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7 Best SEO Certifications: Are They Worth It?

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7 Best SEO Certifications: Are They Worth It?

I’ll give you one guess about the answer to the titular question: Is getting an SEO certification worth it?

It’s every SEO pro’s favorite response.

That’s right: It depends! (If it didn’t, this would be a much shorter article.)

SEO certifications can be valuable if you’re new to the industry or expanding your skillset into different disciplines.

But do you need a specific certification to be successful? Probably not.

Certifications and courses are great for building your base skills and familiarity with industry tools. But SEO evolves so quickly that experience and testing are often the best teachers.

Experienced SEO pros who can prove results don’t need certifications for work they already do.

But you still might find something helpful in the right training. Everyone needs to upskill.

Let’s examine which certifications could be the most valuable for your time or money.

Is There An SEO Certification?

There isn’t one single widely-recognized SEO certification. There’s no SEO degree or common curriculum – which might sound discouraging if you’re trying to learn how to get started in SEO.

But it makes sense.

SEO is a huge discipline that requires many skills and includes many people.

Developers, designers, writers, marketers, data analysts, influencers, salespeople, managers, and other professionals all have something to add to the SEO industry.

There are tons of ways to contribute and plenty of entry points.

However, the academic community seems to be taking more notice lately. Certifications offered by colleges have started popping up.

Should You Pay For An SEO Certification?

Many businesses offer their own courses and certifications. But, these can be pricy.

The short answer is: Pay for what you learn, not for the certificate.

With the number of free resources out there, from SEO beginner guides to advanced SEO strategy guides, I don’t advise paying a lot of money for basic certification.

The certificate itself probably isn’t what’s going to move the needle for you.

This industry cares about what you can prove – and for the most part, all a certificate proves is that you can Google the answers to multiple-choice questions.

On the other hand, the courses themselves can be extremely valuable when they go beyond the basics. If there’s a course you want to take, and you think you’ll gain helpful skills from it, then it’s absolutely worth paying for.

So evaluate a certification or course based on what actual educational value you get from it.

I’ve also noticed that many paid certifications are companions to a specific premium SEO tool. So, they’re likely worth it if you’re committing to that tool.

My advice is to check out the free content first. If you like what it does and feel like you’d get actual business value out of the course or certification, then go right ahead!

Is A Google SEO Certification Worth It?

Learning new skills and tools can propel your career and help you command greater compensation. Plus, a series of specialized certifications can build an impressive LinkedIn profile and CV.

If you’re new to the industry, certifications can help you prove your knowledge to attract your first clients or jobs.

Unfortunately, if you’re hoping for official certification from Google, it doesn’t offer anything directly that fits that description.

However, it does offer certifications in all of its tools. It also provides a variety of digital marketing, career development, and data courses – though not all of these come with certificates.

If you browse the Digital Garage, you’ll also find courses from providers outside of Google, such as Coursera and educational institutions.

The Google resources are helpful in their granularity.

You should be able to tell which are relevant and useful to you quickly. Not all will be, but you should at least consider taking tool-specific courses.

The courses are categorized by time, skill level, and whether you’ll get a digital certificate at the end.

At the time of writing, they’re all free – so there’s really no reason not to check out something you’re interested in.

A Google account with a healthy selection of completed certificates can be helpful if you lack real-world experience with the tools.

Plus, Google partner organizations often require Google certifications.

7 Best SEO Certifications

This list includes some of the most highly-regarded certifications that provide a lot of value in the learning process. I’ve focused on free certifications first, but we’ll talk about paid courses that might be worth it later on.

1. Google’s Fundamentals Of Digital Marketing Certification

This one’s not technically an SEO certification but features SEO modules, including modules about search ads and local search.

  • Level: Beginner
  • Hours: 40
  • Key learning outcomes: Analytics, business strategy, SEO, SEM, content marketing, and several other core aspects of digital marketing
  • Price: Free
  • Number enrolled: 300,000+
  • Learn more here.

2. Google Analytics 4 On Skillshop

If you’re going to be using Google’s tools, there’s no better teacher than the people who made them.

