While this course is helpful to get started in learning about SEO, there are four quizzes that can only be unlocked if you pay for the class, not if you audit it. That is fine, but the course shows my progress as incomplete (0 out of 5 completed) but also shows I have finished 93% of the work because I have watched all the content and participated in all of the discussions. I don't mind that I am not earning any credit, but now it will just sit on my "in progress" course list. If I remove it, it will not show that I did make the effort of auditing the course. If courses are offered to be audited, there ought to be an ability to mark it as 100% audited.

Positives

A good place to start in relation to SEO. It gives you a basic overview of the history and development of the field as well the range strategies used in modern SEO. The video presentations are informative, clear and well-paced. If you have no real great understanding of how modern SEO works then it certainly delves deep enough to give you a better idea of whether it would be a career path you might want to follow.

Negative

Some of the supplementary reading material and videos can be a bit hit and miss in relation to their quality as educational or informational materials.

Much of the content could have been streamlined and better focused; I prefer if it was straight to the point, and clearly expressed the information that is important to me, instead of portraying the content in round-about ways.

Grammatical, stylistic and formatting errors were also plentiful in transcripts and quizzes; the superficial quality of the text really detracts from your brand's legitimacy and trustworthiness, as discussed in the final lecture.

Overall, I felt it was informative but definitely could have been significantly condensed for what it is.

I enjoyed learning some of the basics that I hadn't brushed up on like Core Web Vitals. But I found some of the resources recommended to be out of date or cost too much. Alexa doesn't even exist anymore and it's still being mentioned. Similarweb's free version is just a marketing pitch and Quantcast? Really can't use it without a pricey subscritpion. Also some of the questions in the quiz about personas just don't make much sense! The one about keywords and personas? The question itself isn't even clear. Let alone the answers.

Wasn't what I hoped for. There weren't a lot of practical work that would help me understand the information more. I also feel as though I didn't learn much. Some of the quiz questions weren't covered in the videos, which confused me. There was also some self-promotion going on, which annoyed me a bit. Lastly, the transcripts had some mistakes that made me rewatch and re-listen to the video to see what was actually being said. All in all, it was okay. I did learn a bit about personas and keyword search, but that was about it.

Don't get me wrong. The course is a nice broad introduction. Rebekah May has a lovely way of teaching. However, the first "two weeks" are more of an HR commercial, advertising the SEO career than actually teaching relevant topics. Also "week two" with the co-professor is more than unnecessary and can be left out completely. The rest is (though it is very basic and starts from the very beginning) nicely explained and interesting. I am looking forward to watching the deeper modules and will continue to give this a chance!

The instructor was a bit dry and spoke VERY SLOWLY considering how little course material there was, course by course. There were many mentions of links to materials that I couldn't find within any of the downloads, and the readings were links to articles that were either too juvenile or too complex to follow, and didn't seem to actually apply to the coursework. Overall, I found what I learned interesting, but I wonder if the course could be polished and the readings be refreshed in the next sprint, as it were?

I would not say that this is a class for beginners. It is an introductory course for those who already are familiar with certain computer terms, programs, methods, etc. I learned a lot more than I thought I would. I had to research some of the terms used and ask a lot of questions with my family to understand what exactly some of this means. Just not a great course for 50+ year olds with no previous computer experience. A little off-putting.

But the class was challenging and the tests were a bit difficult.

Videos are pretty informative, especially in weeks 3 and 4. The first two weeks covered history of SEO and job market info, which I found less useful, although it gave me a more comprehensive picture of SEO in general. There's no technical info in this course. The additional readings are not useful (outdated, not well written, many ads on the blogs). The quizzes are okay, but some questions are poorly constructed. The course could be improved with much more interactivity and reinforcement of the concepts.

For me personally, this course was a little waste of time. I entered the course to learn how to optimize content of websites for SEO. Week 4 covered this a little bit with insight into keyword semantics. The weeks 1-3 were not so interesting for me because they cover the job-role "SEO", history of search engines in general and give an overview of major Google search algorithm updates of the past 15 years. This course is great for people who do not have any IT-background and pursue a new career.

