For this post promoting our partner Udemy
‘s New Year’s deal, I’m going to review one of their courses I recently finished.
Choosing a Course
There were a number of subjects I considered taking a course on. Social Media, Email List Building
, and SEO were strong pulls for me. I’d started my searching on the website but decided to try their iOS app to see how I liked the experience. I preferred using the app, personally, because it made navigating easier. The majority of courses have pitch videos similar to Patreon pages. After exploring the pages deeper I saw a number of them offered previews of lectures. I started using this to whittle the potential list down. When you’ve sat through as many whiteboard animations and stock photo images as I have, you just want to see that the actual course material looks like. You can read the curriculum listing for each course but actually watching a preview of a lesson helped me decide.
I narrowed my wishlist down to a few options and ultimately chose Easy SEO for WordPress by Sean Kaye. My logic being Search Engine Optimization is a core thing I could be doing better, I can apply what I learn from it to other ways I promote my site, and particularly because I’m already on WordPress so it’d be more immediately useful than a general SEO course.
Taking the Course
Udemy gave me a coupon code for this review. I redeemed it and was greeted with a confirmation screen and a “start course” link. Once I clicked through the interface was easy enough to understand. Videos would roll on the left side, on the right sidebar I could navigate between lectures, download documents, and post discussion with the instructor and other students.
Course Structure
Instructor Kaye set up the first batch of lectures to be introductions to the course, SEO, and SEO for WordPress. This then moved on to deeper explanations of topics; choosing a webhost, creating and promoting your content with SEO in mind, and the rise of mobile browsing. These were all done with slides and voice over.
The next batch were “over the shoulder” screen recordings as he showed how to install WordPress and options to select for a smoother setup. I’m very familiar with the 5 minute install procedure but it’s good to see a walkthrough and recommendations of it for newcomers and incase there’s some options I’ve missed. He also went through using the Yoast SEO plugin, one I’ve heard recommended for some time but never learned to set up properly.
The last part consisted of an 18 page list of things that could be hurting site rankings, a request for additions we’d like to see added to the course, and a collection of coming lectures.
Final Thoughts
I enjoyed going through the course. I’ve had vague introductions to SEO before and it was nice to see one with clear goals and applicable instructions. It’s very clear Mr. Kaye knows what he’s talking about. If I had any criticisms it’d primarily be with the slides during the lectures. I appreciate seeing things written out but I’d prefer to see shorter bullet points. When each slide is full of text it competes with the voice over for attention. I’d also recommend he mix in a few lectures where we could see him talking, to break up the monotony of text on screen and connect with the audience more. I look forward to getting updates/additions as the course can only grow and improve with revisions. As I’m currently in the process of retooling parts of my own site, revisiting certain lectures will give me plenty to think about.