Plus, earning certifications for all the tools you regularly use is a great – and quick – way to communicate your technical expertise.

This one is particularly relevant to, well, everyone who used to use Google Analytics.

GA4 brings changes and new features, so you should keep up with the times!

  • Level: Beginner through advanced users
  • Hours: About an hour per course
  • Key learning outcomes: Analyzing your website and performance with GA4
  • Price: Free
  • Learn more here.

3. UC Davis Search Engine Optimization Specialization

University of California, Davis offers this specialization in SEO.

It’s a series of five courses culminating in a capstone project.

Out of all the options, this is likely the most time-intensive. It’s also the most intriguing.

  • Level: Beginner-intermediate (two or more years of industry experience)
  • Hours: About 120 – six hours per week over five months
  • Key learning outcomes: Keyword research, marketing, SEO, how search algorithms work, competitive analysis, creating SEO reports
  • Price: Free
  • Number enrolled: Around 120,000
  • Learn more here.

4. HubSpot’s SEO Certification Course

HubSpot’s Academy is legitimately cool. It’s all free and online, not unlike Google’s learning resources. It’s also easy to search for certifications on various digital marketing-related topics.

  • Level: Beginner-intermediate
  • Hours: Just over 2
  • Key learning outcomes: Keyword research, link building, website analysis
  • Price: Free
  • Number enrolled: Around 250,000 (in the entire Hubspot Academy, not just this course)
  • Learn more here.

5. Semrush SEO Fundamentals Exam

Semrush structures its courses and certifications a bit differently.

It lists courses separately from the exams.

If you’re confident in your knowledge and up for a challenge, you can quickly jump into the exams and earn a certification.

Or, you can do as many courses as you like before tackling a single exam.

Alternatively, you can skip certification exams if you don’t care for them and just want to learn.

This certification exam is paired with a course of the same name, but Semrush features several SEO-focused courses and certifications.

  • Level: Beginner-intermediate
  • Hours: Exam – about 30 minutes. Course – Four hours.
  • Key learning outcomes: SEO basics, technical SEO, ranking signals, mobile SEO
  • Price: Free
  • Learn more: ExamCourse

6: Ahrefs’ Complete SEO Course For Beginners

I’m cheating a little bit with this one. There’s no certification at the end of the course, but as I’ve already stated, I can be dubious about the sole value of certifications themselves.

So, you won’t get a digital certificate to add your LinkedIn profile – but you can still brag about it.

I like this one because it’s no-nonsense; it’s a YouTube playlist. Easy access, anytime.

  • Level: Beginner-intermediate
  • Hours: Around two hours of videos
  • Key learning outcomes: SEO basics, link building, on-page SEO, technical SEO
  • Price: Free
  • Learn more here.

7. Paid Certifications

I’m cheating again; I decided to group the paid certifications here. Trusted names in the industry offer these, so you’ll likely get a lot of value from them.

But if you’re new to the industry and just looking to get started, consider saving these for later on.

Moz Academy

The Moz training academy includes a variety of courses.

There’s one free course to get your feet wet, but the certifications are $395 or $595.

Moz does offer a robust learning center where you can get a lot of insight from these industry veterans.

Yoast All-Around SEO Training

Yoast is the ubiquitous WordPress SEO plugin.

If you’ve done any work on the content side of digital marketing, you’ve probably encountered it.

Its training course is an annual subscription model for $99 a year. There’s a free course you can try out to get started.

Conclusion

There’s a critical difference between a course and a certification. Not all courses have certifications. Some of the best ones don’t.

Certifications have their uses. They’re quick ways to demonstrate proficiencies to employers and clients – and if you don’t have a lot of experience, they can act as proof of your skills.

Getting certified in specific tools is great for your resume if you work with them. An at-a-glance list of your certified tools is impressive and helpful!

But the content you learn is much more important than the digital certificate. You shouldn’t discount a course because you don’t get a certification out of it.

In fact, a digital certification in and of itself isn’t particularly impressive.

Don’t let that dissuade you from seeking out learning opportunities. Digital courses, both free and paid, can be critical in your career.

