Some articles, usually published by online course platforms, claim to teach you SEO in 30 days, while others say it takes years to master search engine optimization.

Which?

The short answer is that it depends on certain factors; we will discuss them in this article and then give the final assessment.

For a detailed answer, read this article and learn:

Factors That Determine How Long It Will Take to Learn SEO
What You Need to Learn SEO (Search Engine Optimization) from Scratch
Expected Time for Each Step of the SEO Learning Process
A Brief Overview of Basic SEO Tactics and Fundamentals
There is a lot to learn, so let’s get started.

Factors That Determine How Long It Will Take to Learn SEO
There is no right answer to the question of how long it takes to learn SEO.

It could be weeks or years. How long it takes to learn SEO depends on:

What is your ultimate goal behind learning SEO?
The time you spend learning SEO each day
How tech-savvy you are and how easily you can grasp SEO concepts?
Your current knowledge and experience with SEO
The type of tools and resources you have
Whether or not you have a good mentor
How much money you are willing to spend on SEO?
Depending on these factors, mastering SEO can take anywhere from a few months to a few years. It doesn’t take long to learn SEO if you are committed and willing to put in the effort.

SEO is a lifelong journey for most people; as search engines are constantly evolving, you will need to stay up to date with the latest trends and best practices.

A good starting point for looking at SEO from a 360-degree perspective is the SEO checklist, which can help you get started with SEO the right way.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s get into the detailed process of how to learn SEO and estimate how long it will take to complete each step. Keep reading.

How to Learn SEO from Scratch: The Game Plan
Before you embark on the process of how to learn SEO, you need to understand where you can get the information you need to learn.

As a beginner, you can learn SEO by:

Taking an online SEO course from a platform like Udemy or Coursera
Reading SEO-related articles from authoritative sources and SEO websites
Listening to podcasts hosted by SEO experts
Watching how-to videos on specific aspects of SEO
Talking to SEO experts and getting help from them to learn SEO
Using all this information, you can give SEO a try and have fun
Now that we’ve done that, let’s move on to the process of learning SEO from scratch. And yes, there is a method to this madness.

1. Understand the Basics of SEO
The first step to learning SEO is understanding what it is, how it works, and what the different types are. Basically, you need to understand the basics of SEO before you move on to more advanced topics.

Don’t worry, we’re here for you.

In this section, we’ve summarized all the basics of SEO for you in easy-to-learn chunks. So get to work and start learning the basics of SEO, starting with how search engines work and where SEO comes into the picture.

How do search engines work?
The first lesson you need to learn is how search engines work.

Search engines are software that scan billions of web pages to find the ones that provide the best information on a given topic. Users type in their search queries, and search engine robots get to work finding what users are looking for.

To do this, they use bots, spiders, or robots that crawl billions of pages on the internet. They understand and index these pages based on their topic and quality level, and rank the results from most relevant to least relevant.

The robots rank pages based on ranking factors such as:

Keywords
Content Type
User Engagement
Recency
Backlinks
Local Authority
And more!
There are over 200 ranking factors on Google, but some are more important than others. As you learn SEO, you will learn which factors are most important for higher rankings.

However, in order for your site to rank, it must be indexable.

How can you check if your site is indexed?

For example, here, the Kent Agency site is indexed and has over 247 indexed pages.

If you don’t see any results like this, you’ll need to go to Google Search Console, find the URL Inspection tool, enter your URL, and request that it be indexed.

You can also inspect and index URLs on specific pages, but we can leave that for later. Making your site indexable is enough to start with.

Here are two ways to increase your site’s indexability:

Create a sitemap for your website and submit it to Google to help it understand your page hierarchies and content types.
Earn links from authoritative sites; Google’s crawlers can follow these links to find related pages on your site.
Use the URL submission option to submit individual URLs through Google Search Console for Google to crawl.

So where does SEO come into play at this point?

By using SEO tactics, you can increase your chances of ranking higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). The entire SEO game revolves around this one goal: increasing your SERP rankings.

And it all starts with finding and using the right keywords throughout your website’s content and pages.

How to Do Keyword Research for SEO
Keywords are the backbone of SEO and are essential to all aspects of SEO.

Why are keywords important for SEO?

As mentioned earlier, search engine crawlers look for certain keywords to understand the content of a page and determine whether it is relevant to a search query.

That’s why keywords help search engines decide whether to show your page for a specific search term. Needless to say, choosing the right keywords for each page on your website is extremely important.

