How to Do Your Own Google SEO On A Budget (2019)
DATE & TIME
Wed 6 March 2019 09:30 to 12:30Wed 13 March 2019 09:30 to 12:30
Wed 20 March 2019 09:30 to 12:30
Wed 27 March 2019 09:30 to 12:30
PRICE
£429LOCATION
LCB Depot, 31 Rutland Street, Leicester LE1 1REOverview
This course consists of 4 half-day workshops run once-a-week on Wednesday mornings in March 2019. The workshops are spread out so that practical work using the learning from each session can be carried out on participants’ websites before the next week.
9.30am – 12.30pm
Wednesday 6th March 2019
Wednesday 13th March 2019
Wednesday 20th March 2019
Wednesday 27th March 2019
The course fee covers all four workshops and attendance at all four dates is essential to get the full benefit of the course.
To increase your traffic from Google, a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) consultant would want hefty fees every month. However, much of what they do is neither secret nor difficult. In this four-session course, you’ll learn how to carry out basic SEO tasks yourself, using freely-available tools. You’ll learn: how to find out what people are searching for; decide on search query targets; how to do basic site and page optimisation; what other activities will support your efforts, and how to test and measure what’s working and what isn’t.
SEO requires both the understanding of theory and the practical application of what is learnt. This course takes a step-by-step, logical approach through the tasks that make up SEO, following each section of theory with immediate practical application to your own website. There will be a maximum of eight places on this training to allow for individual attention. You will need time between the sessions to work on your own website and master the skills taught.
Fully updated for 2019, the course concentrates on the things you can action yourself that will make a difference. We’ll avoid things that are beyond the capabilities of most business owners, or ‘busy work’ that involves lots of effort with negligible rewards.
Despite the growth of social media and paid advertising, ranking in Google search remains an essential part of internet marketing. Although the basis of SEO remains unchanged, Google’s recent innovations have added a new layer of complexity, especially in the assessment of site and page quality. The course is based on up-to-date SEO and how it is best practiced in 2019 and beyond.
This course is suitable for business owners, and others with professional responsibility for getting results from a website. The learning applies whether you need SEO for WordPress, Shopify, Magento, Squarespace, Wix, Blogger, or a custom website. All types of business can benefit from greater visibility within search: B2C, B2B, e-commerce, services, local businesses. As well as cost, one other advantage of managing SEO in-house is that you know at all times what is being done in the name of the businesses.
Content
Week One – Getting Started: Understanding SEO, Checks, Tools, Research
- How Google and SEO work
- How Google finds your content
- Initial audits
- Free tools to install and use
- Keyword, search query, topic and entity research
Week Two – Optimising Your Site and Pages
Basic on-page optimisation:
- Labels and signposts
- Optimising images and video
- Content architecture and site structure
- Writing copy for a post-keyword Google
- Structured data
Week Three – Meeting Google’s Quality Requirements
- Mobile, speed and security
- Building links
- Understanding quality from Google’s perspective
- Optimising the search user experience
- Social Media and SEO
Week Four – Managing the Relationship With Google and Future-Proofing
- Voice search, entities and Knowledge Graph management
- Local search
- Site migrations
- Tracking success
- Keeping up with Google
Topics Covered
- Why search traffic is important and how to assess its value
- How SEO and Google work
- What you need to know about indexing
- Keyword, search query and topic research
- Basic on-page SEO, including optimising images and video
- Introducing semantic markup and structured data
- What you need to know about Google Panda
- Link building in an era of penalties
- Optimising the search user experience
- SEO for local search
- An assessment of SEO tools
- What to measure – SEO metrics
- Site Migrations and SEO
Learning Outcomes
Over the four weeks, you will learn:
- How Google search and SEO work
- How to choose search targets with the right levels of commercial intent and competition
- Basic on-page optimisation, including images and video
- Current issues of quality for Google and how to deal with them
- How to put together a linking strategy
- How to optimise for click-through and user engagement
- How to optimise for local search
USPs
- Fully up-to-date with recent developments including Google’s uses of Artificial Intelligence
- Delivered by an experienced lecturer and trainer, not a technician reading slides
- A unique and original course based on the experience of the trainer, not available anywhere else
- Focussed on long-term, sustainable progress, not short-term boom-and-bust
- A tried-and-tested format developed over several years work
About the Trainer
David Ross
SEO Consultant
David James Ross discovered SEO in 2003 when a colleague asked how he had (unintentionally) created a website that ranked so well in Google searches. An experienced trainer, lecturer and business support professional, David now specialises in SEO and e-Commerce consultancy and training, working directly for businesses and training organisations. He teaches this course based on his own experiences of getting sites to rank, and on previous specialist courses with businesses.
The first ever version of this course (“Be Your Own SEO Consultant”) ran between 2011 and 2014 at The University of Derby. A second, fully-updated version (“SEO On A Budget”) was first run at Leicester Creative Business Depot (LCB Depot) in summer 2017 and has been repeated regularly since.