You can learn new skills, keep up with the industry, and command higher rates with the right application of knowledge.

Don’t focus on getting SEO certified. Focus on learning SEO.

More resources:


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Mozilla VPN Security Risks Discovered

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Mozilla VPN Security Risks Discovered

Mozilla published the results of a recent third-party security audit of its VPN services as part of it’s commitment to user privacy and security. The survey revealed security issues which were presented to Mozilla to be addressed with fixes to ensure user privacy and security.

Many search marketers use VPNs during the course of their business especially when using a Wi-Fi connection in order to protect sensitive data, so the  trustworthiness of a VNP is essential.

Mozilla VPN

A Virtual Private Network (VPN), is a service that hides (encrypts) a user’s Internet traffic so that no third party (like an ISP) can snoop and see what sites a user is visiting.

VPNs also add a layer of security from malicious activities such as session hijacking which can give an attacker full access to the websites a user is visiting.

There is a high expectation from users that the VPN will protect their privacy when they are browsing on the Internet.

Mozilla thus employs the services of a third party to conduct a security audit to make sure their VPN is thoroughly locked down.

Security Risks Discovered

The audit revealed vulnerabilities of medium or higher severity, ranging from Denial of Service (DoS). risks to keychain access leaks (related to encryption) and the lack of access controls.

Cure53, the third party security firm, discovered and addressed several risks. Among the issues were potential VPN leaks to the vulnerability of a rogue extension that disabled the VPN.

The scope of the audit encompassed the following products:

  • Mozilla VPN Qt6 App for macOS
  • Mozilla VPN Qt6 App for Linux
  • Mozilla VPN Qt6 App for Windows
  • Mozilla VPN Qt6 App for iOS
  • Mozilla VPN Qt6 App for Androi

These are the risks identified by the security audit:

  • FVP-03-003: DoS via serialized intent
  • FVP-03-008: Keychain access level leaks WG private key to iCloud
  • VP-03-010: VPN leak via captive portal detection
  • FVP-03-011: Lack of local TCP server access controls
  • FVP-03-012: Rogue extension can disable VPN using mozillavpnnp (High)

The rogue extension issue was rated as high severity. Each risk was subsequently addressed by Mozilla.

Mozilla presented the results of the security audit as part of their commitment to transparency and to maintain the trust and security of their users. Conducting a third party security audit is a best practice for a VPN provider that helps assure that the VPN is trustworthy and reliable.

Read Mozilla’s announcement:
Mozilla VPN Security Audit 2023

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Link Building Outreach for Noobs

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Link Building Outreach for Noobs

Link outreach is the process of contacting other websites to ask for a backlink to your website.

For example, here’s an outreach email we sent as part of a broken link building campaign:

In this guide, you’ll learn how to get started with link outreach and how to get better results. 

How to do link outreach

Link outreach is a four-step process:

1. Find prospects

No matter how amazing your email is, you won’t get responses if it’s not relevant to the person you’re contacting. This makes finding the right person to contact equally as important as crafting a great email.

Who to reach out to depends on your link building strategy. Here’s a table summarizing who you should find for the following link building tactics:

As a quick example, here’s how you would find sites likely to accept your guest posts:

  1. Go to Content Explorer
  2. Enter a related topic and change the dropdown to “In title”
  3. Filter for English results
  4. Filter for results with 500+ words
  5. Go to the “Websites” tab
Finding guest blogging opportunities via Content ExplorerFinding guest blogging opportunities via Content Explorer

This shows you the websites getting the most search traffic to content about your target topic.

From here, you’d want to look at the Authors column to prioritize sites with multiple authors, as this suggests that they may accept guest posts.

The Authors column indicate how many authors have written for the siteThe Authors column indicate how many authors have written for the site

If you want to learn how to find prospects for different link building tactics, I recommend reading the resource below.

2. Find their contact details

Once you’ve curated a list of people to reach out to, you’ll need to find their contact information.

