Suppose there’s anything in digital marketing that you can consider a superpower. In that case, it is the ability to consistently and cleanly improve the ranking of a website so it appears when people search using the right keywords.

That is precisely what search engine optimization accomplishes for countless websites worldwide. SEO is an inbound marketing channel, meaning it is a component (and may I daresay, the foundation of inbound marketing. In a bespoke digital marketing model, you can put SEO at the center because it can interlock with virtually any digital marketing approach, including PPC campaigns (Google Ads, Bing Ads, Yahoo Ads, etc.), content marketing campaigns, and even email marketing campaigns.

SEO is so valuable and potent that knowing how it works and how you can apply it to any website is equivalent to having a real-life superpower!

But can you learn search engine optimization in your spare time? The answer is yes, and you can start learning even today. If you have 30 minutes to one hour a week, you’re already set to learn one of the most effective ways to generate organic traffic and create a lasting impression in any digital marketer.

How Does Learning SEO Work?

Reading and Self-Learning

There are so many avenues for learning search engine optimization or SEO. If you like self-learning, I recommend you begin your journey by reading my first SEO book.

My first book came out this year (2022), and I will release more books and courses in the coming months and years so everyone can continue learning about SEO and how it helps businesses wherever you may be.

Reading about SEO is a great way to start because everyone needs a general framework or point of reference when studying something new. What’s truly important here is the source of information is reliable, so you don’t waste time.

There is so much data online that it’s virtually impossible to filter them all if you’re reading everything.

So, if your learning mode for SEO is reading, check the integrity of the material and ensure that the author or company has a verifiable track record and long years of experience in digital marketing and SEO.

There are other ways to learn SEO if you want to do it independently. There are YouTube videos, podcasts, and of course, who could miss the endless stream of blogs discussing the latest E-E-A-T Google Guidelines and other important search engine topics? The challenging part about learning SEO this way is finding a good oasis of reliable information that gives you practical parts, too. Because you will notice that a lot of information is on the internet in general, meaning it’s not easy to translate the theory to practice. And since SEO is both an art and a science, you need to get the science part right through practice and experimentation.

A lot of books won’t tell you that SEO works because someone before you spent resources like time and money to experiment with different ways to get a website to rank for search terms. And those experiments that failed delivery may be tested again for some time or modified or changed depending on the circumstances. Still, some will be put on the back burner until they may be used again to test something.

Of course, people who do these experiments don’t write about them directly. It takes so much effort to write down an experiment; if the experimenter is someone from a digital marketing agency, they won’t divulge secrets to the public. They won’t tell you what works. They won’t tell you impractical strategies. Instead, they’ll describe the process in general terms, so they have something to share with the public.

And when you hit that level where the general strategies are no longer enough, that’s the time that you should think about partnering with a reliable SEO coach or SEO coaching service that can teach you the practical steps to accomplishing what you’ve only read about in theory.

SEO Coaching and Mentoring

An SEO coach can take you under their wing and make everything much more manageable and accessible in SEO. I’m an SEO coach and mentor, and I work with students weekly. I teach classes on SEO, I give seminars, and I’m also an SEO scientist who has run countless SEO experiments over almost 20 years in the SEO industry. The one thing I know is beneficial to my students is they not only have a friendly face to work with while learning something that can be as technical as SEO, but they can also receive direct answers to their questions.

Because the one thing that you can’t have when reading SEO theory is an answer that directly corresponds to your current problem, since SEO books can only tackle examples and use the experience of their authors to paint how a solution might work, you’d have to use your imagination and technical understanding to apply that knowledge to your problem.

When you have an SEO coach with a broad experience in different markets and consumers, you can ask your SEO coach about something, and you both can apply what you know to the problem. Then, when you create a solution, you get an answer that you can directly apply to your website the next time you look under the hood.

The real superpower of coaching is being able to shed light on something as important as website issues, so you can gradually fix these problems. SEO is long-term. It is not something that you can sprint to and get results that would last for years.

You do it almost every day because the internet changes daily, and every year you have a massive list of significant changes in online search and digital marketing. What worked great this year may not work so well next year. So, learning SEO also becomes a lifelong commitment because you always want to know the best ways to do things and the best ways to stay on top of search engine page results.