The SEO Roadmap with Free Resources & Tools

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a practice that involves enhancing a website’s technical configuration, content, and backlinks -among other aspects- to make it more visible in search engine results pages (SERPs). The primary goal is to improve a website’s ranking, so it appears among the top results when users search for relevant information, product, or services; and as a consequence, grow its traffic and conversions or sales. 

Although it’s always easier to learn anything when someone with experience is guiding you, it’s feasible to learn SEO on your own and that is the reason why LearningSEO.io was created: to facilitate the self-learning SEO journey of newcomers through reliable free resources that can be read or watched in a logical order to better understand the concepts and putting them into practice. It’s also highly advisable to test while learning, by putting into practice what you learn on your own site, even if you build a simple one with no-code tools for this purpose. 

Yes, SEO is in demand in 2023. This demand is evident in several ways: 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine (1), the SEO industry was predicted to reach $77.6 billion in 2023 (2) and demand for SEO services continues to grow. In the US, the demand peaked in December 2022, and key search phrases showing significant growth include “seo local,” “seo agency,” “seo content,” “seo consultant,” and “seo analytics” (3). 

SEO doesn’t require coding, but understanding some basic elements of Web coding -HTML and JS- that affect the capacity of search engines to access your content and rank it, can certainly help you, especially when doing technical SEO. You have reliable HTML & CSS resources, as well as JavaScript guides in the “complement your SEO” section. 

No, Google doesn’t have an official SEO certification. They offer guides and best practices but don’t provide SEO certifications. 

Yes. SEO offers diverse career opportunities, from working in-house to taking on clients or starting and growing your own websites. There is an important demand for SEO specialists too: As of 2023, there are 7430 SEO jobs listed in the United States on Glassdoor, indicating substantial demand for these skills in the job market. According to ZipRecruiter, as of May 2023, the average annual pay for an SEO Specialist in the United States is $64,172. 

For SEO Beginners Looking to Start Learning: 

If you’re just starting to learn SEO, begin with the first phase “Learn SEO Basics” which teaches about the main concepts and areas that influence SEO, what are search engine crawlers and how they work, what are title tags, what is an internal link, what impact search rankings, what doesn’t affect search results, how to identify relevant keywords with keyword research tools, how to optimize relevant content, what is link building and what link metrics to pay attention to, and more start with your understanding of SEO and most common SEO issues. 

Then follow with the second phase “Learn to Execute an SEO Process” which covers what SEO needs to be implemented, fundamental to have an “overview” of how the SEO process actually works from a strategical standpoint to attract the desired relevant traffic: How to develop an on page SEO audit, how to establish a link building strategy or how to monitor your search engine rankings or Website’s visibility. 

If you want to start executing an SEO campaign for hands-on experience for free or very little resources in your own sites, take a look at the “Implement with Free SEO tools” section to obtain reliable handy free tools to use in your first SEO processes: from on page optimization to page speed, and keyword tools, with tips from SEO experts about how to use them.

Have a WordPress site? Or a Website using Shopify, Magento or Webflow? If the site you’re working on is using one of the most popular Web platforms, take a look at the “Implement SEO in your CMS“, to get hands-on advice to effectively implement SEO related best practices in them, leveraging these platforms functionalities and plug-ins.  

For SEOs Looking to Expand Knowledge: 

Expand your SEO knowledge beyond the fundamentals, to take your organic search results to the next level with the “Deepen your SEO Knowledge” to get more in-depth SEO understanding: from site speed to content strategy, this section covers the different technical, content, backlinks, management and opportunities across different day to day SEO scenarios. 

Depending on the type of company or industry you’re working for (or want to work at) you might want to decide to specialize, and for that you can pick the specialization you’re interested about from the “Specialize within SEO” area. 

At this point, you would have already started with your SEO process implementation and seen there are very time-consuming tasks that within your context they should be viable to automate and you already know (or willing to learn) some of the most popular programming/scripting languages to automate them. For that take a look at the “Automate SEO Tasks” section.