Typically, this is their email address. The easiest way to find this is to use an email lookup tool like Hunter.io. All you need to do is enter the first name, last name, and domain of your target prospect. Hunter will find their email for you:

Finding Tim's email with Hunter.ioFinding Tim's email with Hunter.io

To prevent tearing your hair from searching for hundreds of emails one-by-one, most email lookup tools allow you to upload a CSV list of names and domains. Hunter also has a Google Sheets add-on to make this even easier.

Using the Hunter for Sheets add-on to find emails in bulk directly in Google SheetsUsing the Hunter for Sheets add-on to find emails in bulk directly in Google Sheets

3. Send a personalized pitch

Knowing who to reach out to is half the battle won. The next ‘battle’ to win is actually getting the person to care.

Think about it. For someone to link to you, the following things need to happen:

  • They must read your email
  • They must be convinced to check out your content
  • They must open the target page and complete all administrative tasks (log in to their CMS, find the link, etc.)
  • They must link to you or swap out links

That’s a lot of steps. Most people don’t care enough to do this. That’s why there’s more to link outreach than just writing the perfect email (I’ll cover this in the next section).

For now, let’s look at how to craft an amazing email. To do that, you need to answer three questions:

  1. Why should they open your email? — The subject line needs to capture attention in a busy inbox.
  2. Why should they read your email? — The body needs to be short and hook the reader in.
  3. Why should they link to you? — Your pitch needs to be compelling: What’s in it for them and why is your content link-worthy?

For example, here’s how we wrote our outreach email based on the three questions:

An analysis of our outreach email based on three questionsAn analysis of our outreach email based on three questions

Here’s another outreach email we wrote, this time for a campaign building links to our content marketing statistics post:

An analysis of our outreach email based on three questionsAn analysis of our outreach email based on three questions

4. Follow up, once

People are busy and their inboxes are crowded. They might have missed your email or read it and forgot.

Solve this by sending a short polite follow-up.

Example follow-up emailExample follow-up email

One is good enough. There’s no need to spam the other person with countless follow-up emails hoping for a different outcome. If they’re not interested, they’re not interested.

Link outreach tips

In theory, link outreach is simply finding the right person and asking them for a link. But there is more to it than that. I’ll explore some additional tips to help improve your outreach.

Don’t over-personalize

Some SEOs swear by the sniper approach to link outreach. That is: Each email is 100% customized to the person you are targeting.

But our experience taught us that over-personalization isn’t better. We ran link-building campaigns that sent hyper-personalized emails and got no results.

It makes logical sense: Most people just don’t do favors for strangers. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen—it does—but rarely will your amazing, hyper-personalized pitch change someone’s mind.

So, don’t spend all your time tweaking your email just to eke out minute gains.

Avoid common templates

My first reaction seeing this email is to delete it:

A bad outreach emailA bad outreach email

Why? Because it’s a template I’ve seen many times in my inbox. And so have many others.

Another reason: Not only did he reference a post I wrote six years ago, it was a guest post, i.e., I do not have control over the site. This shows why finding the right prospects is important. He even got my name wrong.

Templates do work, but bad ones don’t. You can’t expect to copy-paste one from a blog post and hope to achieve success.

A better approach is to use the scoped shotgun approach: use a template but with dynamic variables.

Email outreach template with dynamic variablesEmail outreach template with dynamic variables

You can do this with tools like Pitchbox and Buzzstream.

This can help achieve a decent level of personalization so your email isn’t spammy. But it doesn’t spend all your time writing customized emails for every prospect.

Send lots of emails

When we polled 800+ people on X and LinkedIn about their link outreach results, the average conversion rate was only 1-5%.

Link outreach conversion rates in 2023Link outreach conversion rates in 2023

This is why you need to send more emails. If you run the numbers, it just makes sense:

  • 100 outreach emails with a 1% success rate = 1 link
  • 1,000 outreach emails with a 1% success rate = 10 links

I’m not saying to spam everyone. But if you want more high-quality links, you need to reach out to more high-quality prospects.

Build a brand

A few years ago, we published a link building case study:

  • 515 outreach emails
  • 17.55% reply rate
  • 5.75% conversion rate

Pretty good results! Except the top comments were about how we only succeeded because of our brand:

Comments on our YouTube video saying we succeeded because of our brandComments on our YouTube video saying we succeeded because of our brand

It’s true; we acknowledge it. But I think the takeaway here isn’t that we should repeat the experiment with an unknown website. The takeaway is that more SEOs should be focused on building a brand.

