“Does Moz provide a certification?”
Educating the marketing community about SEO is one of our core values here at Moz. I worked at an agency ahead of joining the team back in 2016, and much of what I learned about how to deliver SEO to the clients originated from reading the Moz Blog and watching MozCon videos.

In 2016, one of Moz’s entrepreneurial product managers, Rachel Moore, launched a new catalog of SEO coursework called Moz Academy. This initiative enabled our community to understand faster through structured, interactive workshops. Since 2017, the team has taught SEO to almost 2,500 students through our various class offerings (I looked it up ahead of writing this. That number made me really proud).

Across each one of these interactions, one question asked by our students kept surfacing:

Can I get yourself a certificate for completing this coursework?

For agencies, the ability to show a certificate of completion is ways to differentiate themselves amongst a packed market. I knew from my own experience how valuable having “HubSpot Inbound Certified” and “Adwords Certified” on my LinkedIn profile was — they allowed we to show proficiency to the prospective clients. For our friends working as in-house marketers, showing a certificate of completion is a way of showing that the student made good on the investment they requested from their managers.

I’m proud to announce that Moz has place in a tremendous amount of effort to create a certificate program that fits this consistent customer demand. Today, Moz is launching the SEO Essentials Certificate through our Moz Academy platform. Take a look below:

What is an SEO Certificate?

An SEO Certificate from Moz is focused on developing familiarization with Moz tools and covering a few of the essential kinds of projects you can use hitting the bottom running. Though attendees of the Moz Academy result from many different backgrounds, we built the certification coursework by having an Agency or freelance SEO in mind. However, I think this material is valuable for anybody thinking about learning SEO.

The certificate is dedicated to five core competency areas:

• Understand the Fundamentals
• Develop Keyword Strategies
• Apply On-Page Optimization Strategies
• Build Effective Link Strategies
• Create Efficient Reporting Strategies

By completing this certificate, attendees should manage to articulate due to their stakeholders where SEO gels an electronic digital strategy, how to find and target se results pages (SERPs) on the basis of the competitive landscape, and how to approach delivering basic SEO tactics utilizing the Moz toolset.

With this foundation, you’ll manage to jump off into more complex topics such as for example technical SEO fixes, local SEO, and how to setup your agency for success.

Have a look at just what’s contained in the coursework for the Moz SEO Essentials certificate:

1. Understand the Fundamentals
One challenge we observed in the development of SEO coursework: our users often started delivering organic traffic improvements without having a foundational understanding of where SEO tactics fit into a broader digital strategy. Often people will initiate optimization efforts without first conducting effective keyword research. Or, if keyword research had been done, it wasn’t framed in just a repeatable, scalable process.

The Understand the Fundamentals course sets the stage for delivering SEO in ways which can be repeated efficiently. Along with defining essential terminology used in these classes, you learn how to organize keyword research in ways that produces insight about competition. This easy framework can radically improve targeting of one’s SEO activities, especially for large enterprises that will compete in several different markets simultaneously.

2. Develop Keyword Strategies
After introducing a framework for conducting keyword research, the certificate program dives into a step-by-step process for creating large keyword clusters and identifying the keywords that will produce the best results. In the development of the coursework, we recognized that lots of articles and resources discuss keyword research but don’t define a repeatable, scalable process for actually doing it. So many articles about SEO promote hacks that will work for a particular use case, but lack step-by-step instructions. We developed this course to offer you a functional process that may scale alongside your work.

You’ll learn the significance of mapping keyword clusters to the typical sales funnel customers follow because they move from exploration of solutions to purchase. I’ve presented this material in workshops to large enterprises and small companies — every marketing team that’s used this technique found it valuable.

By the end of the class, you’ll be familiar most abundant in valuable options that come with Moz Keyword Explorer and how to prepare lists to help you identify and target the best keywords for your stakeholders.

3. Apply On-Page Optimization Strategies
For several websites, you will find quick wins by simply optimizing page attributes that target strategic keywords. For around search has evolved in recent years, we still operate primarily in a global where the writing on a full page defines the worth of this page. This course offers an overview of those attributes and their relative importance.

You’ll have a clear understanding of how to use site crawl and page optimization tools to recognize, prioritize, and begin optimizing pages on the basis of the keyword strategy they developed in the earlier class. Often one of the challenges our students can see is that they moved too quickly into optimization without first having their strategy defined. This class will show how strategy and implementation fit together.