Blueprint for Learning SEO and Online Marketing

I teach people (online store owners) marketing skills. Here's the curriculum I recommend starting with. The blessed thing about marketing is that a) the actual skill curve is fairly shallow, as long as you can think with data and write fairly well and b) everything you need to surmount said skill curve is available online, often from the platform publishers themselves.

Moz - a company that publishes a package of niche tools for fetching various data about site marketing performance - publishes the excellent, excellent Beginner's Guide to SEO.

Google offers free, online certification programs in Google Adwords, their ad platform, that will get you credentials you can put on your LinkedIn profile, as well as a slightly less intense one in Google Analytics. You'll ideally want both certifications, since those two applications play so closely together. 

Similarly, getting certs in Social PPC (pay-per-click) will only make your resume stronger. Facebook offers Facebook Blueprint, fairly similar to the Adwords certification course, but for social ads. 

Altogether, these will give you the conceptual background you need to be able to understand how on-site content and off-site marketing contribute to organic search, how to run ads on various platforms to stimulate paid traffic, and Analytics will (kinda) help you understand how those things fit together into your marketing mix and where you're failing with each of them.

Creative Suite you can master on your own with a million Youtube videos. Focus on Illustrator, probably. This isn't critical, but sometimes when you're making a social ad or creating a content page, you need a graphic on the fly. You'll be a way stronger candidate if you don't have to wait on the art department to make it.

Learn the shit out of Excel. Real digital marketers are all about data-informed decisions. Excel allows you to take the data from several programs and use it to highlight trends. By Excel, I really mean learn the "advanced" Excel skills like PivotTables, =VLOOKUP, =LEFT/=RIGHT, formulas (others include =SUM, =AVERAGE, =CONCATENATE), Find/Replace, Text-to-Columns, and autofilling.

Optional bonus points: a light background in front-end dev languages like HTML/CSS or JavaScript can help you when you're creating content pages and need to understand why something's not rendering correctly. It also lets you talk to the dev monkeys a little bit whenever your boss wants you to do something drastic in a client's CMS. 

Learn a little SQL - it can help you dig in and get the reporting you need out of a client's CMS when it's not data you can get from Analytics. Finally, learn to work with a few CMSes themselves - the most popular one by a longshot is Wordpress.

So here's what you do with all of that: 

think of a business idea. 

• Start a free Wordpress site for it
• Build content pages and customize the design - that demonstrates your writing ability and gets you a little grease with CSS
• Launch the site
• Use SEMRush to learn that you didn't make the content pages keyword-rich enough
• Do some keyword research, then rewrite them
• Specify meta titles/descriptions for every page
• Verify the site with Google Search Console
• install Google Analytics and Adwords tracking code
• Spend $25 to get $75 of free Adwords credits
• Do something similar with Facebook
• Divide those budgets in half
• Set up campaigns in each ad platform to target what/who you think you should target
• Observe the results and figure out what you did wrong
• Use the other half of your budget to improve those results
• Make notes about what changed
• Finally, export all this data into Excel and try to use some PivotTables to demonstrate how this data changed over time

That's your practice course.

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