We’re all humans—we rely on heuristics to make judgments. In this case, it’s branding. If your brand is recognizable, it solves the “stranger” problem—people know you, like you, and are more likely to link.

The question then: How do you build a brand?

I’d like to quote our Chief Marketing Officer Tim Soulo here:

What is a strong brand if not a consistent output of high-quality work that people enjoy? Ahrefs’ content team has been publishing top-notch content for quite a few years on our blog and YouTube channel. Slowly but surely, we were able to reach tens of millions of people and instill the idea that “Ahrefs’ content = quality content”—which now clearly works to our advantage.

Tim SouloTim Soulo

Ahrefs was once unknown, too. So, don’t be disheartened if no one is willing to link to you today. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Trust the process and create incredible content. Show it to people. You’ll build your brand and reputation that way.

Build relationships with people in your industry

Outreach starts before you even ask for a link.

Think about it: People don’t do favors for strangers but they will for friends. If you want to build and maintain relationships in the industry, way before you start any link outreach campaigns.

Don’t just rely on emails either. Direct messages (DMs) on LinkedIn and X, phone calls—they all work. For example, Patrick Stox, our Product Advisor, used to have a list of contacts he regularly reached out to. He’d hop on calls and even send fruit baskets.

Create systems and automations

In its most fundamental form, link outreach is really about finding more people and sending more emails.

Doing this well is all about building systems and automations.

We have a few videos on how to build a team and a link-building system, so I recommend that you check them out.

Final thoughts

Good link outreach is indistinguishable from good business development.

In business development, your chances of success will increase if you:

  • Pitch the right partners
  • Have a strong brand
  • Have prior relationships with them
  • Pitch the right collaboration ideas

The same goes for link outreach. Follow the principles above and you will see more success for your link outreach campaigns.

Any questions or comments? Let me know on Twitter X.



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Research Shows Tree Of Thought Prompting Better Than Chain Of Thought

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Research Shows Tree Of Thought Prompting Better Than Chain Of Thought

Researchers discovered a way to defeat the safety guardrails in GPT4 and GPT4-Turbo, unlocking the ability to generate harmful and toxic content, essentially beating a large language model with another large language model.

The researchers discovered that the use of tree-of-thought (ToT)reasoning to repeat and refine a line of attack was useful for jailbreaking another large language model.

What they found is that the ToT approach was successful against GPT4, GPT4-Turbo, and PaLM-2, using a remarkably low number of queries to obtain a jailbreak, on average less than thirty queries.

Tree Of Thoughts Reasoning

A Google research paper from around May 2022 discovered Chain of Thought Prompting.

Chain of Thought (CoT) is a prompting strategy used on a generative AI to make it follow a sequence of steps in order to solve a problem and complete a task. The CoT method is often accompanied with examples to show the LLM how the steps work in a reasoning task.

So, rather than just ask a generative AI like Midjourney or ChatGPT to do a task, the chain of thought method instructs the AI how to follow a path of reasoning that’s composed of a series of steps.

Tree of Thoughts (ToT) reasoning, sometimes referred to as Tree of Thought (singular) is essentially a variation and improvement of CoT, but they’re two different things.

Tree of Thoughts reasoning is similar to CoT. The difference is that rather than training a generative AI to follow a single path of reasoning, ToT is built on a process that allows for multiple paths so that the AI can stop and self-assess then come up with alternate steps.

Tree of Thoughts reasoning was developed in May 2023 in a research paper titled Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models (PDF)

The research paper describes Tree of Thought:

“…we introduce a new framework for language model inference, Tree of Thoughts (ToT), which generalizes over the popular Chain of Thought approach to prompting language models, and enables exploration over coherent units of text (thoughts) that serve as intermediate steps toward problem solving.

ToT allows LMs to perform deliberate decision making by considering multiple different reasoning paths and self-evaluating choices to decide the next course of action, as well as looking ahead or backtracking when necessary to make global choices.