This course is an overview of SEO and doesn't go into a lot of detail of how SEO is actually implemented on the site. What it does do is offer a snapshot of the industry as a job outlook, discuss Google's algorithm impact on SEO practitioners, offers interviews with current SEO analysts and experts, and describes how content affects SEO. I recommend taking the more practical courses in the specialization to get skills needed unless you're an absolute beginner and have no clue what SEO is.

It was an OK course but I didn't think that starting with a whole week on a career in SEO is a good idea. How can I be interested in a career in a field I still know nothing about? Teach me something first and then maybe at the end add some information on how to pursue a career in this area. I skipped almost all of the first week simply because I didn't sign up for the course looking for a career, and couldn't have been convinced to consider it without having taken any other lessons.

Very good overview, though it is specifically targeted to those who want an introduction to SEO because they plan to pursue a career in it. I took the course to brush up on basic SEO practices. I'm established in my marketing career though I believe in continuous learning so this was helpful. The job search information wasn't useful. I would love to see a course called - "Basic SEO for the marketing professional" or something to that degree. Thanks.

The majority of the course was a good introduction to SEO. One of the biggest takeaways from the course I believe was the indirect introduction to what tools SEO Professionals use. My biggest issue was with some of the reading material. Some of it was very repetitive, no longer available on the linked site, and in one lesson there were two articles that contradicted each other. This I believe resulted in a course that was much longer than necessary.

The instructor could be more engaging and I felt like it was hard to follow with out any spaces in the transcript. The slides don't do a great job of emphasizing what information is important and there isn't a glossary of terms to follow along with so it's a little difficult to take notes. All together there is a lot of good information but ND learners and those with learning disabilities might have a hard time following along.

This was a nice introduction to what SEO is and how it is used in the real world. I liked the short format of the videos and readings that helped orient learners in current dialogues. I wasn't a fan of having the "careers" week first, before we really even knew what SEO was, and I would have liked more hands-on projects or questions to put us in the shoes of an actual SEO professional, but on the whole, I liked the course!

This course provided a holistic review of SEO. The content was interesting and informative, and is a good beginners guide to SEO. Although, the course description said beginners level, there are a lot of technical terminology and concepts that needed expanding on in simpler terms. More real world examples could have been touched on as well. Overall a good course for dipping your toes in the digital marketing landscape.

Interesting course. issues I had: broken links in reading material; unrealistic timing (for example, a reading section marked as 30 minutes gave me links to two videos, one 14.28 minutes long and the other - 14.11 minutes long, which left me several seconds to read two more long text articles); name spelling (the video transcript gave the name Gerard Salton, in quiz it was spelled as "Gerard Sulton"

needs more hands on material to drive lessons home. Mindlessly watching videos while robotically taking notes is not going to help in job interviews... the people teaching the course you can tell are highly skilled at what they do.

I love the integration of philosophy and tying in Ludwig Wittgenstein. That was super insightful. Overall I think this course could be better but not bad.

Rating this as a working copywriter, there's not much here in terms of practical advice to improve my writing. This is a good general overview of the evolution of Google search and how that has affected SEO in very broad terms, that's probably best for someone who already has some practical experience in an SEO role but would like a better understanding of nuts and bolts.

I thought the this course was a good introduction to some topics, but didn't cover others that I was surprised by - no discussion of SERPs and how those are outlined on different search engines. Some of the course materials were very dated (blog posts published in 2011, for example). I thought the instructor was clear and straightforward.

There is a ton of great information in this course if you are wanting to learn the theory and history behind SEO. Professor May dumped tons of her knowledge and others' to make this course a great resource for anyone wanting to now the basic "why's" of SEO. The reading assignments can get lengthy at times, but worth sticking it out for.

I liked how the course introduced the SEO concepts from a historical perspective. However, the quizzes were based on memorizing the names of the updates and numbers. This might work from some, but for me it did not provide extra learning value when you fail quizzes because you didn't memorize, rather than conceptualized knowledge.

Covers history and fundamentals of SEO it didn't cover any ways to apply the concepts in practice (e.g. HTML editing, Google Console analysis,....). Interesting, but not what I was expecting from the course when I applied for it. The content was professionally but just didn't cover the topics i was expecting.

The course is interesting and gives you a good understanding of what SEO is and how search engines work. That said, it does not get into the technical details on how you should build your HTML pages to help search engines better understand what your site is about, which, in my opinion is also important.