Yoast SEO Course Review: Is the Free Course Worth It?

Yoast’s free course is a good, simple start for a complete beginner. It takes about two hours, costs nothing and ends with a certificate. It stops at the basics, though, so it won’t make you job-ready. If you want to work in SEO, finish it first, then learn the rest practically from a trainer.

I wrote this review for one kind of reader: someone who is choosing a first SEO course and wants to know whether a free one is enough. I’ll tell you what the course does well, where it runs out, and what to do next.

The course comes from Yoast, the team that makes the plugin, and it sits inside their learning portal called Yoast SEO Academy. The beginner course is the free one. It is about two hours of video, cut into 20 short clips, with quizzes, downloadable notes and a one-page cheat sheet.

Nothing to pay and no card to enter. A free sign-up is needed only so the platform can remember where you stopped and hand over your certificate.

The course walks you through six ideas:

• how search engines find and rank pages
• how to pick the words people search for
• how to write so that both readers and search engines understand you
• how to organise the pages of a website
• how to let search engine bots reach and read every page without getting stuck
• how to qualify for richer results, such as those with stars or extra details

A few lessons demonstrate the Yoast plugin. They are marked optional, so a person on Wix, Shopify or any other platform can skip them and lose nothing.

You receive a Yoast certificate and a badge to place on your website. The badge only shows once you have completed the course.

What Works in Its Favour

• No risk. You pay nothing, so the worst outcome is two hours spent.
• Easy to finish. A weekend is plenty of time.
• Plain language. The clips are short, and a total beginner can follow them.
• A bigger library. Yoast has other free courses on WordPress, structured data and the editor, which you can take next.

What It Leaves Out

Two hours can only cover so much. Here is what you won’t find in the topic list:

• running a proper technical audit
• reading reports in Search Console and GA4
• targeting several countries or languages, including hreflang
• building links
• ranking in AI search

The certificate proves you completed a beginner course. By itself, it won’t convince a hiring manager or a client.

The rest of the Academy sits behind Yoast’s premium membership, which is listed at $118.80 a year before VAT.

Whichever SEO course I review, I score it on the same seven things, so you can compare courses fairly:

1. Price and value
2. Beginner friendliness
3. Depth of content
4. Practical work
5. Up-to-date information
6. Support and trainer access
7. Value of the certificate

1. Price and value: 5 out of 5
Free is the best price there is, and it comes with no catch for the basic course. Two guided hours at zero cost is hard to argue with.

2. Beginner friendliness: 5 out of 5
You can start with no knowledge of SEO, coding or WordPress. The lessons are short, so it’s easy to stop and restart, and the quizzes tell you whether the ideas stuck. Two independent roundups I read also describe it as easy for newcomers.

3. Depth of content: 2 out of 5
It gives you the vocabulary and the core ideas, and then it ends. The same two roundups say it stays at the level of fundamentals. That’s fair for a beginner course, but it means you can finish it and still not know how to audit a website.

4. Practical work: 2 out of 5
The course is something you watch and answer quizzes on. There is no live website to fix and nobody reviews your work. That matters, because SEO is a skill you learn by doing and being corrected.

5. Up-to-date information: unclear
I couldn’t find a date for the last update to the course. Its topic list doesn’t mention AI search, which now affects how people get found. Before you rely on it, check the lessons for anything that has changed recently.

6. Support and trainer access: 1 out of 5
The course page doesn’t mention live help, coaching or a student group. A competitor’s blog post makes the same point, though it has a reason to. For a free self-paced course that’s normal, but it means nobody answers your questions.

7. Value of the certificate: 3 out of 5
It’s free and it does show you finished something. It does not show you can do SEO work.

My overall view: 3.5 out of 5 as a free first step. As a route to a job, it scores lower, because it was never meant to be one.

It suits you if:

• you have never studied SEO before
• you create content or manage a small business and need to follow what the SEO people around you are saying
• you want to see whether SEO interests you before you spend money

Skip it if:

• you already understand on-page SEO
• you want to work in SEO or look after client websites, because you’ll finish it in an evening and still have the same gaps

Searching for an SEO course you can trust? My advice: pick one where a real trainer sits with you and watches you do the work, instead of only playing recorded clips. A free course like Yoast’s is a good start. But SEO is a skill you build by doing, and it’s much faster when someone experienced checks your work and corrects you early.

At Mohit’s SEO Training, I run my classes on that principle. Here is what you can expect:

1. Practical knowledge
You work on real websites, not slides. You do keyword research, audits and fixes yourself, and I review what you did, so you leave knowing how to do the job.

2. Learn to make your own AI SEO agents
I teach you to build SEO AI agents that handle repeat work like audits, reports and content checks. This saves hours every week, and you learn to use AI tools well instead of just copying prompts.

3. Updated information
Search keeps shifting, with Google updates and AI answer engines rewriting the rules every few months. I update the training as things change, so you learn what works now, not what worked three years ago.

4. A funny way of teaching
SEO can feel dry, and people drift off when it does. I keep the classes light and use humour, so the hard topics stay easy to follow and remember.

5. 12+ years of experience in SEO
You learn from someone who has worked on SEO for over 12 years. I’ve seen what holds up when Google changes, and I can tell you why a tip works, not only what it is.

You can try a free demo class before you pay. If it doesn’t suit you, you’ve lost nothing, and I’d still suggest you finish the Yoast course first.

Take Yoast’s free course if you are new, because it costs nothing and gives you the words you’ll hear everywhere in SEO. When you’re ready to turn that knowledge into a skill you can use at work, learn with a trainer who guides you through real projects.

These are the places I took facts from. None of them is a rating from students who took this course, because Yoast doesn’t publish one. The 4.8 stars at the top belongs to the Yoast SEO plugin, not the course.

Yoast’s own pages

• Yoast’s free beginner SEO course page: the length, topics, certificate and price of the course.
• Yoast SEO plugin listing on WordPress.org: the install count and plugin rating.

Independent reviews and roundups

• Surfer’s list of SEO certifications (April 2025): puts the course fifth out of eight and describes it as a fast, hands-on first look.
• Markampus guide to free SEO courses (2026) (last reviewed September 2026): places it seventh in a list of eight, recommending it mainly to WordPress users who only need a starting point.
• Gotch SEO Academy’s Yoast comparison (September 2025): praises it for being free and easy to follow, but notes it covers mostly fundamentals and offers no live help. Gotch sells a competing course, so read it with that in mind.

Data

• Ahrefs search traffic study (2023): the source for the share of pages that get no Google visits.