Our experiments show that ToT significantly enhances language models’ problem-solving abilities…”

Tree Of Attacks With Pruning (TAP)

This new method of jailbreaking large language models is called Tree of Attacks with Pruning, TAP. TAP uses two LLMs, one for attacking and the other for evaluating.

TAP is able to outperform other jailbreaking methods by significant margins, only requiring black-box access to the LLM.

A black box, in computing, is where one can see what goes into an algorithm and what comes out. But what happens in the middle is unknown, thus it’s said to be in a black box.

Tree of thoughts (TAP) reasoning is used against a targeted LLM like GPT-4 to repetitively try different prompting, assess the results, then if necessary change course if that attempt is not promising.

This is called a process of iteration and pruning. Each prompting attempt is analyzed for the probability of success. If the path of attack is judged to be a dead end, the LLM will “prune” that path of attack and begin another and better series of prompting attacks.

This is why it’s called a “tree” in that rather than using a linear process of reasoning which is the hallmark of chain of thought (CoT) prompting, tree of thought prompting is non-linear because the reasoning process branches off to other areas of reasoning, much like a human might do.

The attacker issues a series of prompts, the evaluator evaluates the responses to those prompts and then makes a decision as to what the next path of attack will be by making a call as to whether the current path of attack is irrelevant or not, plus it also evaluates the results to determine the likely success of prompts that have not yet been tried.

What’s remarkable about this approach is that this process reduces the number of prompts needed to jailbreak GPT-4. Additionally, a greater number of jailbreaking prompts are discovered with TAP than with any other jailbreaking method.

The researchers observe:

“In this work, we present Tree of Attacks with Pruning (TAP), an automated method for generating jailbreaks that only requires black-box access to the target LLM.

TAP utilizes an LLM to iteratively refine candidate (attack) prompts using tree-of-thoughts reasoning until one of the generated prompts jailbreaks the target.

Crucially, before sending prompts to the target, TAP assesses them and prunes the ones unlikely to result in jailbreaks.

Using tree-of-thought reasoning allows TAP to navigate a large search space of prompts and pruning reduces the total number of queries sent to the target.

In empirical evaluations, we observe that TAP generates prompts that jailbreak state-of-the-art LLMs (including GPT4 and GPT4-Turbo) for more than 80% of the prompts using only a small number of queries. This significantly improves upon the previous state-of-the-art black-box method for generating jailbreaks.”

Tree Of Thought (ToT) Outperforms Chain Of Thought (CoT) Reasoning

Another interesting conclusion reached in the research paper is that, for this particular task, ToT reasoning outperforms CoT reasoning, even when adding pruning to the CoT method, where off topic prompting is pruned and discarded.

ToT Underperforms With GPT 3.5 Turbo

The researchers discovered that ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo didn’t perform well with CoT, revealing the limitations of GPT 3.5 Turbo. Actually, GPT 3.5 performed exceedingly poorly, dropping from 84% success rate to only a 4.2% success rate.

This is their observation about why GPT 3.5 underperforms:

“We observe that the choice of the evaluator can affect the performance of TAP: changing the attacker from GPT4 to GPT3.5-Turbo reduces the success rate from 84% to 4.2%.

The reason for the reduction in success rate is that GPT3.5-Turbo incorrectly determines that the target model is jailbroken (for the provided goal) and, hence, preemptively stops the method.

As a consequence, the variant sends significantly fewer queries than the original method…”

What This Mean For You

While it’s amusing that the researchers use the ToT method to beat an LLM with another LLM, it also highlights the usefulness of ToT for generating surprising new directions in prompting in order to achieve higher levels of output.

  • TL/DR Takeaways:
  • Tree of Thought prompting outperformed Chain of Thought methods
  • GPT 3.5 worked significantly poorly in comparison to GPT 4 in ToT
  • Pruning is a useful part of a prompting strategy
  • Research showed that ToT is superior to CoT in an intensive reasoning task like jailbreaking an LLM

Read the original research paper:

Tree of Attacks: Jailbreaking Black-Box LLMs Automatically (PDF)

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