To do this, you need to master the art of keyword research.

There are many ways to find keywords, but we’ll jump right in and recommend using a dedicated keyword research tool like Ahrefs or Semrush.

For example, in Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, simply enter a search term or broad keyword phrase and you’ll find a wealth of keyword ideas, as shown below.

Image via Ahrefs
By browsing through them, you can find the ones that are most relevant to your website, have high search volume, and aren’t too difficult to rank for.

Luckily for you, the tool offers advanced sorting and filtering options, so you can sort keywords based on their difficulty scores, search volume, and other parameters.

Image via Ahrefs
There are many good SEO tools that offer keyword research, and many of them also offer free or no-cost plans. So, you can start with a trial or free plan and upgrade to a paid plan later as your website grows.

Once you have a list of keywords you want your website to rank for, you need to create a specific page or piece of content for each keyword.

Choose a few keywords for your landing pages and service pages that are most relevant to your business. For each page, use your primary keyword throughout the content to maintain a keyword density of 2% or more.

To create content for your blog, you can take a primary keyword and a few LSI keywords to create SEO-friendly content. LSI keywords are related keywords that give search engines more context for your content.

To learn more about this part of SEO, read our in-depth guide to the different types of keywords.

This brings us to the most important step in learning SEO: the different SEO tactics and how they relate to each other.

What are the different types of SEO?
There are two broad categories of SEO: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. However, some people prefer to break down on-page SEO even further and keep technical SEO separate.

Let’s try to understand what these terms mean and what each of them entails.

On-page SEO

This involves making changes to your website to improve your SERP rankings. It involves two main things:

Keyword Optimization: Adding relevant keywords to your content, titles, meta descriptions, headings, and subheadings, etc.

Image Optimization: Reducing the file sizes of images to increase loading speed and using keyword-optimized image titles, descriptions, alt text, etc. to create.
Download our complete On-Page SEO checklist to learn and implement the basics of on-page SEO and reduce the time it takes to learn SEO.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO involves taking actions outside of your website that help improve your site’s rankings.

• Link Building: Building backlinks from authoritative sites to content related to yours sends a vote of confidence that your site has great content. This helps improve your domain authority and ranking. Guest posting, link building, etc. to build backlinks. You can use tactics like.
• Social Media: Your reputation is important for building authority for your site, and social media can help you with this. You can use social media to drive traffic to your website, build a strong brand reputation, and engage your audience.

Technical SEO

This is the part of on-page SEO that deals with optimizing the code and structure of your website to improve the user experience. A great user experience contributes to higher rankings in SERPs as it is one of the most important ranking factors on Google.

There are six key elements to technical SEO: site code, site structure, structured data, loading speed, site navigation, and mobile compatibility.

• Site code: Minify your CSS or JavaScript code to improve site speed and performance.
• Structure and navigation: Using a flat structure to make your site easier to crawl, maintaining a consistent URL structure, submitting sitemaps, and so on.
• Structured data: Using schema markup to make your pages appear as rich snippets in Google SERPs.
• Loading speed: Improving page loading speed using image optimization, caching, and other tactics.
• Mobile-friendly: Use a mobile-first approach to ensure that all of your web pages load quickly and display properly on mobile devices.
• Estimated Time: Learning the basics of SEO will take 3-4 weeks if you dedicate enough time and find the right learning resources.
• Pro Tip: If you want to learn SEO and gain in-depth knowledge about SEO tactics, download our SOP collection that describes the step-by-step process for ranking on the first page of the SERP.

2. Start Implementing the Tactics You’ve Learned
The next step in your SEO training guide is to start putting the theoretical knowledge you’ve gained into practice.

Start by starting a blog and putting keyword research and content optimization into practice on a daily basis. This will help you improve your SEO skills and create a content hub on your website that organically drives traffic.

Then, perform a full site audit and use technical and on-page SEO to optimize your site’s performance. You can use tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Screaming Frog to do this. Here’s a screenshot of the crawl log report from Ahrefs’ Site Inspection Tool.

Image via Ahrefs
Also, start building links from authority sites in your niche. Use this detailed link building checklist to learn how to build links the right way.

Estimated Time: Completing your initial SEO audit and implementing basic SEO tactics can take 2-6 weeks, depending on the time you dedicate and the size of your website.

Pro Tip: Use our comprehensive link chest to find 2,000+ easy backlink opportunities to improve your backlink profile.