS.

A guide from us would be a summary of Google's documentation, only shorter and older than the original.

In our experience the technical side is the bottleneck on very few websites. It shows up in the first audit and is done within days.

Learning on-page optimization and content

On-page optimization covers everything on your own website. Content, structure, headings, internal links and usability. The industry treats technical SEO sometimes as its own field, sometimes as part of it.

Keyword research and search intent

Keyword research answers two questions. What does your target audience search for, and what do they expect as an answer.

The second question is search intent. It is the part beginners skip. A keyword with high search volume is worthless if searchers want something other than what the page offers.

You can check it without SEO tools. Enter the keyword in Google and look at the first ten results. What those pages are is the answer.

Website structure and user experience

Website structure sorts topics into areas. Every page has a place, and the route to it runs through internal links.

User experience means what a visitor goes through on the page. Is what they came for reachable in a few steps. At page speed and mobile rendering the field overlaps with technical SEO.

Free online courses, checked and dated

Free SEO courses are plentiful. On 20 August 2026 we opened one provider and checked the details.

Semrush Academy states on its SEO course page: "All of our courses and resources are 100% free." A certificate follows completion, issued by the academy and the respective instructor. A paid subscription is not required for the courses.

Three courses from the SEO series, with scope and instructor:

• "On-Page SEO and AI Search Essentials", 23 lessons, around 60 minutes, Alex Lindley
• "Keyword Research Essentials", 24 lessons, around 60 minutes, Alex Lindley
• "International SEO", 15 lessons, around 60 minutes, Aleyda Solis

Two limits belong next to that. The courses run in English only. And the provider is a tool vendor teaching with its own software as the example.

What Google openly calls a waste of time

The SEO Starter Guide carries a section headed "Things we believe you shouldn't focus on". It lists nine points that Google considers wasted effort.

Four points from this list turn up in beginner articles as rules. Content length, keywords in the domain, duplicate content and E-E-A-T as a ranking factor. Reading the list once saves months of work in the wrong direction.

Learning off-page SEO, the field we work in

Everything outside your own domain is off-page optimization. That includes backlinks, mentions without a link, digital PR, reviews and directories. What the field covers, and how thin the evidence is for some of its signals, is in our article on off-page SEO.

This section handles the learning question. In which order do you pick it up.

The terms you need first

• Backlink, a link from someone else's website to yours. Explained at length in what backlinks are.
• Referring domain, the linking website. It counts once, however many links come from it.
• Anchor text, the visible words that carry the link.
• dofollow and nofollow, an attribute on the link. It tells search engines how to treat the reference.
• Brand mention, a mention of the brand without a link.
• Link profile, the sum of all references pointing at a domain.

Six terms are enough to start. Anyone who knows them can follow the professional discussion in this field.

The methods behind them, from digital PR through guest articles to paid placements, are in the link building guide. It also covers what they cost.

What beginners get wrong first in off-page

In our experience it comes down to three points, and they repeat at almost every start.

The first is sequence. Many collect references before deciding which pages should get stronger. The reverse works better. Fix the three to five pages with business value, then steer the references onto them.

The second is metrics. Many read a single number such as Domain Rating as a verdict. Two questions work better. Does the topic of the source fit the target page, and does the source reach real readers.

The third is duration. Many treat the build-up as a one-off task. It is ongoing work. A placement from May does not carry June on its own.

Quality over quantity

Ten fitting references do more than a thousand arbitrary ones. Beginners count links, experienced people check sources.

Not every page needs backlinks. Pages with business value and ranking potential need them, a privacy policy does not.

A single link rarely moves a ranking. Reputation comes from repeated signals out of fitting topic environments, over months.

That is where the volume logic breaks. A thousand references from arbitrary topic environments produce a pattern that looks bought and reaches no reader.

What a test website lets you practise and what it does not

A test website of your own is the best practice ground for two of the three fields. On it you see what indexing means, and how a change shows up in the Search Console report.

For the third field the advice does not carry. A test domain nobody knows receives no references.

Recognising which placement is worth having can be learned. The placement itself comes out of a negotiation with a publisher.

Procurement means two things here. You pick fitting publishers in the marketplace yourself and book the placement directly. The price you see in the marketplace is the price you pay. Or you hand the execution over, and we take it on as your link building agency in full service.

Five claims about learning SEO, fact-checked

The following five sentences appear in this form or close to it in many guides. We checked each against the primary source.

"The Google Analytics certification is recommended for SEOs"

The name in that form no longer exists. The former Google Analytics Individual Qualification, GAIQ for short, appears on none of Google's own pages. Checked on 20 August 2026 in the Analytics help and the Skillshop help.