In parallel, I would recommend you to start following the latest SEO related updates and search engine news, to keep up with all what you’ve started to learn. Check out the “Keep up with SEO News” for that, listing reliable SEO publications, podcasts, newsletters, etc. that you can subscribe to. 

Finally, to complement your SEO journey and support your efforts through the execution of the SEO process, you can take a look at the “Complement your SEO Knowledge” section, listing broader digital marketing  resources of connected areas known to be useful for SEO projects success, although not SEO specific, like using Google Analytics, or the building blocks of Front-End Web Development. 

I’ve been also asked if I recommend reading all the SEO roadmap resources and go through all the different areas to better learn SEO or if it’s ok to just pick some of them to pick up the SEO basics and a few SEO techniques to start with. 

As you can see in the answer I gave to the question above about “In what order should I go through the SEO roadmap”, there’s value in each one of these areas to become a well-rounded successful SEO that understands all the needed aspects to grow Websites organic search traffic, although depending on what you want to specialize on, you might want to decide to go deeper in some of them and leave others for later on. 

Because of this, if you can, I would recommend going through all the areas and read at least a couple of the SEO guides/resources listed in each, since I believe that it will allow you to better understand how each of these play a role within the SEO process, and how SEO works as a whole, even if you later decide to focus on a certain area (technical SEO, content SEO, link builder) instead of deciding to become an overall SEO specialist. Then, if you decide to specialize on a specific area within SEO, you can then go through all the resources listed within that area and related/connected topics. 

Sure thing! “Why a page is not ranking for a relevant query in Google Search results” is one of the most common questions you’ll get asked as an SEO. To help you, here’s a checklist with basic SEO diagnostics questions to ask, as well as areas to analyze and types of tools to use, including a Google Sheets resource too. 

There are common challenges when learning SEO that would be important to be aware of to avoid. Here are top ones shared by experienced SEO specialists: 

• “Misinformation or out of date information. It’s strange how many people have read things on the internet, from ranking studies to black hat forums where someone has said something and it has been treated as factual.” – Gerry White, SEO Director and co-organizer of TakeItOffiline. 
• “Feeling overwhelmed because I’m learning something new. I think that’s very common, especially with Tech SEO, to feel extremely overwhelmed by what you’re learning. It’s important to take your time, ask for help and to believe that you’ll eventually ‘get’ it.” – Areej AbuAli, SEO Consultant & Founder of Women in Tech SEO. 
• “The idea that *Teach me/my team everything about SEO in <6hr* works – is a recipe for failure. You need to learn principles, you view them 1st with a lens to your own needs & then you apply them to gain experience. This takes time, everyone needs realistic expectations here.” – Chris Green, Senior SEO Consultant at Torque Partnership.
• “I’d say learning without practicing. Courses and guides from the right sources are good ways to learn SEO, but they are just one side of it. If you don’t try out what you’re learning, you’ll never know what works and what doesn’t. If possible, build a website or ask family & close friends for access to theirs and practice what you learn (cautiously). This way, you not only learn but can get results, no matter how small, that’ll come in handy in landing your first SEO job. It worked for me.” – Katherine Nwanorue, Technical SEO Specialist
• “Mistake: Believing every piece of information published online. Solution: Do read what others have to say or present but don’t believe it blindly. Test and analyse it, then make your decisions. Always test on a small sample of pages first before making sitewide changes.” – Praveen Sharma, SEO Consultant & Strategist 
• “For me it was to learn that content, technical SEO and other digital channels have to work together to be successful” – Veronika Hoeller, Senior SEO Manager 
• “In SEO the biggest pain point in learning it as a beginner is misinformation. Beginners will inevitably feel overwhelmed and would not know how to discern fact from disinformation (esp. SERP searches). Ideally the best way to go would be to join a forum or slack channel, like the one for tech seo women, where you can get legitimate feedback in a healthy manner. It’s free and the feedback is from professionals.” – Iman, SEO Specialist

Subscribe to the SEOFOMO newsletter, a free weekly SEO newsletter including the latest SEO news, updates, guides, events and jobs. 

Take a look at the free SEOFOMO Job Board, featuring the latest top SEO Jobs worldwide.