How can you Train your SEO Team to be More Effective in 2020

You can enhance the effectiveness of your search engine optimization by hiring either a well-trained and experienced team, or you can train your less experienced team to get the best out of them. Either way, training and development is an essential part of your overall SEO and entrepreneurial success in 2020. Times are challenging and more emphasis is given by managers on technical skills; since SEO is a never-ending learning opportunity for professionals, your duty as a manager is to start an effective and easy-to-expand training program for the new staff.

Training is easy if you are a solo SEO professional; all you need is to have a firm determination and a commitment to learn new things and adapt to different situations in this challenging industry. On a regular basis, learning new things is a requirement of your profession. However, if you are already a hiring manager who plans to hire a few more new members to enhance your team, then building and applying a system of training your team is essential.

How important is Training in SEO Field?

Not training your team can get you and your company in trouble. As a busy and professional SEO manager, you must have had a lot of experience of digital marketing technologies and tools. You must have gone through several training programs throughout your life; however, this post aims to teach you to build impeccable training strategies that are both:

• Easy to implement on team members
• And also, scalable methods that cater the needs of growing team members.

Over the course of several years, SEO managers work with diverse teams. It is often harder to link things in new team members before they can actually understand everything about your SEO. Building a training program for SEO beginners is also vital for your organization because SEO success is directly related to the skills and competencies of your team members. Moreover, SEO is changing rapidly and your team needs to be kept up to date on everything that Google throws your way as a commander-in-chief of all search engines. Therefore, team training is all about improving the effectiveness and productivity.

So, let’s get on with the most important task of your professional journey as a SEO manager and follow these steps to build an impeccable training program for your SEO success.

1.     Identify Training Essentials

It is essential for you to start SEO training program as soon as you hire the new executives in your organization. However, before assigning them full-time duties, you need to first implement a robust SEO training program and that should come with a plan. The plan must include covering the basics as well as the advanced concepts of SEO according to the needs of your organization. This is an important phase because in the beginning, you need more than just an outline.

The first thing you need to do to plan SEO training is to map out all the vital strategies and approaches of your SEO in the organization and make sure that team knows all of them before they can start their duties. This means that your SEO training plan must incorporate SEO knowledge as well as your philosophy and standard operating procedures regarding digital marketing SOPs.

The suggested course outline for the SEO training should and can include the following topics:

• SEO Introduction and Basics
• Understanding Success in SEO
• SEO Fundamentals
• Standard Operating Procedures
• Details of Regular SEO Workflow

Let us elaborate on these points a little bit! As you know that an introduction to search engine optimization SEO is important for all the newly hired individuals in your organization, but it is also important to refresh the minds of experienced people.

Then you need to show the team members what does successful SEO looks like in your organization and what are your major goals regarding SEO?

Moreover, the next thing you must include in the training is teaching people the fundamentals of SEO; these topics must include but not limited to:

• Keywords and researching keywords
• Content writing and planning
• On-page and technical SEO
• Website structure
• SEO audit basics
• Internal and external link building

This outline is sufficient at this point to help team members learn the essentials of SEO and what they should follow as SOPs in your organization to create value for the customers.

2.     Decide how you will Deliver Training?

In the technologically advanced era, there are several ways you can present your team the training. The most important thing to remember here is what your unique style is and how you can think of the team to help them learn best.

The following options will give you several ways to fully conduct training:

• Live Sessions

Live sessions can provide your team an easy way to learn SEO basics because they are already used to a classroom environment and won’t be surprised to take sessions. You must set up a schedule first to conduct the regular trainings either lives or by video conferencing.

Of course you are the most important and experienced professional in the team. Therefore, being a manager, it is your duty to lead most of the sessions and also assign sessions to some other team members. This will decrease the burden on your shoulders and focus on other tasks as well.

Moreover, you should plan sessions and their timings to make sure that each session helps the trainees to focus on a specific point. Because in classrooms, people only listen to a fraction of what they listen and never devote full attention to complete training lessons, so try not to teach them too much in one session. If you use PPTs to provide presentations, then make sure you email them to all the trainees after the session is over.

A great benefit of this lives session’s method for your SEO training is that you are building a reusable training library and not creating an advanced course from the scratch.

• Online Course

If you are more tech savvy and advanced trainer who adores using a learning management system (LMS), then you can start building a self-guided course of all the lessons available online. This approach is also beneficial for the trainees because it offers creating many new lessons and you can update them as the time passes.

In an online course, the biggest advantage is that the learning is self-paced; however, a problem or a drawback of online course is that a large investment is often required to design the entire course. Moreover, this can also result in a lack of interaction as opposed to a classroom.

• Existing Documentation

Another quick and easy way to build a training program is to use a documentation you have already created and reusing it as a vital document to teach new people. However, this strategy can work best if you have already been involved in creating SEO courses and updating them on a regular basis. Moreover, this approach can allow you to create a third party content as long as you are sure that the content is of high quality and will benefit all the learners in your organization.

This approach can be used effectively to create a course outline that includes lessons linked to videos, decks, and blog posts. The students can click through reading materials easily and set up quizzes or tests to test their learning.

3.     Begin a Regular Schedule of SEO Training

Now that you have plenty of options to choose from regarding your training methods, you can decide a training schedule and make sure that you stick to the schedule for the rest of your summer. In the normal busy days in an organization, there can be a delay in training and you might skip a few lectures. However, a session or lesson per week is probably sufficient for the live sessions approach.