What does exist is stated in the Analytics help: "Google Analytics currently offers 4 training courses and a certification." The exam runs through Skillshop and covers Google Analytics 4.

For SEO a different data source matters. Search queries, impressions and positions live in Google Search Console. Analytics measures behaviour after the visitor has arrived. Anyone learning SEO learns Search Console first.

"SEO requires constant training because algorithms keep changing"

The documented events can be counted. The ranking update history in the Google Search Status Dashboard lists them with name, start date and duration.

Retrieved on 20 August 2026 the numbers are these. Seven named updates in 2024, plus one reported incident. Four in 2025. Six in 2026 up to 20 August. Seventeen named updates across 32 months.

Google itself writes in its core updates documentation, marked last updated 10 December 2025: "Several times a year, Google makes significant, broad changes to our search algorithms and systems." Smaller changes are not announced.

The advice after a core update in that same document is to avoid quick fixes. What changes fast is the advice industry. The principles in the documentation move in yearly steps.

"Duplicate content should be avoided to improve SEO"

We checked this rule against Google's documentation on 19 August 2026 and disproved it. The finding, with source and wording, is in our article on SEO copywriting. We do not repeat the check here.

The short version in two sentences. Google calls duplicates inside one website normal. The consequence is a selection and no deduction.

The SEO Starter Guide confirms it from a second angle. It lists the duplicate content penalty among the things not to focus on.

"Real data analysis is critical to improving SEO performance"

That sentence says nothing. It names no data field, no question and no decision. After reading it a beginner knows exactly as much as before.

This is what guide prose sounds like when the substance is missing. A sentence asserts that something matters instead of saying what to do.

Here is the same statement in a usable form:

• Open the performance report in Google Search Console.
• Filter to the last three months.
• Sort by impressions.
• Take the ten queries with many impressions and an average position between 8 and 20.
• For each one check whether the ranking page matches the search intent.

A beginner can run those five steps the same evening. The original sentence gives the reader nothing to do.

"Free online SEO courses are available on platforms like Semrush Academy"

This one holds. It appears above with provider, course titles, scope, instructors and check date. Free courses bundle knowledge in one place and supply an order. Feedback on your own website is not included.

How long learning SEO takes and how to measure progress

What Google says about how long effects take

The Starter Guide answers the timing question itself. In its own words: "Some changes might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months."

In our experience two to three weeks alongside daily work are enough for solid technical knowledge. Content and keyword research add one to two months. The off-page field needs a year, because it depends on outcomes you cannot produce alone.

The three numbers you measure yourself against

All three are free inside Search Console:

• Number of indexed pages. It shows whether the technical work is landing.
• Impressions per query. They show which topics the site appears for at all.
• Average position for the main queries. It shows movement across months.

Understanding those three numbers is worth more than any certificate. They describe your own website.

SEO courses, seminars, podcasts and conferences compared

Two formats are enough at the start. An online course for the order and your own website to try things on. Podcasts and conferences pay off once you know the vocabulary.

Blogs and online resources are the most common learning source in SEO marketing and the least reliable one. The fact-check section above shows why.

The roles that exist in SEO

What companies expect from an SEO manager

An SEO manager owns the visibility of a website in search engines. In small companies the role covers all three fields, in large teams it splits.

Four cuts are common:

• SEO manager, responsible for SEO strategies, prioritisation and reporting
• technical SEO, at the interface with engineering
• online editorial or content ownership, responsible for content and search intent
• off-page or digital PR, responsible for mentions and references from outside

For marketing leads that produces the question to settle before hiring. Which of the three fields is the bottleneck, and do we want a person or a supplier.

What Google says about picking an SEO expert

Google has a page of its own for this, marked last updated 5 June 2026. It is called Do you need an SEO? and it lists the services an SEO offers.

Eight services are named. Review of site content or structure, technical advice on website development, content development, management of online business development campaigns, keyword research, SEO training, expertise in specific markets, and optimizing for generative AI.

That list is the clearest delimitation available. Of those eight activities we take on one, content development in the form of delivered copy. The other seven belong to an SEO agency, and that is not what we are.

What is missing from the list is worth noting. Link building and mentions from other websites do not appear there as an item of their own.

Google adds one sentence that belongs in every introduction: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google."

Conclusion: three subjects, three teachers

Learning SEO means learning three fields from different sources. Technical SEO and on-page optimization are covered in Google's documentation more precisely than any guide manages. They cost nothing.

The third part appears in no documentation. It depends on whether other websites write about you.

The skill that does not expire is the check against the primary source. Of six claims checked in this article, one holds. That is the hit rate to expect from SEO guides.