4.     Create an Accountability and Evaluation Schedule

Congratulations! Now that you have developed a training schedule and a proper scheme to teach new kids everything they need to perform like champions, the most important step of this entire process is to ensure that you establish a solid mechanism in the organization that focuses on the evaluation and accountability of trainees. This can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your training programs.

You can do a lot of things to test the effectiveness of your training program such as:

• Take Quizzes

Quizzes are used in institutions as a most conventional approach to assess the knowledge of students. In your SEO firm, the goal of quizzes remains the same as you can develop non-graded quizzes as soon as you finish a lesson or a new topic on SEO.

Creating quizzes will help to reinforce and correct the learning of your students and help to identify the areas where trainees are stuck. Moreover, quizzes can give many benefits such as an immediate feedback of the performance of your employees regarding learning new things. Just make sure that the quizzes also link the learners with the real world knowledge and they do not use any fake methods to participate in quizzes such as cheating.

• Projects

In addition to quizzes, checking the effectiveness of learners is possible by creating projects where the students can be asked to demonstrate what they have already learned in the SEO lectures and prove their worth.

For example, as soon as the keywords research lesson has completed, a good idea for you is to give students a list of 20 new keywords and ask them to apply them to target a website. However, if the students are too many, then this approach can consume a lot of time.

• Monitor their Work

After finishing a lesson such as competitor’s analysis or on-page SEO, you can monitor the work of the team members and ask them to implement the concepts that they have learned so far. Make sure to meet the learners after the class and give them feedback. This can help them to do a demonstration of real-world learning.

The Best SEO Training Courses in 2020

SEO training is challenging for any organization and takes a lot of time and effort to teach skills to new students or employees. If you have a small firm that does not have a budget for a full-time training or cannot maintain a regular training schedule in the middle of business, then we can suggest you to use the following robust SEO training and learning course available online to teach your newbie’s essentials of SEO. These courses are as good as your in-house training; they can also guarantee success of your SEO if leaned properly.

1.      SEMRush Academy Digital Marketing Course

In 2020, SEMRush is undoubtedly the leading digital marketing training and services providing company spread across all continents of the world. The best thing about SEMRush is that it has established its online training academy that is better than most of the physical institutes in the world to learn basic to advanced SEO and SMM skills.

SEMRush academy offers a wide range of courses and certifications in SEO, SMM, Content Marketing, and pay per click PPC.

For example, technical SEO course is offered to professionals that cover pretty much everything you need to work as a successful SEO professional in this challenging field. The most experienced and renowned digital marketing experts have created these video courses such as Greg Gifford and Bastian Grimm of SEMRush academy.

Moreover, with SEMRush academy, you can also get a training to learn to use SEMRush toolkit and work as an SEO professional in any organization. Moreover, the experts are constantly improving the content of these courses and updating them to equip you with the best knowledge possible.

2.      Complete Udemy Training of SEO

If you are interested in getting the most effective SEO training and learn how to rank your website No.1 on Google, then there is no better place than Udemy to learn the essentials of SEO success. Udemy offers a course that teaches you 40 awesome SEO factors, as well as 13 technical SEO factors. You can be in a right place once you join Udemy courses and experience a super SEO training for your employees.

The best thing about Udemy is that it offers a range of digital marketing and social media marketing courses to professionals, beginners, and advanced users. These courses are not only filled with knowledge but also offer an insanely low price to complete these online courses at your required pace.

Udemy SEO courses can surely help you to rank no.1 on Google search with WordPress. The SEO course for beginners is ideally suitable for starters and newbie employees. Moreover, you can get much more organic traffic from different major search engines.

However, there are no introductory classes and you must already know some basics of SEO before you can join these courses. If you don’t have any idea of SEO, then no need to worry. You can purchase the course that gives you an access to 21 articles and a full-time access of almost 10 hours of video lectures and assignments to boost your team’s learning.

3.      Yoast SEO Training from Yoast Academy

As a SEO expert, you must have used Yoast in your daily practices for a number of times. Yoast is the most-wanted SEO plug-in and works well for WordPress sites. Just as there are millions of fans of Yoast plug-in, this company is more than just a software plug-in development firm.

Yoast has gained a status of becoming a full-fledge SEO training institute that gives a chance to people to dive deeper in SEO and master their skills from their academy program. They not only teach you the use of Yoast plug-in, but also Yoast’s online courses are also here to teach you about several different aspects of SEO you never imagined. The SEO training program of Yoast is complete, ultimate, and effective for new as well as for experienced professionals. You can learn great skills if you are unable to conduct a regular training in your office.

Yoast also offers course for WordPress, Yoast Plugin, SEO Copywriting training, and many more courses to enhance the skills of your employees.

The Takeaway

SEO trainings for new employees provide them a way to learn new and important things regarding their daily tasks and technical SEO skills. The learners must be able to demonstrate and apply their learning in the real world. Whichever learning strategy you adopt or whatever schedule you create for the SEO learners recently joining your team, you must develop a mechanism to find out who is doing well and who is performing poorly.

Place more focus on practical SEO learning as compared to theoretical learning. Reinforce the concepts where necessary as a teacher or a trainer. Regularly review the progress of employees and assess their learning using quizzes, assignments, and projects.

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